The Romance of ERA 5

Recently fished out from the 2003 archive: this zippy little number with a waxed moustache and a rose between its teeth, courtesy Foni tis Elladas (Φωνή της Ελλάδας/Voice of Greece).

Foni tis Elladas
09/08/2003, 5865 kHz (0245 UTC)

القاهرة

As promised, here's another short vocal piece from Radio Cairo, featuring the same iconic singer featured in most of our Cairo clips; research and further listening suggests that it may be Nagat (Nagat El Saghira). Reader expertise is duly welcomed and appreciated; I'll provide identifications when I get them.

Radio Cairo #8
07/17/2005, 12050 kHz (2113 UTC)

Postcard From Sebaa Aïoun

In defiance of the smog-suffused drizzle which is currently soaking Los Angeles, shortwavemusic extends its DX vacation in the Middle East with this noise-spattered workout from RTV Marocaine, at an epic length normally reserved for Radio Cairo or our Qur'anic expeditions. Tomorrow we return to our beloved Cairo, so stay tuned for more Middle Eastern confections from our vaults.


RTV Marocaine
11/19/2005, 5980 kHz (0117 UTC)

Funeral For A Friend

HCJB (Quito, Ecuador) is one of the few surviving religious broadcasters whose secular programming is as important (and as high-quality) as their mission-driven content. They're primarily known for presenting the legendary DX Partyline - a cornerstone of shortwave-related news programs - for nearly 50 years, although in recent years they have also offered the World Radio Programme, an interdisciplinary series of interesting public radio-styled aural snapshots.

In fact, we like to think that this stately, swinging piece of New Orleans-style funeral music might have been played in tribute to other, similarly intelligent "silent key" broadcasters, such as the Christian Science Monitor Radio broadcasts of KHBI/WSHB. Join us in the second line, if you will...

Funeral Music
HCJB
10/08/2007, 9745 kHz (2255 UTC)

Half of a Yellow Sun

Encased in a brittle, polyrhythmic shellac, this funky entry from the venerable Voice of Nigeria pops-and-locks circles around Western pretenders who've long made their mint on glossy knockoffs. Broadcasting in eight of some 250 language groups extant in the country, "The Authoritative Choice" has survived wave after wave of fractious ethnic rule since 1962 and presently operates three 250kW transmitters from Ikorodu, Lagos. Political complexities notwithstanding, this is a magnificent slice of Nigerian electro-funk, mechanical and stentorian, like a drum machine mating with a bullhorn.

Shellac Funk
Voice of Nigeria
10/08/2007, 7255 kHz (2152 UTC)

The Shortwavemusic 100

As promised, here's the archive of Shortwavemusic #1-100.

You will need Pando to download it. (Due to its size, straight Web downloads were not an option. I also dislike common file-sharing Web utilities such as YouSendIt.)

Three Qur'anic Views

During the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, the shortwave bands explode with Qur'anic recitations. Since the East Coast is a magnet for Middle Eastern stations, many of these transmissions were readily received at shortwavemusic's former listening post in Brookline, MA. These three items were recorded in the final days of Ramadan 2007, just as the Tarawih were nearing their conclusion in anticipation of Eid ul-Fitr. Each piece opens a unique window on the transmission (literally and figuratively) of Islam via radio.


BSKSA, Saudi Arabia
10/8/2007, 9555 kHz (2225 UTC)


Radio Mauretanie
10/8/2007, 4845 kHz (2115 UTC)


Radio Kuwait
10/8/2007, 9855 kHz (2232 UTC)

¡Que Rico Bailo Yo!

As Cuban music goes, this piece may be fairly traditional, but there's something left-of-center about it that makes it particularly appealing for inclusion here at shortwavemusic. Perhaps it's the hyperkinetic horn breakouts around 00:45 that sound like Laurie Anderson circa 1986 doing son. Or the fact that the vocalist sounds as if he's being pushed off a cliff at the end of every verse, Wile E. Coyote-style, only to crawl back wearily from the precipice. At any rate, it's a bit fleeter of foot than our usual fare, so break out those cha-cha heels, ladies, and mind the vertigo...

