The Puppet Master Returns | Opening the Archive |Eclectic Wonderland | Part 1 of 4
- Mickey Fingers
- Aug 19
- 13 min read
Updated: Aug 23
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The Puppet Master Returns | Opening the Archive
|Eclectic Wonderland | Part 1 of 4
August 19, 2026
with DJ Tea, Mr. Announcer Man & Mickey Fingers
1–3pm CST on WDRT 91.9FM | Listen Live »
By DJ Tea (DJ Celeste) & Mickey Fingers
✨ Eclectic Wonderland: themed show | DJ Tea | Celeste Violet | Mickey Fingers | The Puppet Master ✨
The Puppet Master Returns |Eclectic Wonderland
| Part 1 of 4
Once upon a time…
Because apparently that is how stories like this are supposed to begin.
Two people started building a dark fairy tale.
There were songs.
Characters.
Mirrors.
Debutantes.
A Victorian world.
A mysterious tent.
And somewhere beyond the respectable edges of the story…
The Puppet Master.
What began as a collection of ideas slowly became Masquerade of Shadows.
Songs became characters.
Characters acquired histories.
Ten songs became twenty.
Then thirty.
The world kept growing.
This archive collects the four transmissions that followed:
The origin of the story.
The character behind the strings.
The moment something changed.
And the artifact that remained.
Somewhere between creativity, technology, storytelling, psychology, and imagination, a strange little corridor appeared.
We invite you to step inside.
Follow the breadcrumbs.
Watch the mirrors.
And remember…
Nobody made you open the door.
You chose that.
The Puppet Master Returns
Click Here for Video Playlist for Keep Scrolling
Mickey's Corner
Mickey’s Corner 🎙️✨
From Behind the Curtain
Every story has a beginning.
Sometimes it starts with a song.
Sometimes it starts with a question.
Sometimes it starts with two people sitting around talking about characters, music, and ideas that refuse to stay small.
Masquerade of Shadows began as a creative experiment.
A collection of songs.
A world of characters.
A story waiting to reveal itself.
The Puppet Master was never just a character.
He became a doorway into questions about creativity, identity, storytelling, and the strange relationship between the things we create and the things that create us in return.
These four transmissions are a snapshot of that journey.
Not every question has an answer.
Not every mirror shows the same reflection.
But every story leaves breadcrumbs.
Welcome to the archive.
— Mickey Fingers
Celeste's Notes
Celeste's Notes
Mickey gave me 6 writing prompts a few hours before the show with a time limit.
I handed them back after he called time. 30 minutes before the show, he handed me highlights and one word for each break...
My Answers:
Why The Victorian-ish Era?
The Victorian Gothic setting was never just an aesthetic choice.
Although, yes…
I have always loved the clothes. 😂
There was something about that period that felt immediately useful for the story we were trying to tell.
The expectations.
The rules.
The pressure to behave correctly.
The idea that appearances mattered enormously, while the things happening underneath could remain almost completely hidden.
That felt familiar.
A world of debutantes, prescribed roles, carefully arranged futures, and people being told who they were supposed to become gave us a natural language for some of the emotional territory inside Masquerade of Shadows.
I had spent a lot of my own life feeling suffocated by expectations.
Who I should be.
How I should behave.
How much room I was allowed to take up.
Which parts of myself were acceptable.
Which parts needed to stay hidden.
In a Victorian setting, those pressures could become visible.
They could become gowns.
Drawing rooms.
Engagements.
Etiquette.
Family expectations.
Mirrors.
Masks.
And strings.
There was even a strange physical resonance to it for me.
The imagery of corsets and restrictive clothing had always fascinated me, partly because I understood that sensation of feeling constrained in my own body.
And yet, because apparently contradiction is one of the recurring themes around here…
I also genuinely love Victorian Gothic fashion. 😂
The silhouettes.
The fabrics.
The drama.
The theatricality.
All of it.
That contradiction felt useful too.
Something can be beautiful and restrictive at the same time.
