Mojo - The Music Magazine

Andrew Male is crazy about The Memory Palace: a tiny gem of historical strangeness, beautifully soundtracked, that's free to all.

I'm picky about podcasts. Although happy to have a shuffling ipod of over 5000 different musical artists filling my ears on the way into work, when it comes to spoken word choices I'm far more selective. Following the passing of 6Music's Adam & Joe show, my current list runs to just 5Live's Danny Baker Show, a Radio 3 double-header of CD Review and Jazz Library and, most significantly, a fifteen minute, monthly sliver of historical strangeness entitled The Memory Palace.

Devised, assembled and narrated by NPR reporter Nate DiMeo, The Memory Palace has, for the last year and a half, delivered short, strange, softly-spoken, oddly moving tales about the faded figures and proud hucksters of American history and the dusty corners of more famous lives. Subjects range from the deranged to the heartbreaking, from the hollow-earth fantasies of New York health food mystic Dr Raymond Bernard to the herds of lunar bison and biped beavers allegedly visible through Sir John Herschel's super-powerful telescope of 1835. Marvel at the 18th Century British navy's belief that Ben Franklin possessed a lightning-powered electrical death-ray and rue the truncated, transposed life of Minik Wallace, a Polar Eskimo brought to New York in 1897 by the explorer Robert Peary.

Even within the blessed radio environment of the UK, where listeners are rarely less than two hours away from some interlude of historical/documentary wonder, the pull of The Memory Palace is strong, but out in the cultural wilds of the US, listening to The Memory Palace must feel extra special, like an act of political subversion swaddled in surrealistic wonder.

"I've spent most of my career working in public radio here in the States," DiMeo explained in an email, after I'd I contacted him about the show. "For years, the plan was to create an odd and epic, hour-long history show (there really isn't a good history show on American radio). But a couple of years ago, two things became clear: a) the bottom had dropped out of my industry, meaning that there was barely enough money to keep things going, never mind start new things, and b) the podcasting world had matured enough that I didn't really need any money to make something on my own. It just couldn't be that grand. So I went small."

Sad, beguiling, often ending in madhouses, tuberculosis and poverty, and underscored by the music of John Coltrane, Max Richter and Moondog, DiMeo's monthly communiqués run from anywhere between two to ten minutes, and tend to focus on the curious human stories at the centre of grand history, providing a twinkling moment of soundtracked historical surrealism amidst the grey drift of the morning commute.

Denying that he is a history buff ("I read many more novels than history books or biographies or whatever") DiMeo admits that he has a tendency to "nerd-out" about the past, thanks to "an over-developed sense of wonder about the world."

"I get much more excited about a historic home tour or small-town museum than is socially acceptable among my fellow thirtysomething, urban North American hipsters," he says. "I'm continually knocked out by the past, by hearing some story, seeing some object, or listening to some record and getting, however incompletely, a sense of what those things all meant to real people. It can be as big as, say, the invasion of Normandy, or as small as 'people really thought Rick Wakeman's King Arthur On Ice was a good idea?'. I just love that flash of understanding, if only briefly, the conditions, the aesthetics, the rules that created the possibilities, the choices, the tastes, that crafted the lives of people born at different moments than ours."

A musician and former band-member who ended up landing in radio, DiMeo also places great importance on finding the right piece of music for each broadcast, whether that means underscoring a heartbreaking snapshot of Central Park Zoo during the Great Depression with the twinkling arpeggios of Panda Bear's Young Prayer, or using Lightning Bolt's nervy, galloping The Faire Folk for that tale of Ben Franklin's Electric Death Ray.

"Choosing the music is often the most satisfying part of the whole process," DiMeo told me. "I decided not to go for period music for the most part because I don't want the stories to feel trapped in amber. I want them to feel present and contemporary and relatable to contemporary concerns. The long and the short, though, is music is fundamental to the whole project. I often find myself thinking of the stories as pop songs: I'm trying to pack complex human experience through an inherently reductive set of moments and images and emotional beats into a few minutes. If you had a CD of several stories, in a perfect world, it'd hopefully move like the second side of Abbey Road."

Thanks to mentions on hipster blogzine Boing Boing and in The New York Times, producing The Memory Palace has becomes, says DiMeo, "a big deal in the small world of podcasting. It's well-received [and] I have a really strange array of 'fans' - lots of hipsters and Cool People, lots of history geeks, some goth kids who like the dark ones, some conservative Christian home-schoolers (from whom I'm sure I differ politically 100%) and some elderly people who complain about the volume being too low and of the music being too loud. I like that."

In attempting to collect together some of the more fascinating and bizarre incidents and characters on the scuffed fringes and at the swirling centre of Western society, The Memory Palace possesses a similar aesthetic feel to magician Ricky Jay's much missed mid-'90s Journal Of Amomalies, and it too would make a great book, but in the meantime budgetary constraints mean that it's a struggle just for DiMeo to realise his current goal of one new podcast a week.

Asked who his ideal listener would be, Dimeo manages to sound both humble and ambitious: "Anyone who wants to listen. Sometimes they're going to get a familiar, all-American story that they might have heard about in school (told in a new way), sometimes they're going to get story about a deeply obscure life radically lived, but I'm always going to try to tell it in a way that'll resonate."

Andrew Male