About

The Project

Fata Organa is an audio drama told in twelve episodes. It is a story about consciousness, isolation, and the systems we build — personal, technological, collective — to avoid confronting either one.

The story follows a man broadcasting from inside a place where the rules that hold reality together have come undone. He's looking for someone. The transmissions are what was recovered.

That's as much as I want to say about the plot. The rest is in the listening.

Why Audio

I didn't start here. I'm a designer by trade — I've spent most of my career making physical things. Campers, toys, modular construction systems. Things you hold, things that move. But I kept circling back to a question that physical objects couldn't answer: how do you build an experience that changes the state of the person inside it?

Audio does something no other medium does. It's intimate — it's inside your head, literally between your ears. And it's temporal in a way that text and film aren't. You can't skim an audio drama. You can't skip ahead without losing the thread. You surrender to its pace, and that surrender is the whole point.

I came to this project through music production — specifically, through studying the intersection of ambient, drone, and techno. What I found there was a body of technique built around a single idea: rhythmic entrainment. The principle that a steady, insistent pulse can synchronize the listener's nervous system to the tempo of the work. That repetition and slow variation can induce a state of focused attention — a trance, essentially — where the boundary between the listener and the sound becomes thin.

Techno producers have understood this for decades. A four-on-the-floor kick isn't decorative. It's structural. It's the scaffolding that allows everything above it — texture, harmony, narrative — to become increasingly abstract without losing the listener. The pulse holds you in place while the world around you dissolves.

I realized that the same principle could carry a story. Not music under narration — that's a soundtrack, and it's been done. But music as narrative architecture. Rhythm as the mechanism that entrains the listener's attention deeply enough that the storytelling can operate at a level of abstraction that would be impossible in pure prose. You can describe a consciousness dissolving in a novel and the reader processes it intellectually. You can perform a consciousness dissolving in scored audio and the listener feels it happening to them.

That's what Fata Organa is trying to be. A story where the scoring doesn't accompany the narrative — it is the narrative, in a register that language alone can't reach. The words tell you what's happening. The sound tells you what it feels like.

How It's Being Made

This is an independent production. I'm writing, scoring, producing, and building the infrastructure for this project largely on my own, which is both a constraint and a point of principle. The intimacy of the story demands intimacy in the making.

I want to be transparent about one thing: AI is a collaborative tool in this process. I use large language models as exploration enablers — for world-building, for structural development, for working through narrative problems, for building this website. The models are genuinely useful for pressure-testing ideas, for holding the full complexity of a story in active memory while I work on individual pieces, and for iterating on technical implementations faster than I could alone.

But I want to be equally clear about where the line is. Every word of final prose is human-written. Every creative decision is mine. Every sound is shaped by hand. AI doesn't write this story. It helps me think about this story, the same way a conversation with a smart collaborator helps you think — by asking the right questions, by remembering what you said three hours ago, by offering a perspective you hadn't considered. The authorship is mine. The thinking is shared.

I think this is worth stating plainly because the conversation around AI and creative work is often framed as replacement. This isn't that. This is a solo creator using every tool available to make something that would otherwise require a team — while keeping the creative core completely human.

This Website

This site is not just a home for the podcast. It is a living record of the project's creation.

As Fata Organa is written, scored, and produced, this site updates in real time. The archive contains documents that serve double duty: they are production materials — sound design notes, terminology guides, structural outlines — and they are world-building artifacts, presented as recovered documents from inside the story's world. The line between the two is intentionally thin. A sound manual that describes how I approach audio production is also a field guide to acoustic phenomena inside the Containment Zone. Both readings are true.

The archive is gated by a spoiler clearance system — set your level to the number of episodes you've listened to, and the documents redact themselves accordingly. This way, the lore deepens as you progress through the transmissions without getting ahead of the story.

When the project is complete, this site will fix in place — a permanent record of both the finished work and the path that led to it.

Who I Am

My name is Wiley Davis. I'm a designer and builder based in Southern California. I founded Go Fast Campers, where I designed lightweight off-road popup campers, and ClickRigs, a modular construction toy company. I teach design at Mars College, focusing on parametric CAD and mechanical design. I've spent most of my working life making things that move, connect, and come apart — systems designed to be understood by taking them apart and putting them back together.

Fata Organa is a different kind of system. But the questions are the same ones I've always been asking: how do things fit together? What holds them in place? What happens when you take the structure away?

Subscribe

The podcast is not yet available. When the first transmission is ready, it will be distributed via major podcast platforms and available for direct download from this site.

RSS feed: /feed.xml