Resonance FM kindly agreed to air an interview with the well known musician and field recordist Peter Cusack, which was originally recorded in August 2026 by Karl Richard. It was aired on October 1st 2026 at 8:00pm GMT.
An Interview with Peter Cusack for Resonance FM
We would like to offer particular thanks to Peter Lanceley for his encouragement to submit the interview… And are again immensely grateful to everyone at Resonance FM, especially Milo Thesiger-Meacham and Solen Fluzin, for all the hard work they do in keeping the community radio station alive and thriving… We are also grateful to Mazen Kerbaj for allowing us to broadcast an excerpt from his piece entitled “Starry Night” on this program.
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In lieu of an upcoming project that The Orange Hut is undertaking, which is centred around Peter Cusack’s own work on environmental disasters, we felt it would be good to contact Peter and arrange an interview with him to glean as much information as we could about ‘Sonic Journalism’ and delve into his ideas and notions behind his ongoing work relating to “Sounds From Dangerous Places”.
This one hour long programme is essentially a heavily edited version of the original one and half hour interview recorded by Karl Richard at Peter Cusack’s home in north London on the 17th of August 2026. What transpired was a very spontaneous, relaxed and informally-open interview, with Peter doing much of the talking, expounding on his experiences as a sonic journalist over the last 30 years, discussing how he came to coin the term “sonic journalism”, and looking at the interconnectedness of the stories around the environmental disasters in the areas he has recorded in: namely Chernobyl, the modern world’s oldest oil fields around the Caspian Sea, and the areas and communities affected by Aral Sea disaster. Please note that due to the misplacement of the microphone capturing Karl’s voice during the original interview, much of Karl’s speech was re-recorded and edited in a creative manner to help the program flow more easily.
N.B. The below audio of the program has had “Starry Night” edited out, at the request of Mazen Kerbaj, due to copyright on the piece. Electronic clicks have replaced “Starry Night” in this instance.
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The following listing was provided to Resonance FM:
The Phonojournalist – What is Sonic Journalism: An Interview with Peter Cusack by Karl Richard
A one off, hour long interview with Peter Cusack, looking at his life’s work within the context of “Sonic Journalism”, a term that Peter coined during his own early work with field recording practices that specifically looked at and documented environmental disasters. Visit theorangehut.com for more information.
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Many thanks to Peter Cusack for taking the time out of his busy schedule to expound on the ideas and reasoning behind why he chose to coin the term “sonic journalism”, and for his detailed and droll recounting of the discoveries he stumbled upon during his journalistic endeavours and travels, and for allowing us to use some of his recordings for the purposes of this interview. If anyone is interested in his work relating to “Sounds From Dangerous Places”, there is a UAL webpage link here. Plus many thanks to Mazen Kerbaj for allowing us to use an excerpt from his piece entitled “Starry Night” for the purposes of this broadcast after we contacted him out of the blue. Very grateful for his trust. As per Mazen’s request, the excerpt from “Starry Night” has been removed from the interview found on this page for copyright reasons. Please do check out Mazen’s forthcoming album “Before the War it was the War, After the War it is still the War”, coming out on Discrepant.