Song for Clifftop and Cha-Cha Heels
Radio Habana Cuba
05/22/2007, 5965kHz (2358 UTC)

Media Host (Up &) Down

If you have trouble accessing our clip library, please note that our media host has been going up and down. We are in the process of transferring our data over to a new provider and will be re-writing the links over the next few days. Thanks for your patience...

Al Mamlakah al Maghribiyah

As of 1997, there were at least 6.64 million radios in the Kingdom of Morocco, on whose bands 27 mediumwave stations, 25 FM stations, and six shortwave stations jostled for the attention of the country's 28 million people. Although Al Maghrib is soon to sever its ties to the Western world via the closure of the IBB relay station in Briech, nationals from Taourirt to Tétouan can still enjoy the gorgeous urban purr of RTV Marocaine, broadcasting on 7135 kHz from Tanger.

RTV Marocaine
09/23/2007, 7135 kHz (2204 UTC)

From Doubt to Decision

Say what you will about Trans World Radio's global mission to "evangelize the lost" and "nurture new believers," but unlike many of their secular counterparts (BBC, are you listening?), they still broadcast in over 200 languages and dialects to over 160 countries. And while not all of these may be available via shortwave, they nonetheless maintain 14 different international relay sites from Guam to Grigoriopol. Whether or not you view TWR's mission itself as Good News, it's hard to argue when they provide such rich musical content as this, at a time when even All India Radio itself is reducing its external transmissions. (Shame the service dropped out when it did, however.)

Nepali Service Music (With Interruptions)
Trans World Radio
01/30/2008, 7350 kHz (0143 UTC)

Dawn Feeling with Delicate Fingers

Tonight's entry is an echo, a memento, a smoke signal over an abandoned landscape: Radio Cairo, as it can no longer be received from our new West Coast environs. There are days, and those were some of them. More to follow.

Radio Cairo
05/09/2007, 9460 kHz (0046 UTC)

A Hundred Kinds Of Game

The mouth-blown free reed instrument heard in these two pieces is known variously as the khene (Laos) and the shêng (China). A version of the instrument first appeared in the West in a text by the French "father of acoustics," Marin Mersenne, titled Harmonie Universelle (1636), but its Western origins are otherwise the subject of some conflicting information.

The shêng ("sublime voice") has existed virtually as long as the oral tradition itself, with stories of its creation stretching as far back as 3000 B.C. Indeed, a bas-relief from the West Han Dynasty includes a depiction of a mouth organist among its seventeen musicians. Here's a recent example of shêng music from China Radio International.

Shêng Music
China Radio International
02/06/2008, 12055 kHz (2333 UTC)

The khene ("better") has a similarly storied history, albeit one subject to less scholarly attention than the shêng. The instrument travelled across the Mekong River from Lanxang (Laos) to Siam (Thailand) in the fourteenth century, where it spread with deported Laotian laborers throughout Southeast Asia. The khene has retained its symbolic stature to such an extent that the resistance broadcasters of the North Eastern Laos adopted it for the interval signal of their domestic service on Lao National Radio in the mid-1970s, as reproduced here. The tune is a canonical recording of "On the Mékong" by Thao Phet (Sananikhone).

"On the Mékong"
Thao Phet (via Laos National Radio, Domestic Service)
Time/Frequency Unknown 1976

60 Watt Silver Lining

It was a blue moon over Hollywood this evening.

Granted, at 0118 UTC, the sun was still in mid-descent, still filtering through the low, vaporous cirrus clouds of smog which hover over Los Angeles like a Japanese nihonga. Mount Wilson was barely visible to the East; Mount Baldy, just beyond, was only there by inference. The North Pacific, normally a silvery expanse over the low frontier of Santa Monica, was a mere filament lining the coast. The city below was just warming to its nocturnal penumbra, pulling the night like a sheet from the foot of the canyon.

