skywave

A E J O T Z

In the early 1960s when I was 8 or 9 years old I got to play with a 1940's shortwave radio for a few days. It was like having my own spaceship. Sounds from that old radio have stayed with me all my life.

I make lots of experimental music but I rarely record it and almost never share it. But I really tapped into the haunting sounds of that old shortwave radio this time. It sounds like the day after WWIII.

The static and phasing are courtesy of the BR-600 recorder. The morse code motif is the microbrute step sequencer. The unearthly second sound is a one-key microkorg solo, sonically tortured.

skywave.mp3

Description:

non-melodic experimental

Filesize:

2.85 MB

Duration:

3:07

Viewed:

3484 Time(s)

varice · Posted: Sun Nov 29, 2015 6:44 pm Post subject:

This track is like a little trip down Memory Lane! It does revive some good old memories from the early 70’s of listening to my Dad’s shortwave tube radio that he built from a kit. I spent many hours tuning in faraway stations that had foreign music and news. But what intrigued me the most was all of the amazingly strange, weird, and mysterious sounds and noise that could be heard…

A E J O T Z · Posted: Sun Nov 29, 2015 10:37 pm Post subject:

"strange, weird, and mysterious sounds and noise"...

...made even stranger by that great modulation module in the sky, the ionosphere!

Thanks to the everchanging ionosphere's effect on skywaves, the sound of phasers, flangers, filter sweeps and echoes were old stuff to me by the time they appeared on rock records.

When I first heard "In a Gadda da Vida" I was a boy scout camping near St. Louis, Missouri and listening to Beaker Street (the original underground radio show) from Little Rock, Arkansas station KAAY. I thought the flanging on the drum solo was the radio wave shifting around. Imagine my surprise when I bought the record.