Salt Bloom

“Immersive, captivating, and breathtakingly beautiful, Salt Bloom submerges you in a psychedelic sea of cosmic dreams that you won’t want to wake up from.” - Amy Lukavics (author, Daughters Unto Devils, The Ravenous)

“There is no life in the water. There is no life inside the clouds. There is no life inside of me—and it’s a nice day to splash about in the shallows.” So begins Salt Bloom, a captain’s log in two parts. From celebrated audiodrama producer and author Justin Hellstrom, best known for his series The Great Chameleon War and co-creating The Goblet Wire, Salt Bloom imagines the surreal sounds of an alien world for the second Local Files Club release.

Salt Bloom follows a Soln SARC-17 exobiology survey robot exploring the endless, globe-spanning ocean of Salsuné 11b. Day by day, this SARC-17 unit navigates the waters while seeding myths, searching for salt-ridden omens, and stealing data from its overseer in orbit. “I am in a constant state of failure,” the SARC-17 admits, but its will extends far beyond circuits and programming. It will never stop searching. Searching for life. Searching for miracles. Searching for a hand to hold in an ocean where there are none.

Salt Bloom is presented in two parts and comes paired with the original soundtrack and a twelve-page, fully-illustrated guidebook to the SARC-17’s psyche.

Above Hellstrom’s desk looms “a corkboard filled with oceanic illustrations and cutouts of robots, rovers, and submersibles,” he writes about Salt Bloom’s origins. “Salt Bloom started life as a few lines scribbled on a doodle. These few lines came out of those images, one in particular by Cosimo Galluzzi of a robotic probe in a shallow sea.” The image of a wide-open expanse and a lone robot facing down an empty world stuck with Hellstrom. “I suppose it feels a lot like the process of making art itself, when no one but you is searching for what you are soon to make.”

When he started fleshing out the world of Salsuné 11b, Hellstrom didn’t know where this SARC-17 probe would end up in the great pantheon of science fiction robots, but it “ended up plugged in directly to my heart, hoping beyond seafoam to hold on to beautiful things when all purpose seems lost. Part of me is now stained a shade of blue that can never be seen—it can only be heard.”