It was the last half-hour of my monitoring ritual at Cloud's Rest, and I was preparing to make my descent after a long evening of booming Asian DX. Since moving to California two months ago, my shortwave diet has been overwhelmingly supplied by such Eastern staples as Radio Taiwan, China Radio International, NHK Radio Japan, Korean Broadcasting System, and others. Being a much bigger fan of Middle and Near Eastern stations, I was already pining for the meter-decimating reception of shortwavemusic stalwarts such as Radio Cairo, Voice of Turkey, BSKSA, and Radio Kuwait which I enjoyed from my abandoned post in Boston. (As if by way of apology, my Etón E1 kicked up a passable half-hour from Egypt shortly thereafter.)

Nonetheless, although my view of the Prudential Tower has been supplanted by one of U.S. Bank, and although 0000 UTC now occurs well before sundown even in mid-winter, certain fixtures of my aural landscape remain immutable. One of these is the Fundamental Broadcast Network, previously heard on shortwavemusic via WTJC but presently being received via sister station WBOH.

WBOH was, in fact, responsible for the blue moon in question, for they were playing not their usual Andrews Sisters-meets-Velvet Underground style of gospel RF, but a rather contemplative guitar instrumental oddly reminiscent of John Thompson's guqin. This piece's fuzzy tumbleweed style was perfectly suited for scaling the steep southward trail down the foot-carved canyonside and back into the glowing metropolitan grid which was now coming alight, lamp by lamp, before me.

Runyon's Gospel Descent
WBOH, Newport, NC
02/07/2008, 5920 kHz (0118 UTC)

The Dance of Heaven's Ghosts

On August 12, 2005, the annual Perseid meteor shower hit its stride over Huntsville, Alabama. As the sky spawned silvery minnows over the Marshall Space Flight Center, an experimental "meteor radar" recorded the near-constant drone of the disintegrating meteors from a linked network of modified Yagi antennas. As each meteor produced a trail of ionized gases, it produced an extremely short-lived ionospheric "placebo," ricocheting radio waves back to Earth to produce a constant trail of warbling, mournful signals. Taken in aggregate, the Perseid interceptions (recorded by the MSFC in CW mode on 67.250 MHz) sound like some kind of celestial early warning system, or a ring modulator offsetting the constant, pinging, free-meter drone of the carrier frequency. The recordings prove that even the most innovative of electronic abstract music has yet to catch up with the sounds produced under our feet and over our heads.

In a similar spirit to the annual interceptions of the MSFC, this may be our most hallucinogenic Duelling XMTRs! post yet: a dense and chaotic mass of reverberant voices, subliminal smears of music, relentlessly phasing white noise, skywave-ricocheted code throttles, and a burnished crême brulée of cross-channel speech.

Much like the Perseid recordings, long-term exposure can cause the mind to spiral off into sonic free-association. Soaking in the full seven and a half minutes at high volume, I hear whale songs, slamming doors, airport paging voices, jet turbines, cicadas, Emergency Broadcast System tones, a Wagnerian female choir, perhaps even the Perseid meteors themselves. It's The Ghost Orchid crossed with The River multiplied by Kurzwellen, all generated by the simplest synthesis of skywave and transistor.



Duelling XMTRs! #7: Kurzwellen Turbine Forest
Unidentified Station(s)
09/23/2007, 6155 kHz (2134 UTC)

"Idahat arabia Democratia."

Following on our popular flagship post devoted to Radio RASD (República Árabe Saharaui Democrática), here's a second dose from the same broadcast.


Radio RASD #2
National Radio of the Arab-Saharan Democratic Republic
05/24/2007, 6300 kHz (2337 UTC)

Phase of the Cause

An outlet of the EWTN (Eternal Word Television Network) in Irondale, AL, WEWN broadcasts at a frequency-slamming 500kw to North America, Latin America, and Africa/Europe. Launched in 1992 as a secondary endeavor to its TV namesake, WEWN purports to be the largest privately-owned shortwave station in the world, and certainly the largest of the various religious stations previously excerpted here on shortwavemusic.

