The Lost Cat Podcast - A.P. Clarke - Dark Streets
The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called Dark Streets. It's one of the soundtrack pieces I wrote for The Lost Cat podcast. Today, we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You will listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. Every Wednesday, we break apart a song, soundtrack or composition and take a trip and how it was made. My name is A.P. Clark. I'm a musician and writer from London, England. And this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music episode 87, Dark Streets. by me A.P. Clark. Thanks for listening in. The Lost Cat podcast is a storytelling audio drama that details my continuing adventures and trying to find my cat, which is lost. It features monsters, ghosts, old ones, some cats, several ends of the world, and lots and lots of wine.01:44 INFLUENCESI've been a musician since I was a teenager, you know, started in rock bands. But then I discovered all of the 60s singer-songwriters. And that was just much more narrative driven. Ballad form and story and character and stuff. When podcasts exploded about five, six years ago, it was like Ah, I can do music and I can do storytelling and I can do spoken word stuff. I can do all of it in one thing. So that's what got me into doing the Lost Cat podcast. So one of my influences at the time was I was listening to a lot of Sigur Ros, which is that post rock minimalist atmospheric style of music. Take a listen. It's a beautiful sort of cyclical piano. Piano figures. It affected my practice as I plonked away at the piano. I was getting into all of the the like the minimalists, classical composers like Reich and Glass. And that obviously fits perfectly with the idea of scoring which goes underneath and doesn't take focus off of the talking. So another influence that I was listening to a lot was the Magnetic Fields, all of the works of Stephin Merritt. A very specific song that I liked was his side project called The 6ths. I think the album was called Hyacinths And Thistles. And the impossibility of pronouncing that does give you an idea of his sense of humor. It's called The Dead Only Quickly Decay. Take a listen to it. Obviously has that slightly Gothic but slightly funny but slightly dark but slightly warm and human. It doesn't undermine the morbidness with funniness All of the Magnetic Fields is fairly wonderful for this stuff.05:06 WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE So as I was starting to make this podcast, Welcome to Night Vale was hugely popular is one of the first big independent podcasts, audio dramas to really break through. And so I was listening to it, and I was massively inspired by it. The fact that there is a song in the middle of all my episodes is just entirely because Night Vale did it. I was looking for a format, they had a format that was really good. And I really responded to so I just went with it. Because even Welcome to Night Vale, which is a famously sort of subversive queer podcast, still kept the Lovecraftian tone of fear of the other. So my unique input was to take the Lovecraftian tone, subvert the fear of the other and make it into a going towards the other, use what you got around you and make stuff. That's what I did. I needed a format. So I borrowed stuff from Night Vale. 06:41 GOING DIY I was freelance at the time, which is to say I was massively underemployed part of it was just to like, give myself a project. You can't neurose about like, "is the idea ready yet? Is it good enough yet?" You just have to dive in and go with what you've got. I needed some music, it needed to be sort of dark and scary. So I just played something that sounded dark and scary moved on. The piece of music is improvised, it took 10 minutes. And I find that a very useful way of actually creating stuff. As an example, me and my friends made a feature length movie lastSupport the show