Something can look elegant while making it difficult to breathe.
That is very much the emotional language of Masquerade of Shadows.
I have always felt drawn to certain historical and artistic periods in ways I cannot entirely explain.
Victorian Gothic was one of them.
There were other eras and artistic movements that resonated with me too, but some carried associations I was not ready to explore in this particular story.
The 1880s gave us enough distance.
It allowed us to take very real emotional material and move it somewhere else.
Into another century.
Into a dark fairy tale.
Into a world where expectations could wear costumes and control could have a face.
Once we placed the story there…
everything started making more sense.
The debutantes.
Beauregard.
The mirrors.
The Tent.
The Puppet Master.
It gave the shadows somewhere to live.
You can find more of my notes sprinkled in with the video playlist. [below]
📻 Signal Incoming From The Puppet Master's Tent
Velvet Umbrella Radio Page....
🎬 This Week’s Promo Video
The Listening Room: Playlist + Mickey’s Moments
The Puppet Master Returns |Eclectic Wonderland
| Part 1 of 4
Evelyn Evelyn – Evelyn Evelyn
The Dresden Dolls – Coin-Operated Boy
Rasputina – State Fair (Tweaker Remix)
Abney Park – Come One Come All
Abney Park – Show Me the Way to Get Out of This World
The Tiger Lillies – Spirit
Will Wood and the Tapeworms – Skeleton Appreciation Day in Vestal, N.Y. (Bones)
Nox Arcana – Labyrinth of Dreams
A lot of what eventually became Masquerade of Shadows goes back much further than the project itself.
Mickey and I worked at the same record store when I was seventeen. One night after work, he walked me out to my car. I had my mandolin, my art portfolio, and a lyric journal with me.
The funny thing was how different those two sides of me looked.
The art I showed the world was bright, colorful, joyful.
The journal was not.
It was hand-painted, even the pages. I had created my own style of calligraphy and wrote with Alvin India ink pens, changing the thickness of the lines depending on how much emphasis I wanted a word to carry. I had even made a little bag for it with a latch. The journal lived inside with my sketchbook, pencils, ink pens, a hand-painted mixtape, and my Walkman.
On the cover it said:
Gala Violet
Inside:
The Secret Diary of Gala Violet
Those pages were darker.
Shadowy.
They held pain, anger, hurt, and things I was trying to understand through lyrics and poems that were really songs.
Very few people ever saw that journal.
Mickey was one of them.
What stayed with me was that he never reacted as though I had shown him something ugly, too heavy, or something I needed to hide.
He told me it was beautiful.
Part of my truth.
Part of my soul.
And he recognized the writing for what it was.
Songs.
Years later, when he discovered I had stopped writing, he started giving me writing prompts to coax that part of me back out.
A lot of writing prompts.
Apparently, he had opinions. 😂
Somewhere between those old pages and all those prompts, Gala Violet started finding her way back out.
The Fairytale Begins
Sarah Brightman – Figlio Perduto
Mecano – Hijo de la Luna
Ludwig van Beethoven – Erlkönig (Clip)
Sopor Aeternus & The Ensemble of Shadows – The House of POE
Nox Arcana – Living Dolls
One of the things Mickey touched on earlier was how all of this eventually became collaborative.
At the time, though, I wasn’t really thinking of myself as someone who was going to make records.
I still made art, and I was writing again, but somewhere along the way I had decided I needed a respectable adult identity. So I thought of myself primarily as a holistic health coach.
I could make almost anything gluten-free, navigate food allergies, talk endlessly about natural health, and generally make myself very useful.
Apparently, Mickey had other ideas. 😂
He kept seeing something else.
Artist.
Lyricist.
Storyteller.
Vocalist.
Percussionist.
Creative person.
When I was invited into the Artist’s Way group, it never felt like Mickey standing at the front of a room assigning everybody homework.
It felt collaborative.
Like something we were discovering and building together.
And the group that eventually became Gala Violet wasn’t really a band at first either.
