Recently had the great pleasure to work with Lauren Ferebee on a narrative podcast called Echo Machine as part of terrific series called Femme Future Perfect. I did sound design and music for it, and then recorded the performance live in front of an audience and mixed the podcast.
Lauren originally developed this script as a one act play put on by Public Assembly, the theater company I’m a part of, which is where I first got involved, doing the sound design for that. She then adapted that play into a podcast and I reworked the sound design to fit this new version. I still had all the original sound files (go, obsessive archiving, go!), but it was an interesting process to see what needed to change as the play moved into an exclusively aural experience. Things that were shown visually before suddenly needed a sonic gesture to represent them. Even the imagined space itself had to have some sort of sound. The story also changed, so several sections had to be redone to fit that.
Another element that had to change was a Beach Boys song I had used to create an ambient soundscape that occurs towards the end of the piece. Since this was now going onto the internet for good, rights became an issue, and trying to replace the Beach Boys was a tall order. I wrote a short song, then enlisted Gabbi Barad, a longtime friend and one of my favorite singers to do the vocals (did a couple harmonies myself too), then processed the song in the same time-stretched, reverbed-out, ambient-wash manner I had originally. It’s an impossible task to top the brilliance of Brian Wilson, but we managed to make something that had an emotional quality that served the story in the way we needed it to, which felt huge.
Here’s the Beach Boys’ “Surfer Girl” ambient remix I made for the stage version and the replacement version I wrote for comparison (first the unremixed version, then the ambient remix that is in the podcast):
