Lights Out: Bristling With Creativity & Sonic Surprises

Sometimes, a podcast can surprise you. Typically, even the best podcasts follow a proven formula. Even the most riveting true-crime podcasts, the funniest comedy podcasts or the most provocative interview shows are similar in form and format.

Then there's Lights Out, a BBC Radio 4 podcast, that grips listeners with its experimental audio documentaries.

Lights Out returns for a new season on October 16. Lights Out is a space carved out in the podcast landscape for adventurous, sound-led, inventive one-off documentaries by makers from around the world. It existed on the radio for half a decade - where it became the first documentary strand from the UK to win the Prix Europa, as well as the IDA radio and podcasts award, Amnesty awards, Third Coast and multiple others. In 2022, it finally became a podcast.

I've listened to several episodes and found them to be sparkling with creativity, surging with sonic surprises, and bristling with a strange brew of emotions.

Two of my favorite episodes include Call Signs, about a man who climbs trees in the nearby forest to put up antennas that he uses to communicate with his family and others via ham radio.  This is after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and he is trapped in Kyiv.

The other episode, Gatekeeper, connects the discovery of the planet Neptune with the realities of queer and indigenous people. It's a masterpiece of connective tissue between cosmology and gender expression.

When Lights Out returns for its new season on October 16, its first episode is a piece by Talia Augustidis described as follows: “Exploring an archive of home videos, photographs, memories, and news reports, Talia Augustidis reflects on how we choose to remember someone. Told through five chapters, each part focuses on a single image of her mum, who died when Talia was three.”

Listeners in the United States may not know her, but Talia Augustidis is an award-winning audio producer and community organizer. She is the host and creator of the podcast, UnReality, which has featured in festivals from Florence to Reykjavik to New York. She runs popular monthly listening events in London with In The Dark, often featuring live performances from audio artists. In 2022, Talia built an extensive audio industry resource list, and she now writes a monthly newsletter, All Hear, in collaboration with Transom.

Talia Augustidis explains her creative process behind the episode. "In terms of how I crafted the episode, I've been collecting the tape for two years now. Following my Dad and sister around with my recorder, requesting endless interviews with them, which they always kindly obliged. All the individual pieces were born out of a sense of frustration -- the empty tapes, forgetting to press record, the lifeless headlines, the one video that I can't see, the photographs that I don't want to see -- and I eventually realized that there is a cohesion in this disappointment, hence the "Dead Ends". And it felt important from the beginning of the concept that each individual fragment have a different style, not just to flex my creative muscles, but to best respond to what each feeling and emotion needs. Hopefully that comes across to the listener, too."

In Dead Ends, Talia Augustidis manipulates sound with tape hiss, plaintive voices from the past, and the mystery of her mother's tragic death from a fall from a cliff while on a business trip in Majorca. 

In this, my favorite, episode, I felt the pain of Talia's loss, the frustration at not knowing her mother, hard questions about her mother's lifestyle, and the darkness surrounding her mother's death.

It's a powerful episode, and the sounds she employs are poignant, somber, and wistful. Her narrative process in the episode is anything but circadian, and more like entering a dreamlike state.

Other producers on the docket this season are: Phoebe McIndoe, Redzi Bernard, Alice Boyd, Laura Grace Simpkins, and Jesse Lawson. 

In the upcoming episode Lithified, Laura Grace Simpkins made two big life changes in 2022. She decided to stop taking lithium (a medication she was prescribed for her mental health) just as she moved to Cornwall—the only place where lithium is being mined in the UK. In 'Lithified', Laura gets ready for her future without the silvery-white metal, while exploring the landscape it will soon be coming from.

I highly recommend Lights Out for listeners around the world. Its narrative process is wild and unwieldy, its themes are connected by threads that can baffle, and the questions it poses locate a spot in your brain and fertilize there.