That Ol' Radio Show

You know, that ol' show, the one on the radio...

[audioverseawards]

Semi-Finals voting is NOW OPEN! VOTE!

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[thatolradioshow]

Listening List

[thatolradioshow]

After trying to juggle these lists in my head, I figured it’d be better to just put them to paper already, and share them if anyone’s curious.  Below the jump are the things I’m current on or have finished, things in my listening queue, and things I listen to here and there, to be updated as needed.

(fun fact: in all three lists, more entries than one might expect begin with “W”)

(As of 8 October ‘16 this list has been updated!  If you’d at all want to see past versions of this list check the Listening List tag!)

Current

Currently in my listening rotation.  Items marked with an asterisk (*) are ones I'm still catching up on

Alice Isn’t Dead

Ars Paradoxica

Audio Dime Museum

Big Data

The Bright Sessions

EOS 10

Greater Boston

Hector vs. the Future

Jim Robbie and the Wanderers

The Light of September

Lore (review)

MarsCorp*

“The Mask of Inanna”*

Our Fair City (review)

PleasureTown*

Serial

"Songonauts"

Welcome to Night Vale

Within the Wires

Wolf 359 (review)

Wooden Overcoats

To listen

List compiled from recommendations, curiosities, and 2015's

Audio Verse Award winners

.  This is by no means a comprehensive list.

Alba Salix

Archive 81

The Black Tapes podcast

“The Chimes of Midnight”

The Cleansed

Clovermeade

The Deep Vault

(couple other Doctor Who bits that are slipping my mind)

Elysium

The Family Tree

Fireside Mystery Theater

The Grayscale

Hadron Gospel Hour

The Infinite Now

The Lift

Live Wire

Limetown

Lost in Williamsburg

“Jess Dempsey, First Woman on Mars”

The Magnus Archives

“Milly Foster, Macabre Investigator”

Mirth Defect

Most of @personalinsanitymoment‘s Audio Drama December list

“The Natural History of Fear”

The Once and Future Nerd

Out on the Wire

The Pendant Shakespeare

The Penumbra Podcast

Powder Burns

Radiation World

Red Shift Adventures

Rex Rivetter

Sayer

Second Shift

Smash/Cut

Space Junkies

Spontaneanation

Tales of Thattown

“This Monstrous Life”

Thrilling Adventure Hour

The Truth

Tumanbay

The Tunnels

Uncanny County

We’re Alive

We’re Alive: Lockdown

The White Whale

Wynabego Warrior

You Must Remember This

Finished

Shows that have finished their runs

"The Behemoth"

Conversation Parade: An Adventure Time podcast

“The Duke of Newbury Street”

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

"Neverwhere"

“Star Wars” (review)

Wits

Here and there

Mostly non-drama storytelling, and good for dips into back catalogs.

99% Invisible

The Allusionist

Anthology

Ear Biscuits

KCRW’s UnFictional

Historically Black

NerdCon: Stories

A Prairie Home Companion’s News from Lake Wobegon

Radio Drama Revival

Radiolab

Reasonably Sound

Secret Skin

Selected Shorts

Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me

We Got This with Mark and Hal

The World According to Sound

[thatolradioshow]

Excerpt from that wholly remarkable book in honor of Towel Day. Text by Douglas Adams, background track is Angles of Play by Alan Rodi.

[thatolradioshow]

Listening to Greater Boston

“I don’t know how else to say this, but I love being from Boston, ’cause it’s like…you’ve heard about me.

You’ve heard about us. Everybody hears about Boston.”

What it is: “...a bi-monthly full-cast audio drama set in the Boston metro area, blending the real and the unreal, the historical and the fantastical, the dramatic and the comic”, executed mostly in series of monologues.

Why listen: Even with four episodes to date, Greater Boston is fascinating in unexpected ways.

I’ll be honest: when I first heard about the idea of this weird take on Boston, I couldn’t help but think it might be something of a “Boston Below”, not unlike the London of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere.  And this Boston is similar to London Below in that it does combine the city’s past and present, but the amalgam is much more subtle, and everyone is caught up in this urban oddity--an oddity which is surprisingly plausible.

Then there’s the narrative presentation.  At present the story is unfolding mostly in series of monologues presented in different contexts--narration, open mics, talking head soliloquy.  And within the initial unfolding in these first few episodes, seemingly-unconnected threads are starting to come and twist together, and I’m very curious to see how it continues to unfold.

