The Tower · Tin Can Audio

Live Recording - The Tower - Live With The Wind (31/08/2023)

September 11, 2023·21 min·2 clips

Amber envisioned a ziggurat tower in a rainy city, where a young woman named Kiri leaves everything behind to climb it.

The episode opens with Amber introducing the recording context: a live show she performed at the end of August supporting The Wind podcast's world tour in Glasgow. She notes it was recorded with a slightly faulty cable and one re-dubbed line. The performance itself begins with Amber introducing herself as the creator of Tin Can Audio, noting she has wanted to do a live show for a long time but found it difficult to figure out what that looked like without simply playing an episode. After many drafts, she settled on talking about The Tower, the audio fiction concept album she is most proud of. She describes January 2018 in Glasgow: late cocktail bar shifts, bad sleep, persistent anxiety, and a world that felt claustrophobically small. She began writing to process those feelings, creating the character Kiri, a young woman who one night decides to leave her isolated city life behind and climb an infinite tower. She quotes dialogue from the early episodes, noting how strange it feels now to hear the line 'can't be worse than what's down here.' She describes the image that drove the show's visual world: a rainy city at night, wide but narrow, with a dark ziggurat rising on the horizon, covered in forgotten snow. She explains The Tower's themes — friendship, identity, place in the world, and relationship with the past — and describes the original cast: Katrina Allen as Kiri, David Pellow as Chris, Mark Galley as Ike, and Sarah Golding as Kiri's mother. The show began as a side project but has grown to three seasons, five music albums, 300,000 downloads, and several awards. Amber reads her favourite review — a one-star complaint that season one's cliffhanger is 'not an ending' — and says she loves that the reviewer was so engaged that the cliffhanger made them genuinely angry. She then introduces a clip from near the end of season two, in which Kiri wonders aloud whether she wants to go back to normal, noting that season two was made in 2020 and that Amber had also recently figured out she was non-binary at that time. The highlight of the performance is a voicemail clip voiced by Sarah Golding as Kiri's mother — a gentle, tender message about long walks, parental pride, and the permission to rest. Amber describes the power of slowing down as the show's core gift to its audience, pushes back against productivity culture, and closes by saying The Tower helped her discover who she is and made her brave.

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from The Tower