Spacetime Diaries Podcast Showcases Breadth of Cinematic Production in the COVID-Era
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Ghan Patel, a Portland, Oregon-based creative producer, today released a cyberpunk-influenced music video in conjunction with his new podcast series, Spacetime Diaries. The genre-bending fictional podcast series blends narration, dialogue, sound design, foley, score and song to create an immersive, cinematic listening experience. The show’s semi-autobiographical first season, “The Disappearing,” was inspired by Patel’s experience with identity and truth politics.
The new Spacetime Diaries music video released today visualizes “Beautiful Fantasy,” a song featured in the series’ fifth episode. The video was created in collaboration with visual artist, Reese Bowes. In this video, ads from a dystopian future are juxtaposed against psychedelic collages of 3D-point dancers.
Led by Patel, “The Disappearing” was created by a collective of sixteen actors, producers, musicians, and sound engineers from across the country, including Portland, New York City, and Los Angeles. Released in December 2020, the show follows disgruntled technology worker Karima Bilal, voiced by Patel, through her reckoning of apocalyptic human disappearances. Listeners are transported to the fictional planet of Ankhara, on which two distinct groups battle over the survival of their new world.
“The Disappearing is fairly idiosyncratic, but is rooted in a lot of what we’re all going through right now,” said Patel. “We’re witnessing huge transformations in our climate, in how we communicate and relate to each other, and even where we draw the bounds of our reality. Science fiction is a tool for us to speculate on sea changes and imagine possible answers to big questions, all within a narrative framework. Blending those elements with techniques used by producers in pop, hip-hop, and electronic dance music help drive the storytelling in this first season.”
Looking forward, Patel envisions Spacetime Diaries as a collection of science fiction stories pulled from the same fictional timeline, told across a variety of platforms. Planned future work includes a set of guided meditations that transport the listener into the bodies of alien creatures, a narrative TikTok series, as well as a live musical theater production.
A full second season similar to “The Disappearing” is slated to release in late 2021.
Spacetime Diaries is available to stream on all major podcast platforms, More information can be found at https://spacetimediaries.com/.
About Ghan & Company
Ghan & Company is a collective of artists and collaborators organized by Ghan Patel, seeking to provide a platform for new and underrepresented voices as well as experiment with storytelling using emerging media and technology.
This is a press release which we link to from Podnews, our daily newsletter about podcasting and on-demand. We may make small edits for editorial reasons.