Updates every other Tuesday; episodes can be found here or on the podcast app of your choice.  Go follow them on twitter @ingreaterboston!

Edit: They’re also here on tumblr @greaterblogston!

[collected-sports-bra]

Podcasts by and with Amazing Ladies - Masterpost

The feedback on this post made me realize that we need a masterpost with Podcasts by and with women. I put all the great suggestions from the other post, and added a few of my own. (I should mention that I have not listened to all the podcasts so I can’t vouch for the quality of all of these ^__^)

Feel free to add more - because we can always need more Podcasts by and with Amazing Ladies:

Keep reading

[thatolradioshow]

Lots of great suggestions here!

[stargazer295-deactivated2016062]

NEVERWHERE: Revisit ‘London Below’! All 6 episodes of Neil Gaiman’s BBC Radio play NEVERWHERE are currently available for listening for a limited time at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01r522y/episodes/player

[neil-gaiman]

About 24 days to go. It’s wonderful. And you can hear it anywhere in the world.

[thatolradioshow]

Questions & Answers with Gabriel Urbina

In the excitement leading up to Wolf 359′s third season, it’s finally time to share some questions and answers with its creator--I reached out to Gabriel Urbina back in the fall, and he sent back some really good and thoughtful answers that I’m very excited to share with all of you!

What got you into listening to radio dramas in the first place?

Radio dramas were always kind of a part of my life, in one way or another. I remember when I was little, my mother got me this great big set of cassette tapes that had all of these radio plays and dramatized stories in them, and I'd listen to them over and over again. That was probably my first indoctrination into radio plays, although there were a few other big moments. When I was 13 I really got into Orson Welles's films, and that led me to listening to War of the Worlds and the rest of the work that he did with The Mercury Theater. And then about two years after that I really got into Shakespeare, and there weren't any live productions of the plays around (I grew up in Costa Rica). But there all these audio recordings of the plays, a lot of them really marvelous and faithful reproductions of the full stage productions. And so on and on... The medium's always been around my life in one way or another, and I keep rediscovering it in a new way every few years. 

What's appealing about sharing Wolf 359 in sound?  There was mention in the YouTube AMA about an upshot was that it's possible to tell a technically-high-quality story on the relative cheap in sound, and that for you, as it stands, it's a story meant to be told in this medium, but what's the personal or narrative draw to telling this story in this way?

Bit of a tricky question that one. In many ways, the medium came first and the story came second. I'd been curious about trying to put together a radio play for about a year before the idea for Wolf 359 came into my head. Which means that it's about half, "Radio was the right medium to tell the story of Wolf 359," and half, "Wolf 359 was the right story for radio." So in the first side of that there is the fact that it's science fiction that can feel fully formed, and complicated, and textured, without costing the GDP of a medium-sized nation to produce. And then on the second side, there's the fact that it's a small story, all set in a single space, and that so much of story and the actions are about listening. 

So yeah, in one way or another the story and the medium were just always tied together. It was less that there was a draw to tell it in this medium, and more that they really were just made for each other. 

What's important about this story?

I'm not sure about important... I don't know if we had any grand humanitarian or philanthropic designs for the plot of the show. Besides entertaining and amusing whoever tunes in. (which really is pretty darn humanitarian and philanthropic in its own way, really...) Although perhaps there is something of greater heft knocking about in there. In the broadest of terms, it is a show about having to coexist with people who are massively, radically, sometimes on a very basic existential level, different from you, and having to figure out how to talk to and how to listen to them. And that is something that we could all spend a bit more time thinking about day to day. 

What's been the most surprising thing about it?  In terms of how the story has unfolded, technical or other challenges, discoveries, audience response, etc?

Definitely the audience response. The level of passionate, intellectual, and critical engagement that the show has brought out in people has absolutely floored us. Naturally, you secretly hope that people will care that much, but you never actually let yourself expect it. But lo and behold, the show has found people who do care that much, and more, and who want to spend time thinking about the tiny details of the characters' backstories. I still have moments every single day where I have to stop and take a second to be amazed about that. 

Back when we started the show, the creative team spent a lot of time going over the characters' backstories, their identities, personalities, their stances on various issues, ideologies, etc. And for a long time I thought all those things were ever going to be were background details that would help the actors and their performances, but no one would ever be curious about digging deeper into those territories. But people have proven me wrong over and over - and that never ceases to amaze. 

