LP Livicate

Nov 08, 2021, 02:30 PM

"Samples from Radio Afghanistan 1976 used in the track:
Treated loop of music from part of the original recording used at 0.01 in and throughout.
Bass tone from the beginning of the original recording used at 0.03 in and throughout.

I was intrigued when I initially heard the recording of Radio Afghanistan from 1976. I was a young Short Wave Listener in Coventry at the time so it comes with some personal nostalgia and it's from a period when the shortwave bands were a far busier sonically magical place than now (even though they are still sonically magical.)

I immediately loved the bass hum at the start of the recording and it’s interesting to hear The Voice of America’s "Yankee Doodle" in the background at 23 seconds in and VOA signing on at 59 seconds in.

Originally I tried to make a loop of a section of the main musical interlude but to no avail. As soon as I put part of it through some effects (Reason's Alligator Triple Filtered Gate) and combined it with a loop of the bass tone from the start of the recording I started getting somewhere. I added some drums influenced by a Big Youth track from 1975 then a bassline and sent it to my musical collaborator Jazz'min Tutum in Freiburg, Germany who adds:

"I was working on a praise poem for Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry when Pete sent me the track and I thought why not try those lyrics over it. Lee Perry's work has always been a "hauntology" of Kingston in terms of city and memory and I am sure he would have also been very interested in Pete's (use of) shortwave recordings especially the frequencies contained within them...""

Composition by Pete Polanyk.

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