The Silt Verses
“Carpenter and Faulkner, two worshippers of an outlawed god, travel up the length of their deity’s great black river, searching for holy revelations amongst the reeds and the wetlands.
As their pilgrimage lengthens and the river’s mysteries deepen, the two acolytes find themselves under threat from a police manhunt, but also come into conflict with the weirder gods that have flourished in these forgotten rural territories…”
It’s no surprise that many of the more popular scripted podcasts exist within the realms of our most currently popular genres - sci-fi and horror. And this goes for both serious and comic stories.
Arguably, genre itself is best seen simply as a way to alert a potential audience that this story may unfold across shared territory. Of course, any series which merely reheats cliches won’t be satisfying to any but fetishists, but that’s as true of general fiction as genre works.
And, as the blurb above surely signposts, The Silt Verses is likely unlike anything you’ve experienced before - a densely gothic journey into the grotesque. It’s not for everyone - nor is meant to be. But, if you’re looking to unlock your horizon, give it a listen and decide if that’s true for you.
Meet the Creators
All this emerges from the creative partnership of Jon Ware and Muna hussen - who live and dream (darkly) together. They began with an equally idiosyncratic but smaller-scale series titled I Am in Eskew.
I spoke to them about how they unearthed and sculpted such a unique premise - before, harder still, transplanting it to a wide open audio space where it’s since commenced rewilding like some eldritch invasive species.
The Spark
Muna: “After we finished I Am in Eskew, the first thing we realised was - we are not voice actors. We should probably get actual professionals. And maybe a sound engineer.
So we put a call out - after Jon had written the first couple of episodes of The Silt Verses - and were completely blown away by the response. We had something like 80 people who wanted to audition. And when we put out auditions for Season Three …we had over 500…
So it's really grown ...quite a lot.”
Jon: “I wanted to try a full cast audio drama rather than just a single person podcast. And some of that was going - okay, well, we've done one show where it was just us narrating for...30 hours, basically. You realise it typecasts you.
Somehow people have to feel that it's different. So working with new people who can bring really wonderful voices - that aren't us - was important.”
I Am in Eskew is kind of a mystery of the week, or dilemma, or horror of the week, maybe. What was the adaptation process - going to a season-long arc, or multi-season arc..?
Jon: “The mechanics of the story take up a lot more time when you can no longer just have every episode start with your protagonist waking up ...and they’re in another horrible situation.
We now have characters in a real geography who need to get to X place to achieve Y objective - suddenly there's a lot more baggage.
And in audio, you can't have a three-second driving montage, past the sign that says ‘Welcome to Bellwethers’. Some of that is harder to convey - dreadful exposition where the characters go - oh gee, now we've come to the town of Bellwethers...”
Muna: “We used to get really frustrated at Game of Thrones where, you know, in Season One, it would take weeks to cover a distance - then, by the time it was Season Seven, they would suddenly appear - in moments - between great distances…
We've always been challenged by that, because our characters come together, have an interaction - whether that be negative, or positive, or ...horrifying - then pull apart again.
It's been really difficult. Also - we're doing a horror podcast. So there have to be moments of horror being woven in. And moments of suspense, and climax. How do we get everyone in the same spot at the same time with enough character growth that any confrontation actually makes sense?
So yeah, there's a lot to think about…”
“…working with people who can bring really wonderful voices…”
I was gonna ask about lore and world building, which obviously is huge for a show set in such a fantastical world. Did you have to do a lot of that before you launched? Are you always kind of doing it in the background?
Jon: “We did a fair bit but it is a really hard ask to go - you need to have everything planned out before you get started, especially if you've got no idea if it'll even be a success.
So there always needs to be a little bit of busking - let's roll with it and see where the story goes. That can be the joy of serialised fiction.
We do as much as we need - and then we have lots of blank space on that map where we can expand to, at any given moment.”
I read that David Lynch often inserts things in his stories with no idea what they are.
But - once they're in there, he can pick them up down the road. So it's a set-up with no in-built pay-off - but also a loose thread, basically. Which he can later do whatever he wants with.
Into Production
Anyway, at this point, I usually ask about the main skills you had to learn.
Jon: “I mean ...everything.
That's the joy and the agony of creating an audio drama. Unless you have a huge team behind you, you need to pick everything up - and that's a really wonderful thing to get to do.”
For I Am in Eskew, I did what you could very crudely call sound production, which was...drag a WAV file of rain onto a backing track and then try my best to remove all of the horrible mouth sounds I was making.
But now, for The Silt Verses - where I've been doing sound production since Season Two - I've got all the little gizmos, the environmental spaces plug-in...
You come a very long way very quickly because you are thrown in the very deep end.”