As the concept for Wolf 359 moved out of your head, and past the initial discussions with [Zach] Valenti, was there ever concern about getting other people on board with this idea, either getting them on board as talent or as the first batch of listeners?  If so, what has quelled that, or is that still a lingering concern?

In a weird way, getting people to come on board as talent has never been as difficult as it could have been. Everyone who's worked on the show thus far has either been a friend of mine or Zach's or someone who we'd done work with in the past. So in general, the people who we've collaborated with have been very approachable and very low-pressure because we've had those existing relationships to fall back on. 

Getting people to listen to the show... that's a different story. That always made us nervous, and there was a nerve-racking period of a few months where we really were just throwing content out into the void and getting no indication that anyone was listening. It wasn't until halfway through Season 2 that the first glimmers of discussion and conversation started showing up on the web, and that's snowballed into all the listener momentum that we have right now. Maybe that's why I'm continually surprised that people care so much about the show - part of me is afraid that it's all just been an elaborate, multi-month mirage! 

You have a background in filmmaking, you're doing Wolf 359, contributing on Anthology—in short, you make things.  What's important about making things?

Well, it'll be important for different reasons to different people. I know some people that need to create almost as act of cleansing, as if they need to get these complicated thoughts or emotions out of their heads and the only way they know how to do that is to create something new that encapsulates them. For other people it's about delivering a message, or making an ideological stand, or getting people to see things in a new way. For me, I almost feel like creating things is an exercise in empathy - it's a process that constantly makes me get out of my own head and think about other people and how they see the world and what part of life speaks to them. I think that's the most important thing that I've gotten out of writing over the years. 

My interest in the December essays and my broad takeaway from them was that it was an effort in talking about art, something that I think is valuable.  What do you think is the general value of talking about art, especially in an effort like that where you're examining the kind of things you yourself are making?

Part of it is just the educational value. Liking something, or being moved by a work of art, or even just being amused by something is all well and good, but the moment that you start trying to do all of those things with your own work it becomes that much more complicated and involved a process. You have to start breaking down the way in which those preexisting works got to you. "Where did I start? Where did I end up? How did they get me there? How did they guide me?" and so on. And as you do that, you build up your own arsenal of narrative tools to use. I think that's the main importance of talking about art and how it affects us, to break that invisibility that often surrounds it and to help us articulate how it got us to care. 

You guys had mentioned in the Literature and Film interview that podcasts are on the upswing, and a Financial Times article back in March talked about this upswing, but in a write-up about the cancelation of the public radio variety show Wits back at the end of July, the author—who himself has been in radio for 22, 23 years—seems to suggest the medium's in “cultural hospice”.  Anecdotal evidence would suggest that trying to say “radio is dead” is an unfounded, if not absurd, concern, but as a maker, how do you think Radio as a narrative art form is faring?

That's a lot to unpack, haha! Here's my two cents on all of these matters... I do think that radio (under which I am including podcasts, digital radio, etc) is going through a period of renewal and renovation. I think that claims of it being "dead" in any significant way up until the podcast revolution are overstated at the very least, but the new opportunities in distribution and DIY production have begun to push it back into the cultural spotlight. Beyond that, I'm not sure. I'm neither a historian nor a statistician, so I don't really have the tools to give a full diagnostic of the state of the radio industry. 

As far as narrative radio goes, for as much amazing work as people like the The Thrilling Adventure Hour, Welcome to Night Vale, We're Alive, John Finnemore, and others like them have done in the past ten years (and a lot of that work has really, really been astounding), I get the feeling that culturally we're still getting reacquainted with the radio drama. It's still something that people are trying out, and it's largely a niche interest. And I think it shows when you hear plays that are made today next to things that were made by in the 40's or 50's, and a lot of those older shows are so much more mature or baroquely experimental in their use of sound and narration to tell their stories. People like Wyllis Cooper and Arch Oboler and Lucille Fletcher were pushing the envelope in a lot of very aggressive ways, and a not small part of that is that they had grown up immersed in the medium of radio storytelling. We don't have that. Not yet anyway. We have some catching up to... at least in my humble opinion! 

Finally, if someone wants to tell audio stories, and wants to do that well, what should they know/have/do/read/experience/etc in order to do that?

All you need to tell audio stories is the ability to make sound, the technical capacity to record that sound, and the curiosity to spend a good long while thinking about the medium and how it works. There isn't anything like... THE BOOK on Audio Dramas (or if there is I haven't found it! Let me know if anyone runs into it?) and I think the more diverse and new experiences that people bring into the medium the better. But really, the biggest thing is just having something to say and an idea about how you want people to hear it. Once you've got that, the hard part's done, really.

