A wild and unruly assortment of segments from the archives of Shirley & Spinoza Radio – helicopters; Iranian flute music and drum machines; confused tourists and Japanese folk; a warbled cassette from a dusty Kashgar bazaar; a clip from the 1970s television series Kung Fu; Thai molam; cicadas; Uyghur pop; shortwave radio; wolves; a beggar lady’s song recorded in an oasis town; Chinese radio commercials and urban soundscapes; carrier pigeons equipped with droning whistles; Mongolian throat singing; and more. Many thanks to Fausto Caceres for his fearless and inspiring exploration of both forgotten and new ways of making radio.

Fausto is busy cleaning his mother-in-law’s rain gutters but he did take a brief respite to offer some reflections: “Many of the clips you chose send me right back into the time and space I was in when recording them. Listening to clips of Uyghur language radio transport me to all those winter nights spent in my Urumqi apartment, surrounded by a dirty-ice world & the smell of coal burning smokestacks in the air. They conjure the surrounding streets with large hanging hunks of mutton and fur hats for sale all over the place; my frozen mustache; the sounds of my neighbors walking up the stairwell every day making their unique, individual ‘hooting’ calls to activate the sound-triggered lights at each level; fully kitted PLA soldiers marching in the street; calls to prayer; and the dense, addictive collection of music shops and stands selling local cds. Re: the beggar lady singing 'Rosilem' in an oasis town called Artux, I recorded about half hour with her in a quiet, dusty courtyard off the street. Several local kids quietly appeared on the surrounding rooftops to quietly watch.

There’s a clip in there in Uyghur (a radio commercial for some local store) that starts “Aiygul ma! Nime'sh te!” (basically, just ‘what’s up Aigul!’ I used to just say that often to my local Uyghur friends in that same voice to their amusement as some sort of inside joke about my radio operating “pastime”.  My first year, I lived in a compound with all the local artists / musicians that were employed by the government, so I'd bump into the 'radio voices' and musicians I’d become familiar with at the local market all the time. Also within, you hear the annual September 18th air raid sirens commemorating the invasion by the Japanese; the megaphones at the Uyghur bazaar shouting prices; the pigeons (with attached drone whistle) circling my 6th floor apartment…  some fragments of Yunnan radio from later years. 

The earlier era clips you selected from the Oakland studio years seem to imagine some fantasy Sci-Lo-Fi version of what the coming years living in the PRC might bring.  I guess they weren’t so far off!

It’s always felt totally organic and personal to weave all these sounds and recordings spanning so many years into s&S Radio and particularly cool to hear these bits again assembled this way through your ears. I hope your fans enjoy! – Fausto Caceres (06/09/2021)

The cover image is taken from an art installation titled “Babel” by Cildo Meireles (2001), a large circular tower made from hundreds of second-hand transistor radios stacked on top of one another.  

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 SHIRLEY & SPINOZA RADIO (RIAFC 053)

Shirley & Spinoza Radio [RIAFC 053]

Immaculate Concussion

Ave Maria

Stand By Me

Based on an interview with a friend about his experience of having acute tinnitus.
Co-composed and performed by myself and Steve Truman, Dave Insua-Cao and Kath Ord.

Tinnitus

This is my gaming reel. Space captain Gardena awakens to find herself held hostage, her space ship gone and her precious 'Firestone' missing...will she return to the third sector and or will the evil unworldly 'Sistren' track her down? ...
Original music by Bruce Reid ©2015

Gaming Reel 2015

Dipper recorded by WSRS member Simon Elliott. Dippers are small, stout, short-tailed, short-winged, strong-legged birds. They have a characteristic bobbing motion when perched beside the water, giving them their name. Dippers’ calls are loud and high-pitched, being similar to calls made by other birds on fast rivers; the call frequencies lying within a narrow range of 4.0-6.5 kHz, well above the torrent noise frequency of <2 kHz. Dippers also communicate visually by their characteristic dipping or bobbing movements, as well as by blinking rapidly to expose their pale upper eyelids as a series of white flashes in courtship and threat displays.

Tinnitus

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