/Audio by Adam/

Radio and Audio Features and Documentaries

Author: Adam Phillips

Adam Phillips has been a radio features journalist and audio documentarist and oral historian since 1986, both as public radio freelancer and, since 1993, as a career journalist at the Voice of America. Adam has won nearly twenty international, national and in-house awards for his work, which highlights the experiences and realities of everyday people with extraordinary stores to tell, and which makes extensive use of found sound and music to create a “theater of the mind.” Adam teaches Audio Documentary Making at the New School’s Graduate School of Media Studies, and Oral History at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. His combines his lifelong interests in mythology, theater and community building in his celebrancy practice, which uses ceremonies to mark life’s milestones and the processes of nature. Adam was ‘born, bred and buttered’ in New York City.

Little League’s Big Adventure

Little League is Americana itself, and I was shocked and privileged to be a part of it all as my son’s coach in Washington DC in the late 1990s. I produced this profile of one game for the Voice of America. In it, I had to explain the game of baseball to our foreign listeners, […]

Mister Spoons: Big Apple Flatware Virtuoso

There are hundreds of musicians, good and bad, tooting and strumming and bowing and belting in the New York subway system, but Mr. Spoons is sui generis. Not only is he fantastic at playing the spoons, he has an outsize character to match. I spent some serious time with him, and filed this report for […]

Profile of A Moonshiner (VOA 1999)

Folk all over the world have their own versions of homemade liquor that will blow the top of your head right off., but “White Lightning” from the stills of Appalachia have their own appeal for Americans who have heard about it through family lore and popular culture, or tasted it in a parking lot or […]

September 11th and Spirituality

The scope and the shock of the attacks prompted rage, fear and profound puzzlement. Almost immediately, people started to look for some spiritual response to what had happened that paralleled the pain. Here is a story that features rabbis, ministers, Buddhists and others looking for some wisdom amid the rubble.

Native American “Drying the Tears” Ceremony (post 9/11)

New York City was full of ritual, ceremony, art and other forms of creative and numinous expression in the months following September 11th. This tells the story of one old ceremony that Native Americans brought to the Museum of the American Indian, near Ground Zero after several months had elapsed. It was a ceremonial moment […]