(RIGHT ON SITE): Podcast format provides a world straight in the ear, and allows you to become intimately familiar with the people who populate it. It can be addictive documentary journalism about a fifteen year old criminal. Or it could, for example, be a kind surreal hørespill from a small town in a parallel, American universe.
Welcome to Night Vale has been one of my favorite podcasts since it appeared sometime in 2012. It is the story of a fictional city somewhere in the desert in the southwest United States, with mysterious lights in the sky and something dangerous lurking in the shadows.
Here goes charm, surreal humor and horror hand in hand.
As stated in the introduction: “A friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep.”
It’s a little “Twin Peaks,” a little “The Twilight Zone,” a little “Beetlejuice.”
Imagine a radio play written by David Lynch and Tim Burton. Or imagine that Stephen King and Neil Gaiman builds a town in The Sims and entrust it to themselves, as some have described it.
The series is created and written by Joseph Fink Jeffrey Cranor. Similar to the “Serial” -Lockers Sarah Koenig demonstrates the podcast format’s elasticity. Here is one very far from the original “two people, a Mac and a microphone” format, and far from anything that might be called radio drama.
The story is conveyed in a “fake news” format through voice of news top browser Cecil. He delivers official radio bulletins to city residents, with a mesmerizing, sonorous voice. The format is the very local local radio, with news, weather, information on cultural events and other trivial matter from nærmlijøet.
But Cecil also talks about mysterious, disturbing and quite horrifying things. Night Vale is the city where most conspiracy theories prove to be true.
Cecil conveys mysterious messages from the sheriff’s secret police, reports of glowing clouds, warnings about looming figures dressed in black hoods, a dog park nobody talks about angels that does not exist (and which consequently is forbidden to talk about), swarms of yellow helicopters, and areas of the city it is safest to steer clear of after dark.
Or, for that matter, the recipe for how to saws and cut out your own heart and eat it for dinner.
The hypnotic background music is also very important. It is signed composer and artist Disparition. A separate segment called “the weather” in each episode is not forecast, but a piece of music or a song from a new and unknown artist.
“Welcome to Night Vale” can certainly be read as a satirical comment on xenophobia and oppressive conformity pressures in small town America. But first and foremost it is burlesque, smart and witty imagination.
The podcast took off in earnest in 2013, including via Twitter and Tumblr. Compared with “Serial”, which reached a publkum on 1.5 million weekly listeners through his first season, is “Welcome to Night Vale» something more of a cult phenomenon. But it is a cult with great impact. It made lots of fanart, user-generated visualizations of Night Vale universe. Some take it too out of dress; there is a separate Night Vale cosplay environment.
The series is a regular in the top 10 in the podcast list to iTunes. New episodes are released every other week, and the people behind have traveled on tour in the US and internationally, with performances of specially written episodes alive. In October last year performed the episode “The Librarian” for a greatly anticipated in Oslo.
It is not only in Night Vale they know that there’s something scary out there in the shadows where the street lights not when .
For “Welcome to Night Vale” here in iTunes. Begin at the beginning!
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