A Note From Disparition

A little over a decade ago I was on vacation in rural Wales, about to return to NYC to quit my dismal job at a corporate publishing house that had been circling the drain for years and which was in the midst of laying off most of its workforce. The house would technically last several months after my return, and I had the option to stick out the summer dodging emails from angry, abandoned authors about marketing plans that would never come to pass. But it wasn’t worth it; I didn’t have enough seniority to earn a decent severance, and the environment in the office, tucked away in the windowless darkness directly behind the ever-glowing signs of Times Sq, had become one of recursive, slow toxicity. So instead I planned an exit, thinking I’d either flee to another house or take on freelance marketing work directly for authors, and used my remaining vacation time for some temporary peace in the countryside. And it was here that I first received an email from a Night Vale fan, from Brazil, asking for permission to use my music for a Portuguese fan translation of the podcast.

At that time, outside of my day job, I’d been independently making and releasing solo albums of experimental electronic music for a minuscule audience of fellow chronically online friends, while also doing composition and sound design in the world of Off Off Off Off Broadway theatre. The kind of gigs held in lofts with ten people in the audience and the LD was some guy hiding in the shadows on “stage” with a clamp light. Already falling into middle age, I had long since internalized the “fact” that my art was too weird for public consumption outside of such fringe settings.

It was somewhere around this time that one of my fellow chronically online friends, Joseph, who happened to have also moved to NYC and become involved in local theatre, told me he was starting a fictional podcast and asked if he could use my music. I thought his idea for the show was great, was happy to oblige, and mentally filed it away with much of the other art I’d been involved in - a cool project that I was proud to contribute to that would hopefully be appreciated by a few other weird people like me, and that’s about it. And for the first couple years that’s exactly what it was. The first time we held a live Night Vale event, there were a hundred or so people in the audience and it was combined with several other unrelated performances during a variety act type of show. Most of the people who came were friends and acquaintances of the various writers and performers involved. I played music during the Night Vale bit from a DJ booth off stage. By this point the show had established a small and growing group of online supporters, who contributed to the show through donations, but the experience as both a performer and audience member was very much that of local underground theatre.

And then... something happened on the internet. It had already started before I went to Wales, but I didn’t know it yet. I just knew that this weird little show I’d contributed to had somehow made its way to Brazil, and that someone there liked it enough they were translating the whole thing into Portuguese. I thought that, in and of itself, was pretty incredible. I returned to the US, left my publishing job, and kept working in the local theatre scene. Meanwhile, Night Vale’s popularity was rapidly gaining momentum. Later that year, we did our first “big” show at Roulette, with a full cast on stage, a full band that I directed, and audience of five or six hundred. A very different audience than we’d performed for in the past. These were not just friends and family or colleagues from the local theatre scene, these were fans. They were dressed as characters, they possessed intimate knowledge of the lore and their own elaborate fantasies in the world of the show, they brought art they had made for and with each other in their already strong community and, after the show, they asked for our autographs. I’d never experienced anything remotely like it.

A year later, thanks to the support of our online donor base, we began touring the show around the world. Thanks to Night Vale and its dedicated fans, I found myself performing my own music in front of thousands of people in parts of the world I’d always dreamed of seeing, and the other performers became some of my closest friends. It felt unreal. I tried to never take it for granted.

In the world of art and entertainment, it is common for a sudden rise in popularity to be met with an equally swift backlash. Or for a show or artist to simply disappear back into the void from which they seemingly came. But that didn’t happen with Night Vale. While the show might not be the phenomenon that it was in 2015, and the team and the world has experienced a lot of ups and downs since then, the Night Vale fandom has formed a community that held on strong. We were on tour in 2020 when the global pandemic hit and we had to cancel several runs of shows, shifting to sporadic online performances and unsure of what would remain of the world of performing arts on the other end of it all. With the support and encouragement of the fan community, we kept making the show, performed in the context in which we could and, as soon as it seemed safe enough to tour again, hit the road and found our fans just as eager to see us and each other in the magical space created by live Night Vale shows.

We are now in the midst of another crisis, as the economy begins to collapse under the strangulation of the fascists. Night Vale has always celebrated kindness and has always centered a love of the unusual, especially of that and those who are met with fear in traditionalist societies. To me, and I think to a lot of people, what Night Vale is about at its core is an antithesis to fascism. And I think that sense of community that stems from these values is a huge part of why the fandom - and thus the show - has been able to keep going for all of these years. The fact that the show is funded by independent donors from the community in addition to its own merch sales and live performances is crucial to this, because it is what directly enables us to keep making the show without being beholden to the corporate media conglomerates who are rushing to obey in advance at this very moment, both as a show and as individual artists trying to survive in this world.

There are some who say the corporate world offers more stability than a life in the arts, but when I was working in the dregs of corporate publishing I lived in constant fear of massive layoffs - which were frequent - and was constantly putting energy into promoting work I didn’t particularly believe in, just because it was my job. When I began working more closely with Night Vale and touring with the show I found a group of people I can not only work well with but actually trust, and contribute to work I actually believe in. And in a different way there is that sense of trust between the show itself and the community of its fans. This is what distinguishes independent art made for its own sake from corporate art made for a profit motive, and the support of dedicated communities like the Night Vale fandom is what makes this possible. Thank you for over a decade of creative freedom and support.

Disparition