The Sound of an Enigma in Sonarius: The Mysteries of M

Sound changes. Or, rather, how we comprehend sound changes: And, in turn, sound can change us. That idea resonates throughout Sonarius: The Mysteries of M, the new six-part series from Austin storyteller Peter Mattei who, after decades of writing for the screen, makes his first foray into the realm of audio drama.

The genesis of the story comes from a deep, personal tragedy: Five years ago, his brother-in-law committed suicide and, as is common, the family started searching for reasons why. Mattei explained, "He had left behind some books about solfeggio frequencies. ... Before the scale now of eight notes in music, there was a six-note scale. Gregorian chants use that scale, so it's a very off sound, but there are people who believe the solfeggio frequencies are very healing and somehow connect to our bodies in a deeper way. The second I read about them I went, 'Well, that's it.'"

With his wife's understanding and support, he decided to create a story about Jen, a young woman trying to explain her brother's death through the series of mysterious recordings he left, a story "that dealt with suicide and mental illness because it's important to talk about."

Mattei has spent decades in film and TV (he's most famous as creator and writer of WGN America's Outsiders), and so his first instinct was to take what would become Sonarius to the studios. But like everyone in TV and film, he's spent more time developing projects that never make it to the screen than working on ones that do. He shuddered slightly as he recalled one trip to development hell on a network pilot, describing the experience as "an episode of Monty Python. It got so insane that we thought they were just punking us. Everyone just wanted to quit in the middle of making a script. It wasn't just a few notes, it was endless, endless notes.

"I was tired of that game," he added, "and this was so personal to me that I couldn't imagine getting notes from an executive. So I just decided to go ahead and write it myself, and once I wrote it I went, 'I just want to make it.'" So, rather than try to raise a few million dollars for a film version, he made it as an episodic audio drama.

Modern narrative podcasts are just a new format for what was once called radio drama. The art form traces its U.S. roots back to A Rural Line on Education, a short play broadcast on Pittsburgh's KDKA in 1921, and some of the biggest TV shows of all time – Guiding Light, Gunsmoke, The Green Hornet – started as radio dramas. While the form has faded in America, it's still strong elsewhere in the world (for example, don't tell General Hospital, but the longest-running drama in the world is actually The Archers, broadcast in the UK since 1951). However, Mattei explained that when he started listening to some of the modern audio dramas, "I felt like I was listening to a movie without being able to see it, so in structuring this I made certain decisions about the format that would make it easier for the audience to follow."

In fact, he had two problems to solve. First, providing scenes in a way that wasn't narratively intrusive, and secondly solving the old found-footage problem: Why would the protagonist keep recording? His solution was simple: to have Jen be making "an audio journal of her journey. That way, it would make it OK for her to say, 'I'm walking into a house now.'"

This was all early in the pandemic, when everyone was trying to get projects made with reduced resources. So Mattei decided that Sonarius would be "a DIY project that we made locally," closer to his days in New York's Cucaracha Theatre than his time in TV, "and god bless Austin that I was able to do it." First he reached out to Alan Berg of Austin-based production house Arts+Labor, who connected him to Beavis & Butt-Head sound engineer Eric Friend, and from there he worked with Austin-based powerhouse casting director Vicky Boone (Tower, The Tree of Life, Everybody Wants Some!!). Yet it was another Austin friend, editor and director Karen Skloss, who led him to his Jen: Austin actress Katie Folger, who had starred in Skloss' South by Southwest 2017 selection The Honor Farm. "Karen read the script and said, 'You've got to cast my friend Katie Folger.' I go, 'We have to do auditions,' and watched about 20 auditions, and went, 'You're totally right, it has to be Katie Folger.'"

After rehearsing in Mattei's backyard, the cast recorded the show in late 2020 and handed the files to another Austinite, Evander Lang, to edit the episodes – each of which was named after a solfeggio frequency. Finally, Mattei brought in some non-ATX talent: L.A.-based composer Anton Sanko (The Romanoffs, Big Love). "He really responded to the trippy, weird, Mojave desert, X-Files vibe." Even better, Sanko already knew about solfeggio frequencies, and knew how to build them into the soundscape. "I think of the score as being a main character," Mattei said. "For me, it's bigger than a story. It's an immersive sound experience. I would love to do it as a sound bath at somewhere like the Integratron at Joshua Tree."

And that score is a key element of that immersive environment. Mattei said he was influenced by 1970s science-fiction soundtracks and by the work of Eduard Artemyev, longtime composer for Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky (Stalker, Solaris). "Anton loved Artemyev as well, so he'd send me some things, and I'd send him back some descriptions like, 'It's dark and wet as I walk across the surface of the moon.'"

The creation of that soundscape was a collaborative process between Lang, Sanko, and Mattei, but Mattei described his input as being broad suggestions, "like 'less tears and more sunshine,'" he laughed. "I don't want to be the executive that gives too many notes."

Sonarius: The Mysteries of M is available now on Audible.