FAT CATS

Audio drama auteur Tom Lopez, the award-winning proprietor of ZBS, enjoys cult status among aging hippies and their spiritual heirs. His plays feature meticulous production; low humor; childlike--and often downright childish--themes, plots and dialogue; nearly wall-to-wall musical underscoring; imaginative juxtapositions of time, space, reality and illusion; cartoony acting; and the influence of New Age mysticism, underground comix [sic], pulp fiction and Lopez's erotic fantasies. FAT CATS is no exception. It concerns a housepainter, a lover of cheap detective novels, who comes to investigate the murder of a playboy millionaire. It is a "binaural" recording; if you wear earphones, you can hear not only left and right, as in conventional stereo, but up and down, forward and back. Without earphones, everything sounds distant. Y.R. © AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine [Published: OCT/NOV 00]