The Black Tapes · Pacific Northwest Stories

Episode 109 - Name that Tune

September 1, 2015·44 min·4 clips

Dr. Polman discovers the unsound and a new music file share the exact same frequency ratio.

A song fragment opens the case. Once the sponsorship copy drops away, Alex Regan follows the thread to Richard Sprague, and the music already feels wrong around the edges. Sprague talks about Scriabin as a mystic, an atonal composer who unsettled audiences and drew anger from the church. The phrase that sticks is dark intent. From there, the conversation moves through The Satanic Poem, Faustian bargains, and the old Robert Johnson crossroads myth. Alex keeps asking for something plain. Sprague gives her something murkier: maybe Scriabin was trying to reach creation, God, and the universe through sound. Then the sixth sonata enters, and the mood tightens. Its dissonance pushes the episode out of folklore and into the room, because even the people explaining it seem a little afraid of it. The question becomes motive. Was Scriabin confessing, exorcising, or trying to get rid of something he could not name any other way? Nobody lands the plane cleanly. That is where the episode has its bite, with Sprague's confidence rubbing against Alex's unease. Even the skepticism feels alive. The claim that Scriabin refused to play his own composition gives the discussion its sharpest turn. Music stops being mood and starts behaving like evidence. If a composition can express the soul, then refusing to return to it sounds less eccentric and more like self-protection. The trail is still unfinished. Keith Davich is absent, Percival Black does not answer, and Coralie Strand waits just ahead.

As heard by us

A music-centered mystery that keeps suspicion close.

The episode treats music as something with a shadow over it, folding in Scriabin, theosophy, and the old devil-at-the-crossroads myth to narrow the mystery into a stranger, more pointed shape.

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Why you'd press play

A devil-music detour that keeps the case in view.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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