You can find Wolf 359 on their website and here on tumblr at @wolf359radio--season 3 starts on 14 February!

[thatolradioshow]

Listening List

After trying to juggle these lists in my head, I figured it’d be better to just put them to paper already, and share them if anyone’s curious.  Below the jump are the things I’m current on or have finished, things in my listening queue, and things I listen to here and there, to be updated as needed.

(fun fact: in all three lists, more entries than one might expect begin with “W”)

Current or Finished

Conversation Parade: An Adventure Time podcast

Greater Boston

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Lore (review)

Neverwhere

Our Fair City (review)

Serial

“Star Wars” (review)

Welcome to Night Vale

Wolf 359 (review)

Wooden Overcoats

To listen

List compiled from recommendations, curiosities, and last year’s Audio Verse Award winners.

Alice Isn’t Dead (coming March)

Ars Paradoxica

The Bright Sessions

The Black Tapes podcast

“The Chimes of Midnight”

The Cleansed

(couple other Doctor Who bits that are slipping my mind)

“The Duke of Newbury Street”

EOS 10

The Grayscale

Hadron Gospel Hour

Limetown

Lost in Williamsburg

“Jess Dempsey, First Woman on Mars”

The Mask of Inanna

“Milly Foster, Macabre Investigator”

Most of @personalinsanitymoment​‘s Audio Drama December list

“The Natural History of Fear”

The Once and Future Nerd

Out on the Wire

The Pendant Shakespeare

Pleasuretown

Powder Burns

Red Shift Adventures

Second Shift

“Songonauts”

Space Junkies

“This Monstrous Life”

Thrilling Adventure Hour

The Truth

Tumanbay

We’re Alive

We’re Alive: Lockdown (coming 2016)

Wooden Overcoats

Here and there

Anthology

Ear Biscuits

KCRW’s UnFictional

NerdCon: Stories

A Prairie Home Companion’s News from Lake Wobegon

Radiolab

Reasonably Sound

Secret Skin

Selected Shorts

Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me

We Got This with Mark and Hal

Wits

[audioverseawards]

Voting closes TONIGHT!

Today is the FINAL day to vote in the 2015 Audio Verse Awards finals! Voting closes at 11:59 P.M. PST TONIGHT! http://www.audioverseawards.net/site/vote/

[thatolradioshow]

Lots of great nominees!

[mondaynightquesthour]

Get your ears and hearts ready...

Monday Night Quest Hour is an upcoming fantasy podcast audio drama, which will neither have hour-long episodes, nor post on Mondays. The quest, however, is definitely happening.

The show will star an ensemble cast of at-first-glance incredibly generic fantasy characters, and feature audience participation in the form of votes that will affect the plot in various ways.

After months of work brainstorming character design, world lore, backstories, and secrets, the show is almost ready to go into production. Follow this blog for updates, previews, character art, and (eventually) episode announcements!

[thatolradioshow]

Looking forward to giving this a look!

[thatolradioshow]

Listening to Star Wars (Formative Influences)

"A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there came a time of revolution, when rebels united to challenge a tyrannical Empire."

What it is: An audio adaptation of the original Star Wars trilogy made by NPR in 1981, '83, and '96.

Influence: In addition to being my first true exposure to the Star Wars franchise, this was also one of my first experiences with cinematic audio drama.

Why listen: Even in the change from silver screen to theater of the mind, it keeps a lot of its grandiose scale that the movies' original soundscapes enhanced, so we're talking John Williams' original score and Ben Burt's original sound sound design. There's almost certainly at least one Wilhelm Scream for good measure.

There's also a solid cast--many of the voices are new, but in favor of original ties Mark Hamill reprises his role as Luke Skywalker for Star Wars--eventually A New Hope--and Empire Strikes Back, and Anthony Daniels reprises his role as C-3PO in all three installments. The new voices of the core characters--Perry King as Han Solo, Ann Sacks as Leia, Brock Peters as Darth Vader--provide some new perspectives on the classic characters, especially Peters' Vader. This Vader is a more frequently and outwardly emotional Dark Lord, which is different, but an interesting shift.

