This February, PBS North Carolina is launching "Shaped By Sound," a new series that highlights North Carolina based musicians through conversation and performances. Each episode of the series was recorded in PBS North Carolina’s RTP studio and features an accompanying video podcast that dives even deeper into the featured artist. The first season of "Shaped By Sound" includes performances from Superchunk, Nnenna Freelon, Blue Cactus, and Reuben Vincent.
Each week, WUNC Music's Brian Burns will highlight parts of the episode that resonated with him in the weekly WUNC Music newsletter. He'll be helping you get to know the artists featured so you can head into each episode ready to learn more about them and their impact on North Carolina's music scene.
Burns also recently caught up with "Shaped By Sound" host and producer James Mieczkowski to talk about the launch of the series.
This is an excerpt of an edited transcript of that conversation. You can hear the full interview by clicking the LISTEN button at the top of this post.
"Shaped By Sound" is both a live performance show and a video podcast. Can you break that down to us?
Each week we have an artist from North Carolina come in and they play a set, and then we also have a conversation with them. We then marry the two things together and sort of do like a VH1 Storytellers type thing, but for PBS.

I feel like North Carolina has such a strong and eclectic music scene. Why do you think that is? What’s in the water here?
I think that's something we've been trying to ask ourselves while we've been producing the show. I’ve been asking a lot of artists that too and I feel like the most recurring answer is that North Carolina became a place where people could move to and plug in a lot of loud crap and have the space to be creative and experiment. I think that goes beyond plugging in loud things, it’s more of a metaphor for this creative zone where people could come and feel like they’re part of a creative community.
I know that each episode of “Shaped By Sound” has its own unique vibe. Tell us about the set design for the show.
That’s been such a fun part of the show. We’d go to the artists before we were even in production and say "Hey, if we were to create a universe based around you and your story, what would it look like?" and we based the sets around those themes. For instance, we were working with the band Sluice, and one of the recurring themes of their music is this concept of how the natural world around us meets human made industrial things. And so, that's the universe we wanted to build around them. We took a lot of trees and branches and vines and wrapped it all around their gear and put up some metal grates and other industrial objects, and all of a sudden we were in the Sluice universe.
“Shaped By Sound” debuts on February 6 with Iron & Wine.
You can learn more about the series and check out the full schedule here.