Like their lesser radiophonic brethren at KJES or WTJC, WEWN seems to have a sweet spot for corrosive, acid-reflux audio quality, which can only help to enhance such programmatic offerings as Solemn Mass for the Feast of the Chair of Peter: Live from St. Peter's Cathedral, Scranton, PA. (What do these people feed their engineers?) This clip demonstrates WEWN's intriguing sonic footprint, which pleasantly evokes being menaced at the pulpit with a particularly ornery electric carving knife as the station's opening salvo trips over the extension cord.



Serrated Drone and Sign-On
WEWN (Radio Católica Mundial)
04/22/2007, 7455 kHz (0000 UTC)

The Loudspeakers of Tindouf

On the banks of the Mediterranean in Northern Africa, buzzsaw transmitters are seemingly as common as soil erosion. Surrounded by shortwave powerhouses in Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia, and Western Sahara, Radio Algerienne continues in the storied shortwavemusic tradition of echo-chambered chants punctuated by demure female announcers. Algeria also has the notable distinction of housing the Polisario, the Western Saharan refugees also known to this blog for their astonishing renegade music broadcasts, but here we focus on a mesmerizing excerpt from the officially-sanctioned voice of Algeria.



Chant Buzz with Narrator
Radio Algerienne
09/23/2007, 7150 kHz (2209 UTC)

All The Trees Are Named In The Garden

Kishore Kumar awoke in a startled, low-grade panic.

He had been slipping in and out of a mild fever for two or three days and was locked in that curious loop between exhaustion and restlesness. Even as he struggled to maintain some semblance of structure to his days, he nonetheless found himself slipping helplessly into a thick, leaden slumber.

And his dreams. Oh, his dreams. They may as well have been scored by Laxmikant-Pyarelal in Hell, such were the twisted machinations he suffered in those fevered, tossing moments. And it didn't help at all, that music his son Anit would play even in the dead of night, those records by people with nonsensical names like Talking Heads and Devo and Roxy Music. This music was a far cry from "Om Shanti Om" Or "Gaadi Bula Rahi Hai" or even "My Name is Anthony Gonsalves." It all sounded like someone singing with the hiccups. Or stepping on a cat. It was not, in any case, what a man with fevers needed to be hearing through bedroom floors at eleven o'clock at night.

These records were even starting to influence his dreams. He was drifting off into another sweat-beaded reverie when he saw them: giant, strobing beams of Technicolor light changing his curtain-drawn room into a supernatural discotheque, the ambient dust filtering and swirling like cheap cinematic fog. The curtains drew back, windows opened of their own accord, and then Kishore saw it, descending from the heavens on a warbly synthesizer riff. The deck of the spaceship was lined with mulleted men locked in an awkward two-step, hands aloft over tacky, tin-foil costumes. The light onboard that ship was so strong, so saturated, it made the men themselves turn glaring yellow, then fiery red, then aquarium blue, and so on, in endless permutations of headachey color. As one of them started to sing, the others answered in basso profundo chorus, stomping and whirling like a busload of gay dervishes. Kishore hated this vision, and he especially hated the music. On and on it went. Nothing could shield his eyes from it: no sea of pillows or expanse of blankets, no doors or curtains or bedside tables. Now the whole neighborhood - in fact, the whole sky - was suffused with gonzoid patterns of pure illumination. The song changed key just as Kishore's own neighbors burst from their houses, leap-frogging around and springing from car hoods in an ever-more-heated display of choreographed absurdity. The whole street was singing now, the cat-strangle voice improvising an imbecilic counterpoint that would have deafened S.D. Burman himself.

Then, just as Kishore could take no more, it was over. Shuddering slightly in bed, he shifted his aching frame and licked a salty upper lip. Through migraine-shredded ears, he could hear the needle in Anit's room locked in an end groove: "fup, fup, fup, fup." He remembered the title of an album Anit had brought home just the other day. Fear of Music indeed. At the time, he had scoffed, but now perhaps he was beginning to understand...