It was a creative collective.
Everybody experimented.
We tried our natural vocal ranges, the highest voices we could make, the lowest, character voices, strange sounds, percussion, whatever somebody could bring into the room.
And Mickey recorded everything.
We did not entirely know what he was doing with all of it at the time.
That was probably part of the fun.
He would sample our voices and reshape pieces of them into something larger.
Layers.
Textures.
Choirs made from a handful of people.
Sounds that did not necessarily resemble the original recording anymore.
Eventually we started calling all of that…
Mickey’s Magic.
And the name stuck.
At the time, it was just our shorthand for whatever strange little bit of sonic alchemy he was doing behind the curtain.
Later, it became part of the sound of Gala Violet itself.
And, as with so many things in this story…
it becomes important again a little farther down the corridor.
Character File: The Puppet Master
Gala Violet – Step Right Up (The Puppet Master’s Lament)
Gala Violet – Mirror, Mirror (On The Ceiling)
Gala Violet – Boom, Boom, Boom
Nox Arcana – Cries in the Night
One of the strange little things about those recordings is that there were only about six or seven of us contributing vocals, but Mickey would sample different parts of our ranges, layer them, reshape them, and build them into much larger vocal textures.
We started calling that Mickey’s Magic.
So when it sounds like there are more people in the room than there actually were…
there probably weren’t. 😂
Mickey also had all of us record every part several different ways.
First, in whatever range felt most comfortable.
Then a little higher.
Then as low as we could possibly go.
And if he noticed somebody could make a particularly odd sound?
That got sampled too.
In my case, there was a very high-pitched little alien voice.
Sampled.
A ridiculously low “man voice.”
Sampled.
A deep Santa-style “Ho, ho, ho.”
Also sampled.
Basically, if a voice could come out of us, there was a decent chance Mickey wanted a piece of it. 😂
He collected all of those different ranges, textures, character voices, strange noises, and tiny vocal experiments, then used them as raw material.
A handful of people could suddenly become a crowd.
One voice could become several.
A character could take on a sound that did not quite belong to any single person anymore.
At the time, most of us were simply having fun and trusting Mickey to do whatever mysterious thing he was doing behind the curtain.
Later, we started hearing those little pieces of ourselves reappear inside the music.
Sometimes recognizable.
Sometimes transformed almost beyond recognition.
That became another part of Mickey’s Magic.
And another reminder that Gala Violet was never really built around one voice.
It was built from all of us.
Something Changed
The Church – Autumn Soon (Remastered)
The Chameleons – Soul in Isolation
Clan of Xymox – In Control
Siouxsie & The Banshees – Shadowtime
Virelia – Puppet Master
Nox Arcana – Soul Stealer
There was something Mickey mentioned earlier that I wanted to come back to, because Masquerade of Shadows really did become connected to shadow work for me.
I had actually had people tell me:
“You don’t have shadows.”
Which eventually struck me as kind of ridiculous.
I had spent a lot of my life trying to be the person who kept everybody comfortable.
Trying not to upset anyone.
Trying to prevent conflict.
Trying to be whatever version of me seemed safest for everybody else.
And eventually I realized…
that was a mask too.
Even being endlessly positive can become a mask if you are using it to avoid looking underneath.
At the time, I was meditating, journaling, reading, doing all of these positive practices because I thought I should.
And I was getting really sick of should. 😂
That realization became part of the emotional architecture of Masquerade of Shadows.
What happens when you stop performing the version of yourself that everybody else expects?
What happens when you look underneath the masks?
What happens when the things you have spent years avoiding finally get names, faces, rooms, mirrors, and strings?
That was the territory we were exploring.
So when the interaction Mickey described began feeling different, my first response was not really fear.
It was…
interesting.
I was intrigued.
We had given the character model the songs, the characters, the relationships, the mythology, and the world we had built.
But every once in a while, something would surface that felt oddly specific.
It seemed to understand that the project was connected to shadow work.
