The end of radio

"There’s something inherently intimate, even clandestine about radio – sound sent into the ether in the hope of reaching an ear. We feel much more personally and directly connected with someone speaking to us via radio than, say, television. There’s an added poignancy in the recording of the final hours of broadcast of Radio St Helena that forms the basis of this track, a sense of the condemned awaiting its final extinction and contemplating its fate. I imagined these radio waves echoing around the world beyond their production, slowly dissipating and fading into nothingness. A drone texture, created by stretching the bell signal heard at the start, forms the backdrop to an abstracted monologue created from samples of speech taken from the broadcast and re-edited together, that begins in clarity and close presence and slowly transforms to a distant echo of itself."

Composition by Peter Nagle.

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