For those of you here for the first time, we'd like to offer a quick word on what this site is all about, plus some instructions on how to use it.

 It's the Way I Disappeared Above and Below is -- for tragic lack of a better term-- a "graphic podcast". This means that it's made of sounds, words, and pictures; a weird hybrid of comic book, novel, album, and radio show. Accordingly, each episode of Above and Below comes in 3 parts: Listen, Read and See.

The Listen section links to the audio elements of each episode. Whether they're podcasts, songs, mixes or news briefs, anything in the episode that comes out of your speakers will be found here. As the centerpiece of most episodes is an approximately hour-long podcast, we strongly recommend that you begin exploring the site by launching the Detachable Music Player found in the Listen section. Above and Below is designed to be experienced in several media simultaneously, but pretty much all of them depend on and flow from the podcast, which is the story's beating heart. By launching the Detachable Music Player first you're free to navigate the whole of the episode's content while listening to the podcast uninterrupted.

The Read section contains links to the text content of each episode: full-length transcripts of each podcast, interviews with each episode's characters, investigative reporting, excerpts from Sebastiani religious documents, and more-- the Read section adds depth, detail and context to the story of San Sebastian.

The See section (heh) contains, predictably, links to the visual content of each episode. Artwork, photography, maps... anything not made of language is found here.

So there you have it. Everything is pretty self-explanatory, but the basic idea is just to explore. We sincerely hope you enjoy what you find, and thank you again for taking the time to check out Above and Below.

You can access episode 1 here: E.I.L.C. Radio

WHAT IT IS

Above and Below is, at heart, the story of an island called San Sebastian. Through a mix of sound, words, and pictures, Above and Below follows not only the lives, histories and cultures of the island's inhabitants, but the life, history and culture of the island itself.

There's pretty obviously a lot of approaches to this task. Take for instance the case of Sebastiani artist Lucienne Apikalia-- we could, of course, approach her like a traditional historian would; listen to her music, watch her plays, read her poetry, interview her family or granddaughter or whoever else is left and then present the sum of our favorite parts in some informed, distant and comprehensive fashion, thereby saving everybody the time and trouble of doing all that listening, watching, reading and interviewing themselves. We could, in short, treat her like some long-dried arrangement of ink in a dusty old textbook. But that shit is all nutrition and no food! All brains and no guts! A million times more interesting, we thought, would be to bring you Lucienne's actual work, played with her own hands and sung in her own voice... Why, to use another example, write an essay on San Seb's infamous pirate frequency 267914296 E.I.L.C. Radio when we could recover and present actual on-air broadcasts? Or hell, why not do both?

What follows is just that-- both. The story of an island told through its own artifacts. Through archival radio broadcasts, indigenous prose, photographs and articles by local and international journalists, folk songs, public emails, government files, transcripts, pamphlets, letters, websites, songs, art, advertisements, archaeological artifacts from the island, and an extensive commentary drawn from reporters, historians, linguists, theologians, artists and scientists whose work on the island spans 250-plus years.