White Tapes and Bad Sound: Noise and Monstrous Forms in Video Palace (Ben Rock, 2018)

Video Palace (Ben Rock, 2018) is an intriguing text through which to investigate the relationship between noise and material form, as the presence, texture, and physicality of its monsters are presented through sound alone. Instead of being framed as obstructive “bad” noises, this chapter will examine how distortion, glitches, and interference are utilised in Video Palace to assist the audience in their visualisation of monstrosity and examine how the podcast pushes its diegetic recording technology to the point of (faux) breakdown to suggest at physical forms that cannot be contained by the audio medium.

This chapter will argue that Video Palace is a podcast that is representative of a new and innovative subgenre of audio horror that is connected to, but distinct from, found footage horror cinema, which similarly uses glitches and distortion as a visual aesthetic added in post-production to imply manifestations of monstrosity. Similarly, the noises of Video Palace are manufactured for this effect. In including them, Video Palace encourages a form of active listening – recreating the active viewing of the found footage horror spectator, during which they are encouraged to closely investigate the screen and attempt to see beyond distortion – on an audio level.

Through noise, Video Palace creates monsters that straddle a spectral past full of fading memories of VHS rental stores and the more ephemeral technologies of our current cultural moment. As such, this chapter will connect the podcast to a more “authentic” analogue past, while showing how it uses noise to comment upon the conditions of digital recordings.