Jazmine (JT) Green has always forged her own path. When she felt that there weren’t enough audio opportunities for women, people of color, and queer folks, she teamed up with two friends to launch Postloudness, a Chicago-based audio collective and piloting program for BIPOC creators. That work led her into the academy, where she helped create a graduate-level curriculum for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

These days, Jazmine lives in New York and helps run Molten Heart, a creative and commercial studio focused on the texture of sound. Molten Heart is proudly independent, but it’s collaborated with companies including Spotify, iHeart and Audible. Jazmine also DJs, and writes and produces electronic music as CMD+JAZMINE.

We caught up with her to talk about the importance of good scheduling, subverting genre, and how to layer sound like a tapestry. This conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. 

You’re a self-educated audio creator. Tell me about learning how to make podcasts. 

I already had an audio and music practice, so the learning curve was kind of shifting my brain. I knew sound very well, but I had to be better at knowing words.

This was back, I believe, in the early 2010’s. I was learning software from random YouTube tutorials. I was learning a lot of radio fundamentals from this website transom.org. There were a couple listservs from the Chicago and New York public radio world. 

I was living in Chicago and primarily doing graphic design work. One of my first clients was the local public radio station WBEZ, which then sort of got me more aware of what they were doing in the city, and learning about Third Coast, and learning about all these resources. That's where it was, okay, I can teach you about this if you can teach me about that type thing. That’s the way I like to work: we're figuring it all out together.

I would also pick up little transcription jobs, and study how the hosts would interview, and how things would be produced. 

You say on your website bio that you never learned the “right” way to make audio, and your work is better for it. I love that. 

I really love studying genre, because I feel like genre is a way for people to know how to engage with art. You can use genre expectations to your advantage, to shortcut certain things, like a romcom for example. If you subvert the montage sequence of the makeover, do something interesting with it, that’s going to be memorable. 

Genre was something that was really important for me to study because it gave me frameworks that I could play in. How would I do this genre of a three act story? But then, how can I screw it up? It’s trying to know 70% of the way to do it, and then just be like, "Okay, but how would I want to hear that done?" 

You have to learn the rules in order to break them! What were some of the first pieces of audio equipment you bought yourself?

I definitely remember the very first mic was a Blue Snowball. Me and my friend Cher Vincent shared one when we started our podcast. We could not afford to get two, so we got really close underneath a blanket and we recorded our stuff on there. 

My first field kit was gifted to me from some friends, when I did a contract over at Gimlet Media for the show called The Nod. When I left, they had given me a gift card to B&H or something. I got myself—and I still have it to this day, because it's just so good—a Zoom H4. I think that I got a road reporter mic and a windscreen, and obviously an XLR cable. They are literally right over there. I will not get rid of them, because they hold so much sentimental value. And they work. 

How did you end up starting your collective?

It was myself, Cher Vincent, and Alex Cox. We were three friends in Chicago and all three of us loved podcasts. We basically were just like, we're just going to learn this together.

And we got good enough that other people took notice. The Chicago podcast community was tiny, at the time especially. So we were like, "Okay, we should build a collective." And I think it around that time when podcasting blew up and Serial happened, and the native podcast app on iPhones. All these things made this hobby into a budding industry.

It was one of those perfect timing moments because we knew how to technically do it, because we had been learning it for quite a few years. There was a hiring boom. We got a couple writeups of our collective. It was called Post Loudness.

We were piloting shows for people, cause we just wanted to see more shows from POC queer and trans makers. We just wanted to see more people like us, especially in Chicago. So it was and then we did a show—one got picked up by another larger network at the time and one got really really popular. 

That in combination with some other things led to a job offer to work professionally. It would move me from Chicago to New York, where I am now. And that was the moment where I was like, "This is a career.” All three of us to this day work professionally in media, actually. It's kind of wild.

It’s so cool when that happens… but it’s also a new set of stresses, working in a field that you love. How do you try to separate your work from your life?

It's really hard. I keep a very rigid schedule. I intensely block and plan my time months in advance, and I'm extremely predictable. I know that certain projects, certain tasks, will take certain amounts of time. The amount of focus filters I have on all my devices is near obsessive.

I do a shutdown ritual at 5:00 pm. I've been on that other side of working constantly, and it just did not have good outcomes physically. So I just can't do it.

And I do like going out to have fun. I do like spending time and engaging in my relationships. I have other hobbies now. I am very cognizant that this was a hobby that turned into a career, and I am kind of watching my back on some other hobbies that I have right now. I've been making music for quite a while, and just recently my music is starting to catch on. And I'm just like… I'm keeping an eye on it. How can I protect it so it's still fun? 

I play basketball. Pickup games. There's no way that's going to be professional. And I'm so happy about that. 

Time is really the greatest luxury. The thing that it feels like no one has enough of. 

I know I take forever on things, but I just can't go too fast or else it will suffer. 

I just think things that are slower just are better. Slow-cooked meals. I love that it takes five or so hours whenever I go to the salon and get my hair rebraided. 

Speed is good for some things. I DJ and being speedy there is really really fun. Playing basketball is really fun. But I think having the baseline be slow is something that I intentionally try to do, even in this very fast city.

My favorite art is time-based media. Performance works, sound works, video works: things that are records of time. 

I want to talk a little bit more about your music, and integrating it into the podcasts you work on. Because tools like Descript make it so easy to make a basic chat show. You can add an intro theme, whatever. But you’re doing much more involved, textured sound design. Why is that so important to you? What does that add to your projects?

I love likening my style to that of a tapestry. When you zoom in on a really good sweater, you can just see all the interlocking pieces, and how if you snip one it will slowly unravel the whole thing. 

I grew up listening to CDs and tapes front to back, and there is nothing more engaging than a well produced concept album. You can follow the story from beginning to end.

I always like to say that songs are audio stories and audio storytellers use DAWs that are used to compose music to arrange and sound design things. So we should treat things with that level of care and attention. 

There's something really beautiful not only in a well-crafted piece of audio, but also a well-crafted session in its organization. You can feel when somebody really cares about the timing of bringing in a breath at a 16th of a second, or when certain sounds or kick drums fit on certain words. It's the difference between a microwaved dinner dish and something that's made from scratch. 

We’ve talked a lot about art. How do you approach the self-promotion part of this job?

The way I think about projects is, if someone else made it, would I share it on my personal platform? If the answer is no, then I shouldn’t make it.

You can tell when someone is like, Okay, this is my requisite three posts a day, versus something where you're just like, this is actually really funny, or it’s important information to share, or whatever. 

Also, knowing your community and knowing your people. There’s something I find a little annoying when it's like okay, this person or this brand is clearly trying to talk to people who they are not a part of. You can feel when that romcom writer is not really versed. A lot of the same things that work with being an interesting and gentle person are the same things that you should just do when telling people about your things.

What advice would you give to a creator who’s just starting out—maybe a marginalized creator, specifically?

Control your voice and your narrative, because someone else will attempt to do that for you if you don't know yourself. That is huge, especially as a marginalized creator. 

I would also say look across for mentorship and collaborations. It’s less about the people who feel inaccessible. You can look to your left and your right and those are the ones who you're going to be collaborating with. I'm thinking about my friends who we started that collective with. Those are my homies. People I still talk to and collaborate with all the time. And that also makes the work feel more from the heart.

Also, nothing is original. That was very much a thing from art school. You can literally trace back every single genre, technique, whatever. What I'm doing in sound design is nothing new. When people approach me like you're doing such different things, no, I'm just ingesting my influences and splitting it out in a way through my lens.