London Podcast Festival - recording & post-match report!

Hope you’re all keeping well, folks!

If we seem more exhausted and incoherent than usual right now, it’s because last Sunday we were lucky enough to attend London Podcast Festival at King’s Place, accompanied by the amazing Méabh, who plays Carpenter - and who kindly flew across from Ireland to join us for the day.

It was a really lovely occasion, and for two very special reasons: our first ever live-event for one of our shows, and our first real opportunity to actually get out and meet some of the seriously talented people behind UK shows. We also came away with a whole bunch of new recommendations! We can’t wait to start listening to Chain of Being.

We took part in two events across the course of the day (and otherwise staggered around in a fugue state / greedily snatched up beers from the green room). 

Talking Rubbish

The first event was a ‘horror in audiodrama’ panel, alongside Libby Thomas of Glasgow Ghost Stories, Oli Morris of Kane and Feels, Jonathan Simms of The Magnus Archives, Naomi Clarke of the upcoming Secret of St Kilda, and moderated by David Ault of NoSleep.

It was a fun, relaxed discussion on an extremely hot day - we didn’t get into a furious argument with anyone about the state of horror, sadly - and honestly, it was over far too soon. We could have kept going for far longer!

It also led to one of our absolute highlights of the day (and year so far!) as we got to meet the very talented Arazmis, who’d kindly brought along some prints of seriously cool art featuring Carpenter and Faulkner. Check the originals out here and please do give Arazmis a follow!

The panel session wasn’t recorded by King’s Place, we’re sorry to say, but we were mostly talking about:

• The absolute honour and mortifying ordeal of working with a talented cast and crew rather than just recording everything ourselves
• The challenges of audio choreography and how it leads to some extremely chatty horror villains
• The scary stuff we’re enjoying right now (Muna: The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, Jon: Channel Zero and Brand New Cherry Flavour)
• Why we’ve ended up abruptly changing the season ending for both of the shows we’ve made, in hapless defiance of writerly best practice.

Fighting Dogs

Our second event, later in the afternoon, was our live performance of Chapter 4: Of Lovers, Gods and Beasts.

We had no idea how many tickets had actually been sold, so a part of us was dreading the possibility of performing to an empty room...but we were absolutely staggered to see just how many folks came out to join us. (Judging by the faint cry of ‘oh, no’ at the episode’s climax, some were first-time listeners!)

Our amazing performers! (© Viktor Erik Emanuel/Kings Place)

You can find the audio of the event at the top of this post. 

It’s very similar to the chapter as released, so no big surprises (we had to cut down most of the backstory sections of Carpenter’s monologues to keep ourselves to under an hour), but you do get to hear the audience reactions which we really enjoyed and appreciated.

Jon does...a thing with his hand?? (© Viktor Erik Emanuel/Kings Place)

The event features Méabh de Brún as Carpenter, and some brilliant performances by our new friends Sarah Griffin (you can listen to them on other shows including Torchwood and Nellie Bly: give them a follow on Twitter here), and Pip Gladwin (Pip isn’t on social media, but you can listen to him on Wooden Overcoats in a variety of roles!). It also includes some gorgeous intro music by Annie Browne and outro music by Skip Kent-Davy.

Charity makes a persuasive argument. (© Viktor Erik Emanuel/Kings Place)

Sharing Secrets

And finally - we shared some business cards leading to a bit of a quiz challenge, allowing players to unlock some extra secrets and in-universe content in the run-up to Season 2.

The links have been circulating already on social media, but if you haven't seen them, you can play yourself here. (The first clue - if one mouth devours, what does the other one do...?)

If you joined us on the day - once again, thank you so much! It was an absolute thrill to have you with us, and it meant so, so much just to be able to perform in person.

Hopefully we’ll get to do more live shows in future - and even maybe further afield with more of our amazing cast! But for now, watch this space.

Lots of love,

Muna and Jon

(PS: All of this excitement has meant that we’re running slightly late with our promised Patreon tier updates, as you may have noticed - we’ll hope to have them live by the end of this week. 

We’re also editing our end-of-season Q&A with the incredible Steve Shell from Old Gods of Appalachia, and we hope to have that with you all soon; it'll go live on Patreon first, and then be added to the main newsfeed a couple of weeks later.

As ever, if you have any questions for us, please don’t hesitate to let us know!)