Sound Propositions

Back in February 2022, we celebrated the tenth anniversary of our blog. To celebrate, in this episode, we pull the curtain back a bit to talk with ten of the writers who have contributed to A CLOSER LISTEN since we began over a decade ago, constituting a virtual roundtable discussing the past, present, and future of ACL. We discuss the founding of the site, abandoning scoring, our sub-sites, mixes, video game music, film scores, and the relationship between sound and the visual, including artwork, packaging, and physical media. We reflect on what has made ACL distinct over the years, our openness to new sounds, the joys of ongoing discovery, our formative influences, and our signature blend of critical positivity. The music for this episode was selected collectively, drawn from tracks that came up throughout our conversations. Scattered throughout the episode are also many 10 second clips I solicited from friends of the site back in 2014. I used them to make some “community sound collages” that I never really