At the end of 2021 we had a meet & greet with Monkeypaw Productions. They brought up a project they were doing with Gimlet that was a horror teleplay for Spotify. There wasn’t much they could really tell us about it but what we did hear sounded so cool we were hooked right away.

Roahn & I pulled together some demo material and sent them a pitch reel. We had a great call with Mimi O’Donnell to talk further and then got started working with her and Jonathan (the sound designer and sound producer).

We never could have dreamed how great it would come together and I’m just amazed by the depth and textures that come through. It harkens back to the radio teleplays of the 1940s but with all the added technological advantages of today. There are so many shifting sound perspectives and different microphone treatments that keep your ear consistently engaged — jumping from a tape recorded conversation, to a voicemail, to an iPhone earpiece to an iPhone loudspeaker, a radio station, etc…. They have raised the bar for audio storytelling.

And we were the lucky composers that got to craft music for this story. We recorded quite a bit and worked with some of our favorite musicians including Cyrus Paul Ghazizadeh, Devin Reilly, guitarist Mark Marshall, Leoren Davis and saxophonist Russell Kirk.

This was a new experience writing for a podcast and was so much fun I’m really hoping for more opportunities to explore this new kind of storytelling.