A crow, a murder, and a man who fell.
Atoms, Motion and the Void is first-person audio fiction made of long, winding sentences that can swing from comedy to melancholy within a paragraph. In one chaptered story a crow narrates from a murder scene, and other episodes visit shop shelves, blackbirds and a man known mainly for falling out of an airliner.
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Atoms, Motion and the Void is audio fiction in the old-time radio style, told in the first person by narrators who cannot resist a detour. The show's description names its central storyteller as Sherwin Sleeves. What a listener gets, above all, is prose. Sentences stack clause on clause, veer into memory and then settle on a dry little joke, and even the show's opening line hedges: one episode tells the audience it is listening, mostly, to the show. The serial One Fell Swoop, whose episodes include 'One Fell Swoop - Chapters 1 through 4' and 'One Fell Swoop - Chapters 5 - 8.', shows the range best. Its narrator is a crow. The story says it starts with murder, then lingers on a red-haired woman named Miriam Letzke lying on a blood-soaked rug. The crow drops a golden ball to a master criminal named Edward Ashbery and finds him, against expectation, gentle at the level of his bones. A monster under the bed speaks in an earthquake voice. Officers mutter in a hallway without announcing themselves, unlike the inspectors the crow cites, who say such things every episode. Meanwhile the bird helps an ailing Lady Regina with her sandals. It is eerie, funny and oddly kind, often in the same breath. The other episodes take the same voice to stranger places. 'AMV#60 - The Secret of the Admirals' is about Barnaby James, known chiefly for being sucked out of an airliner in 1979, and a trial at which a man named Charles Ledyard lists his failures: two ice-cream shops, certifications in plumbing and golf-course design, and a heap of spy novels no publisher would take. 'This is a man who has tried and failed at everything, even dying,' Ledyard says. In 'AMV#61 - Run Rest Run Rest Run', a narrator waiting for his well to refill searches grocery shelves for a need he cannot recall, then whistles blackbird calls back at the birds and chases them through forest and field. 'AMV#62 - The Aglet of Overton' includes a note about Sean, described as the narrator's valet and secretary who also helps record and edit. After years of asking, Sean has finally talked his way into the series. Nostalgia is a steady undertow: an antique Coca-Cola machine, packaging that once carried illustrated human faces, and an unbroken torrent about the days before the moon landing, when a person's job could be smelled on them. The audience gets a part too. 'AMV#59 - Persons of the Irritable Persuasion' takes up an audio question from a listener named Parkman and invites questions, riddles, gossip and theories by email, voice recording or letter, with prizes the show itself rates as substantially average to subpar. For a first listen, the crow serial suits anyone who wants a plot to hold onto, while the Barnaby James episode shows the deadpan comedy at full stretch.
Made for: Suits a listener who enjoys voice-driven literary audio fiction, likes a joke tucked inside a long winding sentence, and is happy to follow a story from a crime scene to a grocery aisle.
What sets it apart: It borrows the frame of old-time radio but fills it with prose that reads like literary fiction: run-on reveries, deadpan understatement, and narrators as unlikely as a crow at a crime scene.
Voted Best Podcast by New Hampshire Magazine, AMV is a fictional, first person "old time" radio program. From his cabin on Marked Mountain in Lemon, New Hampshire, Sherwin Sleeves recounts his most recent curious adventures. Sherwin also hosts a weekly live program - The Radio Ghost - which episodes will also appear in this stream.
A crow investigates a murder, and your usual detective may suddenly seem short on feathers.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A blood-soaked apartment becomes the starting point for a crow's strange, watchful investigation.
A red-haired woman lies on a blood-soaked rug in a neat apartment, arranged with the eerie composure of a yoga class, while a crow studies the room around her.
A crow, a sickroom, and a one-eyed cat turn a silent police approach into a precarious escape.
One Fell Swoop makes a sickroom feel like a crooked little stage, with a crow facing the monster under the bed and finding a one-eyed cat keeping watch over Lady Regina.
A lonely burial job leads into old stores, local maps, cellar visions, and quietly dreamlike rural detail.
Sean's story starts with a plain setup: a man is paid to bury people who have no one else to do it. From there, Overton leans into older rural textures, with an old car, Carl and the oil stick, a tidy general store, maps pointing toward the quarry and lakes, and air crowded with…
A listener question becomes a pungent, unruly meditation on work, identity, danger, and the lives people carry in their smells.
Parkman's audio question nudges the host into a loose, sensory reflection on work, rough stretches, sanity, prizes, and the smells that seem to hold a person's whole life.
A snowbound gift exchange slips into dream logic, where poems, wood, and a strange object carry memory's weight.
A snowbound walk becomes an uncanny reflection on making, memory, and the pull that certain objects seem to acquire. The narrator moves through a blue cave of trees with a package for Henry Ronald Jones and a small wooden figure he has carved, expecting a telescope but finding…
Dice, divine mysteries, and the trouble with good intentions.
Atoms, Motion and the Void follows a raven detective through Miriam Letzke's murder, where a blood-soaked rug, two head wounds, a passport photocopy, and a wig all sit in the same apartment.
A crow named Alastair Smoke wakes under the bed at the Buttercup and learns that Lady Miriam and Lady Regina are tied to poisoned tea.
Sean drives a 1964 Volkswagen Beetlebug 900 miles into Canada with Dr.
The narrator finishes a shipwreck-island story and repairs a collapsing shed, then finds his mind blank in a grocery store.
Barnaby James falls 35,000 feet from Flight 19 in 1979 after mistaking its rear cabin door for the Admiral's Lounge.
Parkman writes from an upstate New York park where he now tests lake ice in a red waterproof jumpsuit, checks for six-inch thickness, and yells at visitors who ignore the warning signs.
An unnamed narrator turns a snowbound walk in Atoms, Motion and the Void into a meditation on a diamond ring, a rusted metal car, and a whittled wooden figure on a windowsill.
The narrator introduces Montminy through Lemmon, Road Lane, and a quarter-mile path whose crooked gaps may resemble the narrator’s own identity.
Sherwin Sleeves recounts his postcard parade and the town's reaction in a fictional old-time radio style.
Sherwin Sleeves introduces a metaphysical murder mystery involving a local eccentric named Russ Taylor and his whippoorwilds.
A fictional old-time radio show featuring a series of vignettes about man's subjugation to external forces, with magical assistants.
A fictional old-time radio show featuring Sherwin Sleeves recounting curious adventures, with a sample episode blending a Nancy Drew mystery and a bog description.