Talking Heads Meets Bollywood
Kol Israel
8/20/2005, 7490kHz (2339 UTC)

On the Ruins of Kievan Rus

Blame it on Boris Grebenshikov or Zvuki Mu or t.A.T.u., but the Russian Federation continually gets short shrift from Western tastemakers when it comes to the quality of their pop music. While other nations happily export trendy indie-underground icons and shiny, shrink-wrapped megapop alike, the Great Bear receives little love, despite birthing a considerable pool of exceptional songwriters.

However, we here at Shortwavemusic have long championed the "lungs of Europe" - particularly their deeply expressive ballads. Our "Post-Soviet Melancholia" series continues today with the latest installment thereof: a lush, sweeping torch song entitled "Мой Рок и Ролл" by Yulya Chicherina & Bi-2 which could have been co-produced by Stephen Street and Dynamite-era Stina Nordenstam. Every aspect is transistor-perfect: the gently sloping heterodyne which pops into place just before the chorus; the aquamarine sunset of see-sawing strings; the windswept sprechtsang of the duetting singers. Like walking in on the conclusion of a well-crafted film, we only get a mere suggestion of what's come before, but the fleeting moment itself is deeply pleasurable.

Post-Soviet Melancholia Pt. V: "Мой Рок и Ролл"
Yulya Chicherina & Bi-2 (via Russian International Radio)
05/15/2007, 7125kHz (0107 UTC)

A Letter from Albania

"Every night at sundown, there is a promenade of citizens through downtown Tirana. In front of the Palace of Culture a man trying to give us a Bible approached us. He says that freedom has given him the right to preach, something he had been praying for, but he says that the human greed which comes with freedom is making life bad. Just then, the muezzin on top of the minaret begins the evening call to prayer. Some of the beggars take notice, hoping to get charity from devout Muslims. The loudspeaker is not sounding the clear call to prayer tonight; the system is overly loud and distorted. In the coffee shops and bars, proprietors turn up their sound systems to drown out the call. Bob Marley is 'Jammin'' in the name of the same Lord whom the muezzin and the evangelist call us to serve. A boom box on the square is playing Dion and the Belmonts."

- Rich McClear, Letters from Albania


Go!/Let's Go!
Radio Tirana
05/22/2007, 7425kHz (0015UTC)

Performing Democracy

I've often cited the transmissions of Radio Bulgaria as the flash-point in my lifelong obsession with music via shortwave radio. Receiving the former Radio Sofia from the characterless environs of suburban Illinois, the country's rolling, broken-legged rhythms and curious antiphonic singing were - as the cliches now shamefully have it - utterly otherworldly to my adolescent ears. My American compatriots would soon become infected with the same (somewhat misguided) fervor via the Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares recordings, but for a brief moment, those broadcasts from the Balkans were like unthinkably beautiful sonic hieroglyphs beamed from a salt-eroded transmitter on the shores of the River Styx.

Somewhat surprisingly, the excavation of this music - at a time when Bulgaria was newly emerging from decades of Communist rule - did not belie the relationship of this so-called "authentic" Bulgarian folklore to that of its State-appointed curators. What Western audiences were being sold as genuine Bulgarian music was, in fact, the result of decades of cultural and religious whitewashing on the part of the country's Communist leaders, who forcibly dismantled the agrarian religious and cultural traditions of the peasantry to make way for a more "sophisticated" interpretation informed by Western classical modes and harmonies. The music we Westerners thus came to know as "Bulgarian music," then, was a bastardized version of the tradition which bore as much a practical resemblance to genuine village singing as, say, The Sound of Music to Tuvan throat-singing.

Perversely, even with extensive and highly credible scholarship on this subject from folklorists such as Donna Buchanan, Timothy Rice, and Martha Forsyth, one can still tune to Radio Bulgaria and hear these candyfloss arrangements presented as if they actually represented the distinctive sounds of the country's seven folkloric regions. It seems that, even today, Bulgarian National Radio and its sponsors feel compelled to offer this clean, safe version of its profound cultural legacy in place of the rougher, more difficult, and yet more true sound of Bulgarian village singing, even as its last remaining progenitors fade into old age and infirmity.

