Whispers in the Wood ( A Metamor City Podcast )

Kia ora

If there were league tables for New Media / Podcast authors then Chris Lester would be in the Premier Division.

Whispers in the Wood is a four episode story arc that kicks off season two of Metamor City.  To be honest I thought that Chris would struggle to maintain the standard of writing, and production that earned him and his team a PARSEC award last year. Well he hasn’t struggled, he has taken Metamor up another level. I can see Metamor beating the Leviathon Chronicles to this years PARSEC as well. (It would be nice if we could have a tie!)

Before I go on to much this is the Metamor City Website, here you will find some of the best audio drama entertainment around. Its award winning that says it all. ( http://www.metamorcity.com/ ).  Pinching from his website this is the authors description of the Metamor City Podcast.

The Metamor City Podcast is a sci-fi/fantasy audio fiction series that is distributed for free through this website. It will feature a mixture of short stories and full-length novels, all taking place in one large world with an overarching story arc. Combining the narration of audiobooks with the music, sound effects and full vocal cast of a serial radio drama, The Metamor City Podcast provides an immersive audio experience of a world like no other.

I am not going to argue with Chris Lester, but will say that his world and writing is so well crafted that it moves out of the fantasy genre into full sci fi (for me) . To me it ranks up there with Terry Pratchett’s world in terms of reality and fullness. When you listen to a podcast you actually feel you are there and involved, so well is the world crafted and the characters developed.

The Metamor world is a world where Magic and technology exist together. In this world you will find vampires, telepaths, wizards, fey and all sorts of other “humanities” and “non humanities” . In Metamor City they all exist, work and live together. The Metamor City society is not classless, and it has a dark but not overbearing undertone to it.

The Whispers in the Wood story arc  involves a telepath working with one of the cities enforcement agencies, investigating a series of murders that seem to be connected to a musician and an enchanted violin. Although it does involve a character from a very early episode of Metamor City you loose nothing by jumping on board here. Abbey Preston’s history is not relevant to this particular story. If downloaded through iTunes it comes with an explicit tag. This shouldn’t put you off, it seems to me that Americans rate an awful lot of stuff explicit, when you will see or hear worse on most soaps, or even TV advertising these days.

If you already enjoy the Metamor City world then I am preaching to the converted, if you are new to this then my suggestion is that listen to all of Whispers in the Wood, then download episodes 001 to 041. By the time you come out of episode 41, the Metamor City team will probably have another couple of episodes up for our entertainment.

Dave A

Town Without A Soul and Other Stories

Town Without a Soul and Other Stories – Written and Narrated by Andrew Culver, Music by Josh Cherney

Kia ora

From Podiobooks.com. A podiobook with 6 very short episodes, each episode about 12 minutes long.
Andrew and Josh are working on the integration of music into audio. Its not new for Audio type books to have a musical score to support or as background, but these guys seem to have taken the music narrative blending to a new level.

The stories are almost lyrics to the music.

 

In the six episodes there are 4 stories.
Episode one starts off with “Night of the Witches” this is so short it might actually be a drabble,
so the danger is that any comment on it will be longer than the piece.
The main piece in the podiobook is the story Town Without a Soul. This is the story of a drifter
being evicted off a train and being forced to stay in a town. It has a very noir feel to it. With the
inculcation of the music the story as narrated felt very much like a Frank Zappa album ( It has
a  Joe’s Garage feel to it )
Leaving Saturnis a Noir Sci-Fi piece involving murder and sex with aliens.
Eye to Eye is a four chapter piece over two episodes with the central theme of revenge, the music on this one has the feel of the old time music theatre.

I really enjoyed the experience and can see a real future with this type of performance in this media.

Dave A