Moscow shortwave 1970

"There's something I loved about grit and the words coming out of the interference that grabbed me. My original idea was to try and make the whole track out of samples from the original piece. Although it didn't quite work out that way, I did create a lot of the drums, pads, bass and the kind of piano / xylophone lead thing at the end by dropping samples from the recording in to various ableton instruments and pitching / manipulating them until I could play them as instruments. It produced these brilliantly gritty sounds that had the character from the original recording

"I went through the track and pulled out the more melodic sections from the ident at the beginning of the recording and chopped and rearranged them ableton. I also went through the spoken section and pulled out some phrases that jumped out and panned and glitched them to create the wall of spoken dialogue.

"Once I laid out the main track with the instruments and direct samples I then added some new drums and guitar to the last section. I used ableton to kind of jam the whole thing out and added live guitar overdubs and some new drums to make it sound more alive."

Composition by Tiger Mendoza.

Part of the Shortwave Transmissions project, documenting and reimagining the sounds of shortwave radio - find out more and see the whole project at https://citiesandmemory.com/shortwave