Empty Room Empty Room Theater

[The evening news broadcasts a terrible climbing toll. You start to wonder if your neighbors will ever even know your name. Silence is not an option. Silence is not an option.]

A new experimental radio play by poet and essayist JP Seabright. In a dystopia seemingly shuttering in on itself, two companions try to mine meaning from one another's fading memories and desires, hushed by the drone of television static and flickering industrial lights.

Written to be performed in a randomized sequence each evening, CONTROL. HALT. DELETE. drums out the mundane rhythm of two lives under tyranny, refracted through an alien drama that borrows its stilted moods from Orwell, Lynch, Beckett, Brecht, and Ballard.

Voiced by Lizzy McCabe and Spike Pulice. Directed and designed by Jarid McCarthy.

. . .

EMPTY ROOM 2024

VARIANT: ULTRAVIOLET

Read Along: emptyroomradio.com/chd-seabright-3

[You know someone might be watching, but not who or why. This room is familiar enough that it could be home, for now. You don't know how long it's been this way. Is it all a show?]

A new experimental radio play by poet and essayist JP Seabright. In a dystopia seemingly shuttering in on itself, two companions try to mine meaning from one another's fading memories and desires, hushed by the drone of television static and flickering industrial lights.

Written to be performed in a randomized sequence each evening, CONTROL. HALT. DELETE. drums out the mundane rhythm of two lives under tyranny, refracted through an alien drama that borrows its stilted moods from Orwell, Lynch, Beckett, Brecht, and Ballard.

Voiced by Lizzy McCabe and Spike Pulice. Directed and designed by Jarid McCarthy.

. . .

EMPTY ROOM 2024

VARIANT: BRONZE

Read Along: emptyroomradio.com/chd-seabright-2

[The way here is hard to remember. You work without a break, but don't know what your job is. A nightly lottery is required viewing. Someone familiar is at the door.]

A new experimental radio play by poet and essayist JP Seabright. In a dystopia seemingly shuttering in on itself, two companions try to mine meaning from one another's fading memories and desires, hushed by the drone of television static and flickering industrial lights.

Written to be performed in a randomized sequence each evening, CONTROL. HALT. DELETE. drums out the mundane rhythm of two lives under tyranny, refracted through an alien drama that borrows its stilted moods from Orwell, Lynch, Beckett, Brecht, and Ballard.

Voiced by Lizzy McCabe and Spike Pulice. Directed and designed by Jarid McCarthy.

. . .

EMPTY ROOM 2024

VARIANT: MARINE

Read Along: emptyroomradio.com/chd-seabright-1

Broadcasting April 10th: A NEW PLAY by JP SEABRIGHT

A dystopian lottery. Lights flickering on and off according to schedule. Two partners sitting in their usual places, trying to remember how they got there.

Presented in three variations, and performed in a randomized order, JP Seabright's modular drama follows a couple's futile and stilted attempts to understand one another in the midst of a totalitarian regime.

Voiced by Spike Pulice and Elizabeth McCabe.

"Well, it's true what they say. Practice makes perfect." An all-night rehearsal that stretches into morning. A pianist straining over their instrument– and their instrument straining back. CHROMATIC SCALE is the first one-act play of poet Leela Raj-Sankar, exploring a musician's relationship to the art that confounds them.

Voiced by Claire Wagner, the pianist, and Diego Noll, the piano.

Performed in phantom-concert with a frustrated arrangement of Chopin's Ballade No. 1 in G Minor by Matthew M. Hayashi.



Read the full piece online: emptyroomradio.com/chromatic-scale

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EMPTY ROOM

SUMMER 2023

@emptyroomradio

SIDE B: An interview with Garett Strickland.



Empty Salon contributor Garett Strickland meets with the operator to explore Ordealism & Liminalogy; his books UNGULA (2020) and A PLACE BEYOND (forthcoming, 2023). Jarid and Garett discuss the all-encompassing task of struggling to leave a mark on deep-time, the horrors and hopes of technology, the failure of mediation, as well as wonder about what remnant of the human experience will survive the flood. Islands of plastic incubating new life, a thousand years of unwatched security footage, a dollar bill anointed as a final image.



Listen to Garett's original composition, 'MUTATIS MUTANDIS' in the COMPULSION PETAL anthology: emptyroomradio.com/garett-strickland-s2



Garett Strickland is a love-singer, portalogist, so-called Nervous Appalachian, and also the author of UNGULA (Inside the Castle, 2020), SCRIMS (Cloak, 2023), and A PLACE BEYOND (Inside the Castle, 2023). He can be found on Twitter or Instagram at @grotstricken where one can often see his cat or sometimes hear him singing from behind a curtain.



This is the second of two artist-dialogues with contributors to the second installation of Empty Salon. Recorded in June of 2022.



Featured music: Scott Walker - Angelica



View the full anthology /// Empty Salon: COMPULSION PETAL /// emptyroomradio.com/salon-2



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EMPTY ROOM

2023