Chimes (Rai Internazionale)

"For this reimagining I wanted to turn a disparate collection of sounds into something more cohesive, but with a structure and flow that mirrored the original radio recording. I also wanted to utilise audio solely from the original source material, without introducing additional musical elements.

The electronic bird sounds at the start were recorded onto an analogue dictaphone and played back at a local allotment. This was then re-recorded, along with ambient sounds of the surrounding area - bird song, wind, distant traffic etc.

A short section of the bell chimes were cut up and looped with a gated delay and reverb. This was slowly increased until the loop was completely saturated and totally unrecognisable.

For the last section of the piece, I digitally processed radio interference and other sounds, and introduced looped vocal samples, run through a granular synthesizer."

Composition by Grey Frequency.

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