Sci-fi Radio (ep00) Voices Lost in Calling

A friend confides to the speaker that she has been hearing voices in the middle of the night. She has the uncanny feeling that she herself is speaking, but in someone else’s voice. A phone call interrupts the friend’s strange tale.

The female speaker picks up the phone, and immediately the call is terminated. She forgets about it. The conversation goes on, other topics arise. But the “answerless” calls are repeated over and over in the following months.

Another voice intrudes: “There is no once calling, but the calling.” She wonders which is more traumatic: “voices heard in the dead of night, or voices cut short in the dead of the afternoon.” She figures the friend must be going mad, and at least she is just picking up a telephone, which is perfectly normal.

But then there is the other voice, a male voice that comes from nowhere, interrupting her but also continuing her thoughts. “It comes from me,” this male voice insists. “It calls me to a place I have never been, a place so unfamiliar…” His voice is not his own. Neither is hers. Both the voices are constituted by voice transmissions that come from elsewhere. The voices evoke the unconscious, calling from somewhere else, mysterious, unknowable.

The audio file is so eerie because of the way it formally evokes the sense of voices calling from nowhere, or somewhere. A place so unfamiliar…”it calls me to disconnect.” The sounds in the background which are really just as much in the foreground, which makes the voices bleed into the soundtrack in a disturbing and menacing way, the sounds sound like the ghosts of a radio play.