Bulgaria is, of course, only one such example of this trend; such revisions occur all the time in American as well as European culture. Perhaps it is now left only to the academics to map the cultural memory of our homelands. In keeping with this theme, this week's item is a similarly stylized but nonetheless quite beautiful interpretation of Romania's village singing traditions from the Skylark program of Radio Romania International.

Skylark Music
Radio Romania International
05/25/2007, 9775 kHz (0038 UTC)

"Sin interferencias, sin problemas."

Backed by the Polisario Front, a Sahrawi rebel movement working for the separation of Western Sahara from Morocco, Radio RASD (República Árabe Saharaui Democrática) has broadcast intermittently via shortwave and mediumwave since December of 1975. From its HQ in Rabouni (near Tindouf) in Western Algeria, the station has been monitored on a handful of frequencies, including 6300, 7460, and 7425 kHz, and can be heard with border-blasting strength in early evenings here in New England. Most importantly, they broadcast some of the most stunning music and speech extant on the bands - from longer, improvised drone/recitations to alien Eastern pop pastiches to the festive, barrelling, skywave-scorched piece recorded here. Much more from Radio RASD to follow in the coming weeks, but here's a little taste test to enthrall the senses.

Radio RASD #1
National Radio of the Arab-Saharan Democratic Republic
05/24/2007, 6300 kHz (2337 UTC)

Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting

Tonight (with sincere apologies to Charles Mingus), shortwavemusic presents two more items from our Caligari's cabinet of American evangelical music: one representative each from the transcendent and the terrifying.

Newport, NC's very own WTJC has been dispensing Rapture-induced migraines for years from their distinctively overmodulated signal on 9370 kHz. With a seemingly bottomless reserve of basso profundo singers and absurdly overheated choruses, WTJC's steroid-enhanced signal slices through the 31-meter band like Constantine's sword. Their message is one of such urgency that they rarely, if ever, allow songs to completely fade, a technique which makes this surreal station all the more like a small-town talent show in which the impatient performers prematurely shove one other offstage. Tonight, however, the obstreperous piano and virtually unintelligible singing are hammered into a strangely moving cacophony. (And, yes, the cut-off is theirs.)

"Bring Back the Glory"
WTJC (Newport, NC)
5/15/2007, 9370kHz (0035UTC)

On the somewhat less charming end of ramshackle is our second item, this time from WWCR(Worldwide Christian Radio), a megalith on the shortwave bands not commonly known for its high programming standards. "The following program is not religion as commonly known in America," the singer boasts (after a particularly egregious tape edit), and thank God. We think he might have done better to remember a credo of the famously snarky pop group Steely Dan: "Use an accordion, go to jail."

"Highway of God"
WWCR (Nashville, TN)*
8/13/2006, 7465kHz (2300 UTC)

(*Thanks yet again to Glenn Hauser - who, at this rate, deserves a merit badge for his endless editorial contributions - for the station amendment.)

The Boyband Headphase

Shortwave radios, as we all know, are time machines.

Not in any sense that H.G. Wells or Mort Weisinger or Ib Melchior might recognize. Rather, think of the ionosphere as a sort of plasmic Advent calendar with infinite variations. In the architecture of the sky, windows open and close, shape-shift and change coordinates; cross-beams splinter into kindling or gather into thick, verdant, untamed rushes. Space lacks fixity; no scene occurs twice. If there's any parallel to be drawn to those hoary old science-fiction legends, it's the notion that the more one wants to control one's trajectory, the more one loses it.

But, unlike all but the most dystopian of time-travel stories, the correct course of action when travelling on the wavebands is to give oneself over entirely to chance. You're never without reference points - frequencies, bandwidths, the needless distractions of date lines and time zones - but the epiphanies are in the unmooring, the throw of the rudder, the casting of the compass into the sea. This is the way into vision.

