Flanorama
things made by Walter Scharold

Hi, again.

We've established that I make things. I also run 385 Productions, a game audio production company I founded in 2023, and I’m Head of Audio at Playnetic. Before that: Head of Audio at Play’n GO, Senior Sound Designer at IGT, Lead Audio Engineer at Disney Mobile, Notetracker at Activision, Audio Lead at LeapFrog in that order, but backwards.

Meanwhile, I spent 15 years (1999–2014) leading miRthkon, a chamber-core ensemble, while also sidemanning for several bands in Oakland’s avant-prog scene and collaborating with local artists across genres and media. In 2015, I produced and hosted a short-lived experimental podcast called Fine Just Fine.

During all that, I kept making other things and still do. But now I live in London.

What's a Flanorama?

It’s a portmanteau of flaneur* an aimless idler and panorama, a sweeping survey. One implies wandering, the other, a view of the entire landscape at once.

When no genre, medium, or discipline holds more weight than any other when they all offer the same potential for expression one's bearing becomes irrelevant. The only way forward is to drift. For better or worse, this has been the guiding principle of my work as much as aimlessness can be one.

This archive follows the same logic: built in real time, guided by whim, synchronicity, and whatever I happen to stumble across next. The process? Mostly just me opening old files and saying, “Oh yeah, that.”

The saving grace might be that with the right fancy web design, a vague air of intention, and enough postmodern jargon, even an archival process as aimless as the work it’s preserving can be spun as a grand curation project.

Of course, if it were actually that important, someone else would be doing this for me. But here we are.

*Hannah Arendt, in her introduction to Illuminations by Walter Benjamin, described the flaneur as the aimless idler who strolls “in studied contrast” to the hurried, purposeful crowd, to whom “things reveal themselves in their secret meaning.” The flaneur, she notes, does not march forward into the future but drifts through the wreckage of the past, gathering fragments before they’re lost to time.


Or, in my case, before they’re lost to whatever mislabeled hard drive they ended up on.