Guest DJ: Aldous Harding

VPM | By Bob Boilen

Published June 21, 2017 at 1:01 PM EDT

Updated February 20, 2024

Aldous Harding released her debut Party, produced by John Parish, this May on 4AD. — Aldous Harding released her debut *Party*, produced by John Parish, this May on 4AD.

Aldous Harding, the intense singer and songwriter from New Zealand, sat down with me after the Tiny Desk Concert she recorded earlier this month (posting on July 28) to talk about the music she loved growing up. It was a teary and thoughtful conversation around the artists that would go on to have a huge impact on the music she’s now creating.

Aldous Harding’s second album, Party, was released last month — it’s been my constant companion in 2017. (Read her thoughts on the inspirations behind the album and its songs here.)

I first fell for these somewhat disconcerting pieces of music when we premiered her video for “Horizon,” a film shot with her mom. About a month later, she played an outdoor space in Austin during SXSW. As can be the case at that sprawling-but-packed event, there were at least three other bands blasting their sounds nearby, bleeding over onto her stage. Aldous, accompanied only by her own guitar and her keyboard sound-wizard mate Invisible Familiars (Jared Samuel), completely transfixed us all, despite the sonic crosstalk. Her stage presence reminded me of an intense version Charlie Chaplin, with exaggerated facial expressions and body language adding commentary to the songs she sang.

So on this edition of All Songs Considered, Aldous Harding plays DJ. We begin our conversation talking about her just-finished Tiny Desk Concert, which most performers find incredibly awkward. She found it comforting.

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Bob Boilen

In 1988, a determined Bob Boilen started showing up on NPR's doorstep every day, looking for a way to contribute his skills in music and broadcasting to the network. His persistence paid off, and within a few weeks he was hired, on a temporary basis, to work for All Things Considered. Less than a year later, Boilen was directing the show and continued to do so for the next 18 years.

Significant listener interest in the music being played on All Things Considered, along with his and NPR's vast music collections, gave Boilen the idea to start All Songs Considered. "It was obvious to me that listeners of NPR were also lovers of music, but what also became obvious by 1999 was that the web was going to be the place to discover new music and that we wanted to be the premiere site for music discovery." The show launched in 2000, with Boilen as its host.

Before coming to NPR, Boilen found many ways to share his passion for music. From 1982 to 1986 he worked for Baltimore's Impossible Theater, where he held many posts, including composer, technician, and recording engineer. Boilen became part of music history in 1983 with the Impossible Theater production Whiz Bang, a History of Sound. In it, Boilen became one of the first composers to use audio sampling — in this case, sounds from nature and the industrial revolution. He was interviewed about Whiz Bang by Susan Stamberg on All Things Considered.

In 1985, the Washington City Paper voted Boilen 'Performance Artist of the Year.' An electronic musician, he received a grant from the Washington D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities to work on electronic music and performance.

After Impossible Theater, Boilen worked as a producer for a television station in Washington, D.C. He produced several projects, including a music video show. In 1997, he started producing an online show called Science Live for the Discovery Channel. He also put out two albums with his psychedelic band, Tiny Desk Unit, during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Boilen still composes and performs music and posts it for free on his website BobBoilen.info. He performs contradance music and has a podcast of contradance music that he produces with his son Julian.

Boilen's first book, Your Song Changed My Life, was published in April 2016 by HarperCollins.

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