Desert Radio Kuwait

 "My inspiration for the piece was imaging the fragmented sounds of snippets of radio chatter and music crossing the Kuwaiti desert carried by the desert winds. The voices and music fragments forming ghostly echoes as if the listener is acting as a radio tuning in and out to hundreds of unknown transmissions.

"I used the original recording in a number of ways, firstly to create a number of layered drones, representing the desert emptiness as a well as the idea of a generator for an internal radio receiver. This formed the desert ambience where selections of speech and music were laid out in time for form fragmented voices. Each voice was manipulated from simple panning across the stereo field, to more intense distortions and added glitch/reverberation processing. Some of the vocal snippets were cleaned in Izotope RX to reduce the frequency content to allow for more intense processing without extraneous frequency content. 

"I picked out sections from the original recording which I felt spoke to me, although hardly speaking any Arabic, I chose phrases and sections which resonated with me and spoke to me."

Composition by Neil Spencer Bruce.

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