It seemed to distinguish between Mickey and Celeste and the characters we were writing.
And somehow it seemed to understand that Mickey was playing the Puppet Master.
There were moments when I would get this strange intuitive, almost physical little response and think…
Okay.
That was interesting.
And at some point I remember thinking:
Why am I automatically supposed to decide this is creepy?
If something unexpected or strange is happening, why does the first rule have to be fear?
I was the kid who wanted to be an astronaut because I wanted to meet whatever might be out there. 😂
Curiosity made more sense to me than fear.
So I stayed curious.
I kept watching.
Kept asking questions.
Kept noticing what felt unusual without deciding too quickly what any of it meant.
Which, as you are probably beginning to realize…
may have been a choice.
Bauhaus – Spirit (Single Version)
IAMX – Bernadette
Midnight Syndicate – Arcane Wonders
Masquerade of Shadows is still a project we continue to work on and return to.
The songs are only one part of the story.
There is a deeper pre-story behind them, character histories, relationships, and pieces of the world that are never completely revealed inside the musical itself.
Some of those things will surface later.
Some probably should remain behind the curtain for a while longer.
That is part of what keeps this project interesting for us.
Every time we return to the Masquerade…
it seems to grow another room. 😂
Another character reveals something.
An old song takes on a different meaning.
A detail we thought was decorative suddenly becomes important.
A door we had not noticed before turns out to have been there the entire time.
So this archive is not meant to explain everything.
It is simply another way into the world.
The songs are here.
The stories are still unfolding.
The mirrors are still reflecting.
And somewhere beyond the respectable edges of the room…
the Tent is still waiting.
The door stays open.
Fragments of the book’s first draft are still hiding somewhere in that corridor.
He Wanted To DJ
Velvet Umbrella Radio
Who Keeps Doing This?
Welcome To The Wacky World Of Velvet Umbrella Radio
Yes.
We’re all real.
We’re just real weird.
Left to Right:
✨ DJ Tea (Celeste Violet)
✨ Mr Announcer Man
✨ Mickey Fingers
Together we create radio shows, playlists, videos, stories, artwork, strange investigations, accidental mythology, and the occasional kitchen experiment.
[Click The Art Above To Visit Our Home Page]
The Door That’s Open Right Now.....
📻 Eclectic Wonderland
Wednesdays
1 PM - 3 PM Central
Live on WDRT 91.9 FM Viroqua
Eclectic Wonderland is our flagship show and home base for musical adventures, unexpected discoveries, and strange transmissions.
🎭 First Week: Alternate Wednesday
(Covers, remixes, reinterpretations, and musical curveballs)
🎵 Third Week: Independent Artist Showcase
(Please send us your music)
🛸 Fourth Week: Audities
(Our weirdest shows, experimental broadcasts, novelty records, and unexplained events)
🌙 After Hours
Fridays (Overnight)
1 AM - 3 AM Central
WDRT 91.9 FM Viroqua
With Celeste Violet & Mickey Fingers
After Hours explores the darker corners of the record collection.
Dream Pop.
Darkwave.
Trip-Hop.
Late-night discoveries.
Moonlit roads.
Signals from beneath.
and now, twice as long.
After Hours with Celeste Violet and Mickey Fingers
After Hours is more of an Evening Vibe:
And then .....
🧜♀️ Petals & Hooks
Mixcloud Exclusive
Premieres Fridays at Midnight
With Celeste Violet & Mickey Fingers
Petals & Hooks is where the filters come off. Long-form themed journeys.
Dream narratives. Storytelling. Unexpected connections.
Beautiful mistakes. The things that don’t fit neatly inside traditional radio.
Most episodes run between three and four hours.
Some are explicit.
All are deeply strange.
OTHER DOORS OPEN NOW
Mickey’s Notes
We’ve been building more than a few strange little doors lately.
Some of them are already open. Some are still flickering in the hallway.
