Like so many of us, Josh Mattison’s introduction to audio storytelling was This American Life. (“The most cliché thing in the universe,” he says now, but hey, clichés exist for a reason.) 

Josh was already studying graphic design at the time, so that’s what he pursued professionally, but the idea of playing around in audio stuck with him until a friend asked him to help make a show called Bad or Not Bad?, which involved a panel rating various pop cultural artifacts every week. Josh learned enough from that experience to start a show of his own, The Revisitors, which had him and a friend pairing and reviewing albums and movies from the 70’s and 80’s. 

Then Josh decided he was ready to try something different from the chat format, and launched Low Orbit, which he describes as a “collaborative audio magazine.” Low Orbit was recently on hold for a few years while Josh dealt with burnout, but he’s re-launching the podcast later this year. So we talked to him about how to find the right collaborators, making a production-intensive pod, and what to do when your passion project starts bumming you out. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I know you picked up a lot of your audio skills in the field, but I’m curious about how you taught yourself sound design. 

I was still doing graphic design at the time, so I had the Adobe Suite, like the whole thing. And Adobe Audition is just sitting there. Luckily, Adobe's programs, they all work on relatively the same visual, so if you do Photoshop, you can pick up Illustrator pretty easily, and so on. So I started messing around with Audition, and watching YouTube videos and seeing how it all worked. 

I had this idea of starting a Wikipedia podcast, where I would just read a Wikipedia article and then sound design it and score it. I started making that, and that was a way to practice what the levels need to be, and what sounds good and what doesn't. Even what music sounds hopeful and upbeat, and what music sounds introspective or whatever, you know what I mean? 

Then, once you were ready to make Low Orbit, how did you start finding contributors for the show?

Being in graphic design was pretty helpful for that. I also worked at the front desk of the Museum of Contemporary Art here in Denver, and I used to work in a record store and used to be in bands. And so it was like, well, I know all these people, and they're all doing something interesting. If I just put a microphone in front of them and record what they're saying—like, one was just a guy who loved Norwegian black metal. That was his whole thing. And so I let him talk about it for an hour and then cut it down to, I don't know, 20 minutes or something like that, with a lot of Norwegian black metal piled on there to give it a lot of body. 

I called out on Facebook, hey, did you write something you want to share? There’s a lot of people in the writing community here. It was a, one-person-turns-into-three-people-turns-into-five-people kind of thing, you know? It wasn't super difficult at the very beginning, partly because I already had this connection with the creative community here. But it isn’t always easy. There aren’t necessarily people knocking down my door. 

I really wanted it to be like a zine. I didn't want it to be the kind of thing where you can submit something and if I decide it sounds okay. It was more like, "We're all making a thing." I was much more interested in having a diversity of content, and a diversity of people making that content.

But then you already had a built-in community of listeners, because people wanted to hear themselves, and probably wanted their friends and family to hear their stuff, too. How else did you build a listener base?

I did all the things you're supposed to do: I started a Facebook page for it. I got on Twitter, which I'm no longer on. I got an Instagram and then I was like, what the hell do you put on a podcast’s Instagram? For a long time I’ve been saving up goofy old comic book images and weird advertisements; I have folders full of this stuff from my graphic design days. And I was like, well, I'll just put a couple of those up every day and keep the feed going. But I noticed that social media doesn't drive people to a podcast. And I think that's pretty true across the board. It's really word of mouth that got it to where it was. 

Right after I started, one of our local alt weeklies called it the best podcast in Denver, which helped a lot. And then the publication Bailout Collective called it one of the best examples of “slow radio.” I didn't even know what that was at the time. Those things grew it more than anything I put on Facebook or Instagram.

Low Orbit was always going to be kind of niche. The stories aren't the standard stuff you're going to hear on most podcasts, and the interviews are done in a way that's a little bit different. The audience is self-selecting; it's going to be a lot smaller. But I think that's okay. 

It took me a while to come to that feeling. But I think there should be alternative stuff that maybe isn't getting hundreds of thousands or millions of listeners. I think it's okay for there to be smaller, niche things.

When you have someone else recording themselves for the show, what does that look like from a tech standpoint?

Ideally they just come here [to my house]. I have sound-baffling panels all over this room. It’s not perfectly treated, but it's 70, 80% of the way there. 

I have a lot of field equipment, because one of the things I do for money is tape syncs, which is just recording one end of the conversation. So I can go to where people are and record them out in the street as well. 

For the home studio, I use the Shure SM58, which is the standard stage mic, the one that's like, indestructible. You can throw it around; it sounds good, but it's not the SM7B. It’s not quite as rich of a sound. 

I record right into a Focusrite. I used to use a big soundboard, but I could never get it to sound right, and I think that's ‘cause they're all sort of cheaply made. So finally I broke down and bought the Focusrite. That’s how I record at home, just directly into Audition. It makes the track and I can edit straight out of there. 

I do use Descript. That's how I edit, is picking out all the best quotes in Descript and then doing the editing. I don't use Descript necessarily to do all the sound design and scoring. 

The field kit is a Zoom H5, an Audio Technica shotgun mic, and headphones. It’s all just kind of middle of the road gear, middle of the road stuff. 

I feel like that’s exactly the point of this series, though—to be like, you don’t have to spend zillions of dollars or book studio time to make something that sounds really good, and sophisticated, and well-made.

