Islington. Spring, 1996. An estate sale. A cardboard box with a handwritten label: Victor Sable. Pandaemonium Records. Paris.
In the first episode of her investigation, audio engineer Mara Voss introduces the find: seven LPs, fourteen microcassette tapes, press clippings, and correspondence fragments. Eleven pounds. She outlines what she knows from the press materials — the 1974 Record Mirror photograph, the Cabaret des Oiseaux Noirs, the Pandaemonium Records imprint — and plays The Projectionist, the opening track from Lichtspiel Vol. I: Weimar Shadows, for the first time.
She also plays the first cassette tape. Viktor's voice. Private. Recorded in his apartment on the Rue des Ombres sometime in the early seventies. He describes arriving in Paris, the dinner with Cornelius Ash, the contract he signed, having read twenty-two of its forty-one pages. The wine, which was exactly right. The piano in his apartment, tuned to a pitch he would not have specified himself and could not fault. The first song, which arrived on the third morning, complete — all of it, all at once, already under his hands.
He says: The work began with uncanny ease.
At the close of the episode, Mara notes that she cannot locate Pandaemonium Records in any public registry. She attributes this to label consolidation.
She is professionally satisfied with this explanation.
She should not be.
The Strange Case of Victor Sable is an investigative audio documentary following audio engineer Mara Voss as she reconstructs the life, disappearance, and possible continued existence of cult dark cabaret artist Victor Sable.