But perhaps my favorite aspect is the level of extra detail we get, especially towards the beginning. The series spends over two whole episodes on things that happen before the start of the first installment--one focuses on Leia's activities and motivation for joining the Rebel Alliance, and the other fleshes out Luke's life on Tatooine. We get more insight into Luke's friendship with Biggs Darklighter and his conflict with his uncle, and Leia's interaction with her adoptive father and her mission to retrieve the stolen Death Star plans before her ship is captured by the Empire. There are other extended details--Luke building his new lightsaber at the beginning at the start of Return of the Jedi--but I especially appreciate those "extended beginnings" for the Skywalker twins.

[xoxoblu-deactivated20180808]

Looking for some scary stories?

In the spirit of Halloween try these scary podcasts:

•Lore- a bi-weekly podcast about the history behind scary stories. (@lorepodcast)

•Limetown- (fiction)Ten years ago, over three hundred men, women and children disappeared from a small town in Tennessee, never to be heard from again.

•The Black Tapes- a serialized docudrama about one journalist’s search for truth, her enigmatic subject’s mysterious past, and the literal and figurative ghosts that haunt them both.(@wolf359radio)

•Wolf 359 Radio- Take one part space-faring adventure, add one part character drama, and mix in one part sitcom, and you get Wolf 359 Radio. New episodes are released every two weeks.

•The Truth- THE TRUTH makes movies for your ears. They’re short stories that are sometimes dark, sometimes funny, and always intriguing. Every story is different.

[g2-lpi]

psst: iTunes has a whole scary stories category!

[thatolradioshow]

Listening to Wolf 359

“Your home away from home... seven and a half light years away from Earth.”

What it is: The misadventures of a small crew orbiting the titular star; or, “a radio drama about the advantages of floating, tiny and alone, in the middle of nowhere.”

Why listen: Unlike the sprawling tunnels of Our Fair City’s Hartford, Wolf 359′s world is very, very small--just about everything takes place in the confines of the USS Hephaestus, the station orbiting the title’s dwarf star.  And because of those confines, and the stakes of those confines, it gives the characters’ actions and interactions a certain urgency of sorts.

And holy crow, the characters.  The Hephaestus’ crew is fairly small, but they’re a very distinct set of personalities that have to somehow work with each other and come away in more-or-less one piece.  What’s especially wonderful is that, even though we initially see the other crew members mostly filtered through communications officer Doug Eiffel, all the characters are incredibly rich and detailed, which makes their subsequent development all the more fruitful and enjoyable.

It’s difficult to separate characters from plot, because they influence and drive each other as they tumble along, and the ride is exhilarating.  Tense--as space angst is wont to be--but exhilarating.  For all that’s happened to date, I have the wonderful sinking feeling that there’s a whole lot more in store, lurking under the surface.

 Updates every other Monday; episodes can be found on Wolf 359′s website or the podcast app of your choice.  Go follow them @wolf359radio here on Tumblr, and keep a lookout here for more on them in the future!

[thatolradioshow]

Listening to Our Fair City

“A post-apocalyptic sci-fi radio epic for the internet.”

What it is: Just what their tagline says, the stories from a company city in post-apocalyptic New England.

Why listen: The use of “epic” in the tagline is no accident, this story is big.  As of writing this I’m about halfway through Season 3 (2012), and in that time we’ve been hearing about four or five different stories happening all at once.  Their intersections are absolutely tantalizing, and as the stories unfold I can’t help but be excited for how they’re going to eventually collide.

And to fit a big story, sometimes you need a big world, and the titular Fair City of Hartford is a fascinating, sprawling world.  The workings of this subterranean city controlled by some omni-prevalent corporation (following some disaster(s) that have left the immediate outside world a frozen wasteland), from its occupational class system to its shadier dealings, are fascinating to pick up bit by bit.

The framing and narration are curious, because the series is framed as “true-life dramatizations of our fair city’s glorious history” sponsored by the aforementioned corporation HartLife, and the narration tends to support the company more often than not, but given many of the characters I’m not sure we’re supposed to root for HartLife.  I’ll be interested to see how that continues to go.

I mean come on: there’s science rivalries, corporate overlords, love, intrigue on all sides, zombies, colorful characters in every sense of both words, what more could you want?

Updates every other Wednesday; episodes can be found on Our Fair City’s website or the podcast app of your choice.

Edit: Go follow them @theboardofdirectorslovesyou here on Tumblr!

[thatolradioshow]

Listening to Lore

“Sometimes the truth is more frightening than fiction.”