Roman Mars talks about how when he started, he would just get right up to his mic, ‘cause he didn't really know what he was doing. So he would just put his mic a few inches away from his mouth to get that rich sound, you know how his voice has that beautiful baritone? I saw him talk once, I think at Third Coast, and he said, “Yeah, I used to practically eat the mic. That’s what I used to do just to get that half decent sound out of it.” 

That's it to me. If it sounds good enough, it's good enough. There is that NPR quality where it's like—especially during the pandemic, they were all in their closets and they had like, clothes on top of them and all that, to try and recreate that crisp, perfect studio sound. I don't care so much about that. And I don't know that the audience does that much, either.

What were some other resources you used to help you learn how to make the show?

There was this organization called Third Coast Audio International, and part of what they did was have seminars. Part of it was networking, but a lot of it was just listening to people talk about how they made things. They put that out as a podcast, so you could listen to those sessions. 

There’s a site called NPR Training. That has a bunch of information about how to make audio—the really basic, like, how do you get it from this to something that people are listening to on the other end? There’s a book called Out On the Wire; it's a graphic novel about how to make podcasts, which is really good. 

Your voice is very rarely on Low Orbit. Why did you decide to do it that way?

When I first started Low Orbit, I wouldn’t even mic myself for interviews. I was afraid of my voice on tape. That was ‘cause I don't know how to write narration. I was running away from it. 

And so I accidentally started making what's called "slow radio.” They do that a lot at the BBC, and for Australian broadcasting, too: these non-narrated interviews, where it’s just the person being interviewed who’s speaking. I accidentally did it, ‘cause I was so afraid of writing narration tape. 

When I made The Order of Death [Mattison’s show about a Denver talk show host who was murdered by a white supremacist group], that's a standard documentary style: interviews interspersed with narration. I was like, well, this is how I'm going to do it, because this is how the pros do it.

Then I started doing that on Low Orbit. The second half of Low Orbit is really much more that style.  And then I got tired of it. I got tired of listening to it. I got tired of making it. 

So when I start Low Orbit again, I'm probably not going to do a lot of that. I'm going to go back to that slow radio style. It feels more natural for the show to have people presented that way. 

As I start making it again, I'd like to use much more experimental techniques like that. I don't hear a lot of that out there right now. There used to be some podcasts, even from bigger places, that made that kind of radio, but in the narrative audio apocalypse that we're living in right now, most of those are gone. I want to start making it partly because there is a vacuum there, right? Like, there is like a space for something like that to exist.  So I'm going to get back to making kind of much weirder stuff. 

Have you ever tried to monetize the show?

I had a Kofi thing set up for a little while. I've never really done Patreon, partly 'cause I'm resistant to making something else. It takes a lot of effort to put one of these together, even just one episode, so to do gifts and things, I don't know if I have the time. 

The other thing is that this show is designed to sound a very specific way, and ads would kill it. I hate to say that; it sounds pretentious. But ads would kill it. It would make it sound like a podcast. I want it to sound like a magazine.  

How many hours does it take you to put an episode together?

I try not to think about it too much. It would definitely take a full 40 hours, at least, to put together a 25, 35 minute episode. Sometimes a little longer, but yeah, somewhere around there.

When did you realize that you were burned out, and how did you decide to pause the show?

A friend of mine who’s a playwright, she kept a diary during Covid. And she pitched the idea to me of her interviewing her family members and then reading her diary excerpts, and pairing those two together. 

We couldn't do anything together for the longest time, because—you know how it was, you remember. We had to meet in a park for me to give her the equipment to record her family. You put it down on the grass and backed away slowly. Everybody's wearing masks and gloves. 

It was a five episode mini-series, 30 to 40 minutes each episode. So it was a pretty big undertaking. And the audience for it just wasn't there. Maybe it was the timing. I put it out in the summer of 2021, I want to say, and I think the timing was off. People didn't want to think about Covid. Everybody was like, I'm done. 

And so no matter how beautifully crafted this thing was, it just didn't go anywhere.The audience was even below my usual numbers, and I was like, what the fuck am I doing this for? This is so frustrating.

I needed a break. Part of the reason I was doing this was because I wanted other people's work to be heard, and it felt like that wasn't happening. It didn’t feel good anymore.

And then recently a friend of mine, a guy who owns a graphic design and printing studio, was like, I'm opening up a little annex. I want it to be a live space for shows like your show, if you wanted to get back into it. And then another friend of mine was like, Denver needs this. You need to start making this again. It really was just people saying, "you should make this again." That’s how I broke the funk. 

Before that, though, there was a real genuine moment of, of like, I have all this stuff, right? I have microphones, I have field equipment. Am I just going to stop making audio entirely? It feels like I’m giving up. 

I think it's similar to people who write or paint: it's like, I don't have a gallery show, or I've sent out a thousand manuscripts and nobody wants them. It’s a real existential crisis. Do I make the art thing or do I stop making the art thing? Fully acknowledging that there won't really be any money in it. 

I decided to keep going anyway. 

Man, that is very, very real. I feel like we’re all supposed to be too pure to care if anyone likes what we make, but if you’re making something that’s important to you—that you pour hours of your life into—how can you not?

It feels personal when it doesn't fall the way it should. And also, we live in a world that rewards engagement with money. It’s hard not to think that way.

I had to think a lot about where I came from, as a drummer in punk rock bands in the nineties, playing little shitholes somewhere. You don't get any money for that. You get a cut of the door and you get three PBRs.

But we didn't do it because we were looking to get popular. We just did it ‘cause we wanted to do it.