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Here Be Monsters · Here Be Monsters

So What Exactly is Episode 149?

June 16, 2021·26 min·2 clips
Geoff reveals a secret project: a podcast that regenerates new audio every time you download it.
Episode 149 needs an explanation. The host starts with The Daily Blast: a podcast episode that does not stay put. It changes by design, day to day, which is already a weird enough promise. He connects it to Neutrino Watch, a secret project built with Martin Saltz-Ostwick after the better part of a year of tinkering. Six episodes exist, and one has been lifted from another corner of the internet and tucked into the Here Be Monsters feed as episode 149. The offer is simple in the most suspicious way. Download it today, tomorrow, or 10 years from now, and the file should come back a little different. Then the idea gets loose. Wendy becomes a kind of idea engine, jolted by a cosmic event and talking like she has wandered out of a fever dream. The bits stay delightfully low-tech: voice memos, game-show premises, spammy emails, whatever scraps can be fed into a show that keeps rearranging itself. Gus Harms shows up too, introduced as a prolific, antisocial Pacific Northwest experimental musician who sends demo-tape emails with titles like Reality Anarchy. It is funny, but not fully relaxed. Under the joke is a real distribution headache. A podcast episode that changes every day is not what RSS feeds, hosting services, or listening apps are built to expect. They walk through the weak spots: the website, Dropbox accounts, the podcast host, even Spotify. Nobody declares that the internet is doomed. Martin and the host land on the smaller, better punchline, that they may not break it, but they might get uncomfortably close. The experiment comes with instructions. Download episode 149, delete it, then download it again, and in theory something new should appear. The goodbye feels handmade, like two collaborators signing off after building a strange little machine that works, maybe, while refusing to be easy to describe.

As heard by us

A daily-changing podcast turns redownloading into part of the experience.

The Daily Blast is presented as a dynamically generated episode that shifts from day to day, so deleting it and downloading it again should surface audio that is slightly different.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want episode 149, The Daily Blast, to feel a little different each time you fetch it.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
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