When I was a kid I used to play around with my parents' shortwave radio. Sometimes I'd use it to listen to broadcasts of Australian cricket matches via the ABC's shortwave service. It was great listening to cricket commentary via short wave, because invariably there'd be these huge sweeping phases to the signal, as if the cricket game were being played on a beach while huge breakers rolled in. Hearing the various squeaks and fartings of electrical storms and other geomagnetic phenomena as I tuned up and down the dial was really great.
Kraftwerk summed up the whole radio experience in the song "Radioland" ('Turn the dials with your hand /'til you find the shortwave band'), from their greatly underrated Radio-activity album from 1975.
Bear with me; I am going somewhere with this. A couple of years ago I got the idea to start sampling bits and pieces from shortwave transmissions for music. (Why I hadn't thought to do this before is beyond me. Certainly my favourite bits of Holger Czukay records is where he cuts bits he's taped from the ether.) To my horror I discovered my parents' radio had clapped out, and I was unrealiably informed that my grandparents' set was no more (I saw it just the other week in all its 60s Sony glory). I set about trying to buy my own radio, and eventually I located what I wanted from an old man running a strange electronics shop on Tory Street. Don't bother looking for the shop yourself; it's gone now.
Rushing home with my Pye 'RadioRanger' (awesome!), I found that I could only pick up what I think was a Philipino station. I later found out that many shortwave services have been scrapped in favour of internet streaming. I don't know about you, but it kind of kills the romance. It's true that the UDP packets of a digital audio stream have to travel the same distance, but there's not the beautiful modulation effects you get from sending radio waves through the atmosphere.
Okay, I am getting to the point. In the two years since I got the radio, I haven't done a lot with it, but there are some good aspects to it. For one the FM band is considerably bigger than your average FM radio: it goes all the way to 175 megahertz. In that range you can pick up all sorts of exciting things like Air navigation beacons, and the automated transmission from the Wellington Airport Control tower.
Last night I set about recording some of these sounds, along with whatever effects I could get from the AM band (FM shmefM!). For large tracts of the various bands all I could get was mains hum. Admittedly interestingly chorused mains hum, but mains hum nonetheless. Then I had a bit of a brainwave. The sleepout in which I have my studio (read: PC and large collection of empty coke bottles) has an outdoor power outlet on it for lawnmowers, etc. I wondered if this might be better grounded than our in door electrics. Using an extension cord I plugged in the radio to this socket and switched it on. The hum was gone and the resolution of the shortwave receiver was greatly enhanced. I was able to get not only the Philipines, but a Chinese station (mainland China too, judging from their "shur, furr" Beijing Mandarin accents), something that might have been French Polynesian, some gad awful American Christian station (bloody Americans!), the ABC, and another station that was in English but such a weird accent it was hard to tell where it was from.
I spent half and hour recording the sounds of these stations. Reception was pretty weak, but the exciting analog signal processing performed by the Earth's atmosphere was very nice. One station seemed bathed in reverb; I wonder if it might have been some sort of strange doppler effect causing a kind of chorus. Another station was interpolated with some very strange bloop sounds, which still managed to sound rather euphonious. At other parts of the band I recorded strange staccato hissing and beeping. Not morse code, I think, but who knows?
There are two reasons why I like this sort of thing. The first is a sense of heightened exoticism. I think listening to a far away station gives you a bigger sense of distance than actually flying there in economy class. The other reason is that I spend many of my evenings tweaking sounds so that they are enhanced or pleasingly degraded. It's nice to be able to hear such sounds processed without any intent by nature itself.
Anyway, with the hour of sounds I've recorded I'll probably end up doing some sort of ambient collage. But the best bit about it was just hearing them the first time.
Posted by stuart at October 10, 2005 9:11 AM