And so they come from the most unlikely of places. Life during wartime; an air-drop of radios on a town without electricity, fixed irrevocably on a state-sponsored station. To soften the reception of the sometimes shrill propaganda, the populace is placated with harmonious music played in modern idioms. All across the land, as labor-abraded parents fold into themselves like Murphy beds, their daughters steal away into darkness, transistors pressed against ears, thirsty with desire, anodyne pop like solar flares over the dark geography of the heart.

The Boyband Headphase
Station not identified
4/21/2007, 12085 kHz (2336 UTC)

"Paris à Dakar, ou Dakar à Paris"

Nb.: I am not ordinarily inclined to use this blog as a podium for the promotion of other sound artists' work, nor do I intend to make it a practice. But Jukka Lehmus's piece has been rattling around in my universe for the past several years, and given its complete lack of exposure in other venues (particularly on a critical level), I feel inclined to share it with you here. I will resume with my regularly-scheduled shortwavemusic clips in the next post - consider this, then, an interim item. - MDW

Unproduct is the musical alias of Finnish multimedia artist Jukka Lehmus (b. 1970), whose interdisciplinary work focuses on "The almost imperceptible / and subtle / ... the early warnings / and the small news items" (Marchsongs, 2006). Although his audio assemblages share certain characteristics with his poetic work - particularly an attention to seemingly offhand details and a clipped but hypnotic sense of internal rhythm - Lehmus's sound pieces stretch, rather than compress, time, tracing and retracing the moments that his poems catch only fleetingly.

The Radio Canvas series (2001-2002) is arguably the most significant of Lehmus's aural experiments: four long-form process pieces derived from shortwave radio broadcasts which gradually loop, unfurl, and mangle their sources. Consider them a less genteel analogue to William Basinski's Disintegration Loops: in contrast to Basinski's purely chance-driven (de)compositions, the Radio Canvas pieces are more aggressive in both form and content, rawer and more disjointed, less the gentle drift of entropy and more a harsh, elemental attrition. If Basinski is the romantic naturalist whose pieces are requiems for memories which disintegrate even as they are summoned, Lehmus is Walter Benjamin's angel of progress, wreaking destruction on all that precedes it in order to make space for the future.

Radio Canvas 3, issued on Lehmus's own Linguablanca imprint, is the most focused and powerful of the quartet. It rides into view on a lopsided, clip-clopping rhythm, like a flood-damaged print of a John Ford western played on a dilapidated projector. The loop is dusted with a light, ringing heterodyne, as if the staccato clatter of the film reel was bleeding over onto the soundtrack through a disjointed tape head; the source audio ping-pongs from the left to the right speaker, where it is manipulated in and out of phase through the use of a slapback delay. At the ten-minute mark, the piece abruptly snaps into mono, leaving only the source loop, until a Middle Eastern pop melody, played on what sounds like a harmonium or a distorted piano, sneaks into the periphery.

What happens over the next minute is almost overwhelmingly dramatic: seconds later, the cowboy loop is encroached upon by a swirling, distortion-studded snatch of Senegalese shortwave. The Middle Eastern harmonium is fragmented by female singers harmonizing on a serpentine melody; a woman's voice drifts by, distorted beyond recognition; a French-African voice calmly narrates a news bulletin from "Paris à Dakar, ou Dakar à Paris." On the second loop, the harmonium-piano snakes through again; the spoken voices are drenched in slapback delay; the volume continues to rise, an unstoppable tide of information and assimilation. Within thirty seconds, the gain has increased fully twofold; the voices have surpassed all intelligibility; only the chant of "Paris à Dakar, ou Dakar à Paris" emerges from an oppressive whirlpool of noise. The piece is so distorted, so completely engulfed in effects, that aural hallucinations start to emerge: sirens, the collapse of buildings, needles skidding off records, symphonic snatches, pneumatic drills. By sixteen minutes, the noise qualifies as "musical" only in the most extreme of senses, as the whole collapses into stuttering, shattered convulsions every thirty seconds or so, congealing only long enough to spit out the harmonium melody and "PARIS-DAKAR-DAKAR-PARIS."

