“The Safest Place To Be Is Always Halfway Into Your Future.” – An Interview with Radiolab

The story of “the end,” or even attempts at conceptualizing this story, can be mystifying, terrifying, and often times, unimaginable. Yet Radiolab manages to approach this topic with refreshing curiosity, illuminating profound ideas through sound and science. When I first met Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the hosts of Radiolab, it was several hours before their show at the Solid Sound Festival. Wilco organized the festival, and the band’s drummer, Glenn Kotche, along with Darin Gray, together known as On Fillmore, will accompany Radiolab on their tour this fall. Noveller, the solo electric guitar project of Brooklyn-based composer and filmmaker Sarah Lipstate, will also be joining them to create a live, improvised score. On this tour, “Apocalyptical,” Radiolab will push towards the end and continue to discover, even amidst complete destruction.   

– Julia Edelman

Robert Krulwich: The way we’ve done live shows before is we do exactly this – you go in, you try something, and there have been points where we don’t even know what we’re doing. During one of them, I said to him, “I know I’m on page seven, but I don’t remember any longer why I’m on page seven.”

Jad Abumrad: We had a moment, actually, where we were typing madly, and moving the beginning, and making it the middle, and making it the end, we were just doing radical shifting and changing. We print, grab the prints out, run downstairs, and we hadn’t even changed. We just ran onstage to perform it, and we had grabbed the wrong script – it was four versions ago. So Robert is kind of glancing at the script, and improvising, and then he gets to a place where it just says, “Robert says something.” [Laughs] But we hadn’t figured out what he was going to say yet. And he says, “I think I’m confused and angry, but I forget why I’m confused and angry…do you know why I’m angry?”

RK: [Laughs] I mean, my memory is not like his, so there are times in some of these shows where he can do all the parts and all the in-betweens and everything. I can just leave for a while.

THE BELIEVER: How was it when you guys first started working together? How was the dynamic?

RK: Honestly, it was one of those things that were kind of mystical.

JA: We met, actually, not to work together, but because the station sent me to record him reading something. It was one of these weird things, where I handed him a thing, he starts reading, but he doesn’t want to read the thing I gave...