Courtesy Sienna Luna
Audio drama Eminent Domain features work by Santa Fe artist Sienna Luna.
Imagine you’re minding your own business, working late nights at your futuristic car company when, suddenly, you’re thrust into a world of ghosts and conspiracies and hostile ranch owners. That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Eminent Domain, a new chapter-based audio drama produced entirely within Northern New Mexico and culled from state lore. It also might just be your next obsessive listening binge.
Eminent Domain follows Loretta Pacheco (voiced by Ama Zathura), a brilliant sound engineer for a fictional Tesla-like car company pumping out smart cars—like, really smart cars—that talk to drivers. She is working late hours at a mysterious subterranean facility someplace within Santa Fe County when a near-fatal car crash pulls Loretta into a decades-old missing teenagers mystery for which the answers hit closer to home than she, or the listener, might expect.
“I always wanted to write something ‘New Mexican’ my whole life,” says co-writer Victoriano “Tori” Cárdenas. “Breaking Bad didn’t have a lot of the quirky things that are a part of our culture, it’s just set here. We wanted to produce something more representative of the people living in the region. I wanted to reach out to New Mexico kids like me.”
For creator, co-writer, director and co-executive producer Warren Langford, a self-described “man of every hat” and native New Mexican, the project has been more than a decade and a half in the making.
“In 2005, I had this dream of three young boys playing on the side of a highway. Under a tree, they found a weird device sticking out of the ground, and that’s all the dream was,” Langford says. “So, when I moved back to Santa Fe [in 2017], I was working for Meow Wolf. That’s when I started thinking about this a little more.”
As the idea for Eminent Domain’s otherworldly sci-fi and horror experience began to come together, Langford locked himself in a room with longtime friend Michael Martinez. They delved deep into world-building together, spending days nerding out about scientific specifics and the intricacies of the evolving narrative, right down to the fictional vehicle’s sound engineering; the entire project was mapped out in a week.
“A couple of months after that he took his own life,” Langford tells SFR. “He was dealing with a lot, so the project was put on hold. But one of the last things he told me was how much he loved the story, and how much he loved working on it. He brought so much brilliance that I couldn’t abandon it.”
And what better to get a project moving again than a pandemic? As with many of us, 2020 offered a bit of extra time, particularly for Langford, who was laid off from his senior producer of narrative audio job at Meow Wolf. About a year earlier, he’d discovered Cárdenas online and hired him to help flesh out Eminent Domain, and together they set about making it as New Mexico-centric as possible. But don’t expect long monologues about adobe, green chile or other surface level New Mexico ephemera. Instead, Langford and Cárdenas were drawn to deeper ideas, like folklore and localized sayings. They pulled from their own personal experiences, too, including Cárdenas’ life growing up in Taos and Albuquerque.
“[Warren and I] were both on the same page of wanting the characters to be New Mexican, and not just actors pretending,” Cárdenas says. “You can tell in the final product, too. When I moved from Taos to Albuquerque for the creative writing and history program [at UNM], I’d raise my hand and answer with that Norteño accent—and I’d feel so differentiated by that. That’s a reality we really wanted to portray.”
Such steps are no more evident than in Zathura’s performance as Loretta, one intricate enough to connote different speaking styles between, say, friends or more professional relationships—or a budding relationship portrayed by lovable voice actor Antonio Marquez. Elsewhere, notable New Mexicans like comedian Carlos Medina, performer Rod Harrison and Shit Burqueños Say creator Lauren Poole add depth and authenticity; outside of its genre elements, Eminent Domain sounds like we’re eavesdropping on any given Northern New Mexico conversation.
The production itself went well beyond casting locals, too, with Langford choosing to record on location and in binaural audio—a first for an audio drama as far as he knows. Foley and sound effects were done live on location by the actors, and the production adopted a stringent no-script policy during recording sessions.
“There’s always this thing [in audio dramas] where the actors are disjointed because they walk into the studio and act on the spot. It’s a disconnect, and it really comes across,” Langford explains. “Ama memorized over 200 pages of this script, like memorizing an entire season of a TV show.”
Production for Eminent Domain also included everything you might imagine on a movie set (minus, you know, the visual stuff), including adherence to Screen Actors Guild guidelines, rigidly enforced COVID-19 safety protocols and minimal on-set personnel. Langford also enlisted his brother Evan for help with recording and mixing duties, as well as recordist Georgina Hahn—and there’s a reason they suggest listening to Eminent Domain with headphones for a stronger audio experience: Even those uninitiated in the alchemy of audio will find themselves impressed by its level of auditory immersion and innovation.
The protocols, the cold winter months and the unknown variables paid off—Eminent Domain caught Audible’s attention early in its production, and the online audio mega-brand will release the full project to the public on Thursday, Nov. 4. Perhaps even better, Langford and crew will debut a special preview at the Jean Cocteau Cinema this Saturday, much of which will play out in darkness.
“It’ll be the first 40 minutes, sort of an experimental thing,” says Langford. “From that point on it’ll be all about getting the word out.”
Eminent Domain Release Party: 7 pm Saturday, Nov. 6. Free. Jean Cocteau Cinema, 418 Montezuma Ave., (505) 466-5528, bit.ly/3GMN4ag
