Combing the Aether for Strings 2

Combing the Aether for Strings 1

Astral Weeds 2

Astral Weeds 1

Nostalgia for the Planet Earth 2

Nostalgia for the Planet Earth 1

Nekromagnetic Aeon

The recordings you will find here are the result of a very strange experience I had at times between 1992 and 1994 when I was a student of Italian literature in Florence. Living in an former nunnery on the via Guelfa, I made recordings onto cassette of Short Wave, MW, AM and FM broadcasts that I had been hearing in the late night hours. I see now that the value of these archives is considerable in that the nature of radio has changed so drastically since then that it seems clearly another world, another epoch. I coined the term "radio-phonography" a few years ago in order to describe what I do, because I was not then a DXer, and  I also wanted to emphasize it was not a kind of "cut-up" or plunderphonia, since it was all recorded live. It was strange, mildly prophetic or serendipitous that I would even then have entitled the series of these thirteen or so 90 and 120 minute cassettes as "Radio Wide World"--some kind of subconscious fore-echo of the WWW system that friends in California had envisioned in the mid 80's and which, even in that moment in the mid 90's was becoming a new reality. The emergence of the internet of course is a major factor in the decadence of radio culture (certainly the shortwave has lost some of its purposes and many stations stopped broadcasting). I feel as if I accidentally captured a moment of radio that was at an apex of some kind. In the wee hours, many local stations would become still then sign off. This meant that in the breach of the bandwidth swelled over with signals bouncing from many distant locations. Much of this can be heard in these recordings. This continually changing melange of cultures, musics, languages and noises put me into a kind of immediate trance. Even when I touched the aerial, I was part of an extended antennae that permitted the receiver to access other layers of signals. It was perhaps the most eerie of all when I started to hear satellites and what I would later learn were in fact the radiographic results of sun spots, meteorite scatter, solar flares, pulsars and who knows what else. The aural field called white-noise I would continue to learn was not empty at all but rather veined with ulterior information. And so the radio became the sign or sigil of an invisible world or worlds. It is not only that radio programming has changed over the decades that makes the documents I offer on this site unique: radios themselves nowadays produced with digital tuning mechanisms no longer allow one to tune between the channels, thusly depreciating the range of possible experience. Following up on this initiatory experience between 1992 and 1994, I would pursue the research in New Mexico where a yard-sale garnered me an old military SW radio which I then recorded and began using as one on my principal instruments as a sound artist. As the series of releases continues, I will present details on recording circumstances in the comments boxes associated with the recordings. These are all very dirty phonographies and although I have mixed them in various ways since the original cassettes were recorded, I have endeavored to keep it rather raw and faithful to the original feeling that produced in me such enduring fascination and satisfaction. I want o thank my flat-mate on the via Guelfa, John Elmanahi, who never utttered a compromising word whilst living with these strange noises nightly issuing from the kitchen where I worked by candle-light into the first glimpses of dawn. --Jeff Gburek, Poznań, 2011

Radio Wide World

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