BRASS: The Company We Keep!

The narrator for the most recent episode of BRASS Stacks is Seattle favorite Nikki Visel. Originally from Michigan, Visel came to Seattle via Chicago to start a theater company focused on original work–and liked the city enough to stay when the company disbanded. She soon found herself with a regular berth at Taproot Theatre, one of the city’s premiere mid-size … Read More

From Page to Podcast: How We Make BRASS Stacks

While we complete edits on our new BRASS serial “The Devil in Whiechapel,” we’re adding a new podcast, BRASS Stacks, where great Victorian and Edwardian short stories are narrated by a rotating company of actors. (Check it out this week for a new short story by the astonishing Virginia Woolf.) Compared to the complexities and people needed to create our … Read More

Music from a Lost Empire: An Interview with Composer Benedict Edwards

From its earliest incarnations, BRASS has been fortunate to include the work of several contemporary composers, including Amanda Laven, Miriam Mayer and Cesar Belita, each of whom have brought a thrilling modern sensibility to the music and sounds of the 19th century. As we ready our new BRASS Serial “The Devil in Whitechapel” for release, we’re excited to announce our … Read More

BRASS Stacks 2: Tobermory by Saki

For our second BRASS Stacks, we are featuring one of the greatest short story writers of the pre-War years, H.H. Munro, who wrote as Saki. This brilliant journalist-turned-short story writer was one of the great wits of the Edwardian age. Orphaned at age 2, Munro was raised by his grandmother and a household of puritanical aunts. (In both his comic … Read More

Back in the Stacks

Even more than Victorian history, the world of BRASS is inspired by the fiction of the 19th and early 20th century. Literary creations like the Phantom of the Opera and Sherlock Holmes rub shoulders with Tesla and Oscar Wilde in our story, creating a mash-up of fiction, history and alternative history which samples from each. This period was the flowering … Read More

Is This The End of Our Heroes?

Season Two of BRASS, like Season One, ends on a cliffhanger, as despite the heroic efforts of the family and their allies Ponder Wright and Lord Whitestone, the Crime Minister’s plans are carried through to their cataclysmic conclusion. How could the Brass family possibly survive such destruction? One of the primary inspirations of BRASS were the classic radio adventure serials … Read More

BRASS at Brass Screw!

We were honored to again be invited to give a BRASS presentation at the Brass Screw Confederacy. Held in beautiful Port Townsend, one of the few extant Victorian ports in the world, it’s a long weekend of performers, panels, music acts, carnival acts, and a lot of convivial activities. From its beginnings seven years ago the Brass Screw has been … Read More

Steampunk Primer: Why Dirigibles, Anyway?

One of the iconic images of Steampunk is the dirigible airship, either rigid (a zeppelin), rounded (a blimp) or some imaginative variant. Along with top hats and corsets, these inflatable aircraft are part of the basic vocabulary of alternative 19th centuries—and that includes in BRASS, where the family returns to London in Episode 1 aboard such a ship, and are … Read More