Colonial ghosts

"The original recording was just over an hour of a Channel Africa news broadcast from (I think) Oct 3, 2014 being broadcast from Johannesburg, South Africa. Channel Africa is a broadcaster that uses multiple media (radio, internet radio, shortwave) to reach as wide an audience throughout the continent of Africa as possible. However, despite their current noble efforts, Channel Africa is the former broadcast network of the South African Apartheid regime. This legacy (and the fact that the broadcast is in English among several colonial as well as native languages) speak to the colonial ghosts and hauntings of the title. The hauntings were also present in the stories covered including those of independence, war, plague, and climate change. The goal with the piece was to highlight this haunted and haunting quality of the news broadcast through a work of noise/ambient music. 

I ran a copy the whole sample through several effects including a significant speeding up. I also isolated several interesting sections and several random sections of different length that I then effected, scrambled, and layered. Some samples were used as drum sounds others as drones, and others as vague melodies. This was combined with a generative synthesizer melody created with MiiRack, also heavily processed. This was a multistep process that went through several iterations before reaching its final version."

Composition by Celestial Noise Disco (aka Aaron Zwintscher).

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