What it is: An exploration of elements of spooky folklore--places and creatures--and the influences both on and of those places and creatures.

Why listen: Not only is it fascinating, but in its style it’s also clearly fascinated with its subject matter, that comes through in the words and the level of detail. And while the pieces are grounded in research, it’s not bent on trying to prove the stories true or false--it’s content to present the stories for whatever they are, and let them play in our minds to wonder for ourselves.

Usually updates every other Monday, but during the month of October Lore will be updating every Monday!  Episodes can be found on Lore’s website or on the podcast app of your choice.  And go follow them here on Tumblr @lorepodcast!

Edit: Also, if you’re in New England, starting next week (11 October) writer and producer Aaron Mahnke is starting to do live shows!  More info on that here!

[cmog-deactivated20230215]

Live from “Just Out of the Annealer” it’s DJ Slo-Moe! This super cool design came to us from Brian and was gaffed by Ryan Doolittle and Aric Snee this past Wednesday. Congratulations again, Brian! http://ift.tt/1NSCGic

[thatolradioshow]

Talking about Talking About Art

It’s been quiet in this corner of the internet lately, but I want to put this space to good use and talk about some radio-related things that cross my radar.

To begin, let’s talk about talking about art.

We all do it, whether swapping head-canons, hashing out the intricacies of plot either as a creator or as a reader/viewer/listener (let’s call them RVLers), or generally flailing about how intense the most recent episode of [insert title here] because man that was good.  And I love that, because art has those layers that can touch people and can be picked apart, and because I love the enthusiasm it inspires; I’m a total sucker for listening to people talk about things that excite them.

There’s an intimacy in that excitement, I think: whether someone is verbally keysmashing or constructing deeper analysis, something about the art in question resonated with the RVLer enough to give the product of someone else’s mind meaning in the mind of that RVLer.  The creator had some meaning in mind while making the thing in question, of course, but that meaning isn’t necessarily inherent, people project some of themselves onto the art they’re consuming.

And that’s totally wild to me.

So I love hearing people talk about art, both as RVLers and creators, and I think it’s important to listen to those conversations as well, even when it’s about something outside of your realm.  The two main about-art podcasts presently in my rotation right now are Conversation Parade and Secret Skin, both Infinite Guest podcasts.

Conversation Parade is a podcast where hosts John Moe and rap artist Open Mike Eagle dig into the show Adventure Time.  Now, I haven’t watched Adventure Time in years, but the level of minutia they get into, and the personal levels of personality that color the conversations are all so great.  In one episode, they talk about how Ricardio (the disembodied heart of the Ice King) represents a different set of desires of the Ice King, and has an entirely different agenda.  And in the course of that conversation, Moe and Eagle talk about what their disembodied hearts might be like--Eagle says his would probably be doubled over laughing at everything at the oddest and most inappropriate times (“Funerals, the DMV”), and Moe says that his, being in a situation out of its control, would be so anxious that it would just try to claw its way back into his chest.

Secret Skin is another podcast hosted by Open Mike Eagle, and this is more from the creators’ approach; he conducts interviews, primarily with other indie rap artists, and talks with them about their creative lives, their lives in general, philosophies, worries, all of these things that get at the person behind the art.  Again, I know nothing about the art form under discussion--I know far less about any kind of rap than I do about Adventure Time--but to hear creators talk about their work and what’s important to them and how they think about things, it’s incredibly informative, both in terms of their work and about creative people in general.

Cripes, even Wits sometimes gets on that kind of level in its interviews; it’s often more in a lighter context, given that it’s primarily a comedy show, but it’s still getting at art from a Human perspective.

All in all, talking about art gets you thinking about art on all kinds of levels, both as a RVLer and as a creator, and for the most part good things come out of thinking on those varied levels of detail and meaning.

Before everything, before even humans, there were stories. A creature at a fire conjuring a world with nothing but its voice and a listener’s imagination. And now, me, and thousands like me, in little booths and rooms and mics and screens all over the world, doing the same for a family of listeners, connected as all families are, primarily by the stories we tell each other.

And after, after fire, and death, or whatever happens next, after the wiping clean or the gradual decay, after the after…when there are only a few creatures left, there will be one at a fire, telling a story to what family it has left. It was the first thing, and it will be the last.

-- Welcome to Night Vale, ep. 71, “The Registry of Middle School Crushes”

This kind of discussion is new, what kinds of radio things would you like to see talked about?  Other comments or questions?  Drop a line in the ask box!