The significance of the narrative, as any racing fan will recognize, is the traditional route of the Dakar Rally, an off-road endurance race originally known as the Paris-Dakar Rally. The Dakar was appropriately founded on an accident of geography after the French motorcycle racer Thierry Sabine became disoriented in the Libyan desert during the Abidjan-Nice Rally. Sabine perished in a helicopter accident during the 1986 Dakar; fifty people have died from a remarkable array of mishaps connected with the Rally since its inception in 1979, including an uncertain number of indigenous people along the routes.

If Lehmus's source material was contemporaneous with its composition, Radio Canvas 3 would have been composed during the final year in which the Dakar was launched from Paris, a decision since compounded by harsh criticism of the race in geopolitical, environmental, and economic circles. Many outside the profession have come to view the Dakar as a grotesque symbol of European imperialism, described by France's Green Party as "colonialism that needs to be eradicated," and by no less than the Vatican as a "vulgar display of power and wealth in places where men continue to die from hunger and thirst."

Radio Canvas 3 thus functions as a remarkable aural allegory of the Dakar's legacy. The opening montage of American Western music, itself a symbolic representation of nationalist might, becomes a menacing cloud of sound which inexorably engulfs the indigenous voices, the coolly indifferent purr of the newscaster, the shredded narrative of the unintelligible female speaker. As the piece snaps to a sudden and inexplicable end after twenty-three minutes, all that remains in its wake are fire-scorched fragments, ruthlessly pulverized languages, an exhaustive and exhausting psychic toll. Taken as a political gesture or even simply as an artifact of sound, Lehmus's work is frightening and powerful: the art of noise, indeed.

Radio Canvas 3 (via Archive.org)
Unproduct (Espoo, Finland)
Linguablanca Records LBR005

Look Out Through Many Eyes

In January of 1973, the American writer William S. Burroughs toted a cheap tape recorder to the Aïd el-Kebir festival in the village of Joujouka*, Morocco. "We set out with the kerosene lantern carrying my Sony recorder with built-in mike," he wrote for Oui Magazine, "recording as we walked down muddy paths to the little square." Burroughs's serendipitous Bou Jeloud audio documents - excerpted on the Sub Rosa volume Break Through in Grey Room - are slippery, decibel-blasted, chaotic, jubilant, relentless. "The moon racing through clouds, young pilot faces of the dancers, panel of musicians at the control board," he wrote, "the village the hills and the sky seem to dance away into space."

Perhaps, then, on another continent and in another time, the twin spirits of Joujouka 1973 and William Burroughs are haunting the Voice of America's Chinese service in the phantasmic form of the Chinese "Firedrake" jammers.** Shot through with a panoply of disembodied voices and ricocheting atmospherics, the sky itself becomes the public square where rituals mutate, recombine, slip in and out of time and phase.

"Firedrake" Jammers vs. VoA
Voice of America (via Thailand)
4/22/2007, 15150 kHz (0011 UTC)

[ * Readers have written in to ask me to modify the spelling of the village to Jajouka. as this is consistent with the current spelling as used by Bachir Attar in the most prominent incarnation of the Master Musicians. However, the transliteration of the word has produced a number of varieties - the most prevalent of which are Jajouka, Joujouka, and Zahjouka. Burroughs's writings and recordings use the Joujouka spelling, and it is this system I have chosen to preserve in direct reference to his work. ]

[** Thanks to Glenn Hauser for writing in with the identification/clarification. My initial suspicion was Balinese gamelan via the Voice of Indonesia; more information on Firedrake can be found in Hauser's DX Listening Digest: www.worldofradio.com.]

Identifications and Amendments

"(Unknown Arabic Song)" in the "Two Eastern Interventions" post of 19 May 2005 has been identified as "Μακριά μου να φύγεις" by the Greek singer Eleni Vitali. The file has been renamed and tagged accordingly.

"Mystery Torch Song from Ukraine" in the 24 May 2005 post has been identified as "The Dream," a setting of a poem by Taras Shevchenko by Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov. The post and mp3 have been amended.

Although I identified the Zemfira track in t