Muna: “I do more of the directing. It's basically - we get the actors together in a Zoom room. Everyone records their own section - they send it to us and we do the editing and everything.
When I first started doing that, I would just try and keep people to the script, and then that was it. But over time, you get better at giving directions, you get better at supplying notes.
So - this character is eating or chewing, you learn actually - could you have a tangerine slice in your mouth while you do this line? Little things like that.”
“…you get better at giving directions, you get better at supplying notes.”
Muna: “I would say, though, Jon is definitely downplaying what he's learned. If you listen to Season Two - it's definitely become more ambitious.
There's a scene where two characters are fighting, and roll down a hill - while they're fighting - then into a body of water - and then they fight in the water, and all of these sounds are being layered on top of each other and... “
Jon: “It's a really exciting challenge to have - to try and figure out what you can do with the relatively limited palette of audio.”
The Flame
Looking back across that show's run so far what would you say your high point was? Or high point …so far? Let's not jinx it.
Muna: “Gosh. Yeah, I would say quite a lot.
One was - maybe four or five episodes in when we were like, yeah, we're doing better than I Am in Eskew - but no one's listening to us on Spotify - what's going on with that? And then we realised our Acast feed wasn't pulling in the Spotify figures…suddenly we had, like, an extra 20,000 listens or something just appear out of nowhere…
That's when I realised...this is really going to take off. People are really interested in what was essentially a massive gamble.”
Jon: “Honestly, if this isn't too much, I think it's when I've seen people online saying that it helped. Like, you don't create a horror show as a therapy session, but people find catharsis in horror anyway.
And, with The Silt Verses, seeing people go - I had a really crappy religious upbringing or - literally, I was in a cult - and this has helped me process my feelings…”
Muna: “I really love that it has allowed so many people to be creative. There are so many amazing artists sharing fan art. People cosplaying, making songs… It's just awesome.”
There's a big Tumblr culture around it, right?
I guess some more traditional genre shows - more horror than weird, for example - get a massive amount of fan interaction, but with every other one of those, you have the possibility of diminishing returns, whereas you guys are opening up a very different landscape, and I can totally see that would be fertile land for fans to come into and respond to and fill.
But that wouldn't be happening if you hadn't provided them with the raw materials. Or sophisticated materials. Sophisticated raw materials.
“…people find catharsis in horror.”
How about - a low point - and how you bounced back or processed it, to keep it positive..?
Muna: “It's probably time management. It's a lot of work - only the two of us. We don’t have sound engineers, marketing people …even an admin assistant. We get back to every single person ourselves.
There was a certain point last year that we were going through a house remodel - both working full-time and then working on The Silt Verses which was…yeah, pretty, pretty difficult…
And we've had to make some decisions on how to manage our mental health. as well as, you know, making sure that we're still putting out what we want to put out.”
Jon: “And it's not just time management - it's expectation management. Because when you're putting out a show - in our case, every fortnight - it can be so draining. You watch for the response - and start to second guess yourself: Were people less keen about this episode than the last one? Is there something that's not being said? When someone does make a criticism... how hard should I be taking that?
And that is creating serialised content in the era of the internet, where you feel that you need to keep stoking the fires of audience response in order to keep having a career...but you are also very, very vulnerable to it.
The key thing is I think having a support network so that you're not just going through it alone in front of the computer.”
“Don't compare yourself to anyone else.”
This is, again, where you guys producing something that's unique is potentially both a risk and a reward.
Jon: “I think that's what the industry needs to continue doing. Like, the biggest fiction podcast ever, Welcome to Night Vale, was a genre-blending mix of everything.
As a medium, audio drama needs to keep striving for the undefinable. The problem is, when something is a success, when something's popular, you get a flurry of shows that are very, very similar.
And actually, what we always need to be doing is thinking - okay, how can we create something that couldn't exist anywhere else?”
Muna: “If you are that person, in a basement with a blanket fort - and you're listening to shows like The Silt Verses or The Black Tapes and you think to yourself - well, I'll never be able to produce that...
Don’t be put off by a shiny finished product that has got a couple of years of experience behind it. Don't compare yourself to anyone else. If you've got a story and you want to tell it, there is room for everyone - and to find people who want to listen.”
Listen to
The Silt Verses.
Or, for yet more hard-won wisdom from Jon & Muna, click on their names to visit their profile pages - or check out their contributions to the ever-expanding practical podcasting database, elsewhere onsite.
For the other side of the story - that of contributors to the show - follow the names below to interviews with actors and more.
Méabh de Brún (Actor - Carpenter)
David S Dear (Actor - Sid Wright)
Lucille Valentine (Actor - Paige)
Jimmie Yamaguchi (Actor - Hayward)
Coming Soon
B. Narr (Actor - Faulkner)
Landscape Picture
Jeffrey Johnson