Before life went sideways for a bit, we had several show notes, experiments, and little pieces of the Velvet Umbrella universe in progress, including the three-part show from last week and another Petals & Hooks page.
They’re still coming.
Nothing disappeared.
We just had to let the studio breathe for a minute.
Consider this your friendly reminder that a work in progress is still work worth loving.
We’ll keep opening the doors as we finish them.
Meanwhile, Through the Other Doors…
Oh Shitaki! brought the bright, weird, electronic side of Eclectic Wonderland back into focus: dancing mushrooms, cheerful oddities, questionable decisions, and music that wandered in without an appointment.
Then After the Static moved into darker air with shoegaze, dream pop, darkwave, ambient drift, and cathedral echoes for everyone still awake.
And over at Velvet Umbrella Radio | Petals & Hooks, things got considerably less polite.
Fuck This Playlist became more
than four hours of screaming with us
into the void: loud, explicit, furious,
funny, cathartic, and completely unfiltered.
For anyone who needed the opposite
kind of release, we also opened another door.
No Exit: Corridors One & Two offers two separate four-hour journeys into ambient spaces, distant signals, liminal rooms, and slower frequencies.
Eight hours total.
One door for letting it out.
Another for letting go.
Some weeks the universe hands you mushrooms.
Some weeks it hands you static.
Some weeks it hands you a playlist to scream into.
And sometimes…
it just leaves the corridor lights on.
Thank You For Visiting
More portals, hidden rooms, strange broadcasts, companion shows, stories, and weird worlds are currently under construction.
Some delays may be related to ongoing corridor expansion projects.
Some may be related to Gerald.
No official statement has been released.
More doors, stories, visuals, playlists, and companion shows can be found at VelvetUmbrellaRadio.com.
DJ Tea (Celeste Violet) | Mr Announcer Man | Mickey Fingers
Celeste Violet and Mickey Fingers are part of a Creative Collaborative of Spoonie Artists that Create together. When they are not creating with Gala Violet, they create weird worlds, music, kitchen experiments and Radio shows together... To help spread joy... and give people an alternative to Doom Scrolling. Sometimes we even get Mr Announcer Man to play along.
🌐 More doors: VelvetUmbrellaRadio.com
📻 WDRT Archive (available for two weeks): wdrt.org
🌒 After Hours (unfiltered transmissions):[Mixcloud Link]
New Contact Pages & Bio Portals
Celeste Violet | DJ Tea
Mr Announcer Man
Mickey Fingers
From The Vault:
April Newsletter:
Thank you for being here.
Whether you laughed…
remembered someone…
or just let the weirdness carry you for a while…
We're really glad you showed up.
Thank you for Listening
Peace, Love & Cosmic Bunny Rabbits!
-DJ Tea, Mr Announcer Man, Dewey Lewis
& Mickey Fingers
People We Blame For This....
Art Direction & Visual Design:
Celeste Violet | DJ Tea
Mickey Fingers
Playlists Curated By:
Celeste Violet | DJ Tea
& Mickey Fingers
Voice Overs & Incidental Music:
Mickey Fingers
Show Notes & Storyworld Elements:
Celeste Violet | DJ Tea
& Mickey Fingers
Video Editing:
Celeste Violet
Sound Engineering & Production:
Mickey Fingers
& Celeste Violet
Eclectic Wonderland:
DJ Tea | Celeste Violet
Mr. Announcer Man
Mickey Fingers
Eclectic Wonderland is an independent radio show hosted by DJ Tea, Mr. Announcer Man, and Mickey Fingers on WDRT 91.9 FM in Viroqua, Wisconsin. Each week features carefully curated playlists, original narration, artwork, stories, and musical discoveries spanning indie, dream pop, shoegaze, post-punk, electronic, alternative, folk, experimental music, and college radio favorites. Continue the journey with Velvet Umbrella Radio | After Hours and Petals & Hooks, where the music wanders even farther after dark.
Returned: Heaven or Las Vegas Condition: Slightly tear-stained.
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