Previous links and posts about radio:
My iPad Is A Radio – converting dying devices for extended uses
Shipwreck Radio – Nurse With Wound’s art-music broadcasts
That Was Very Fine – fun quote about German radio art
ANTIDAWN, Burial – radio is always a strong theme in his work
Ganymede Series 01 Watch Arrived – weird radio-dial watch
Beckett And The BBC Radiophonic Workshop – true story
Heart Of The Island – vaguely adjacent, my visit to the British Library sound archives
Reading this Wirecutter review of “tabletop radios,” as I guess they’re called now, made me want one.
I use an old Echo Spot in the kitchen for radio, as well as for access to Amazon Music, and the sound quality doesn’t seem to me to be much different from the radio sets of my youth. When I was a kid, the radio was always on in the kitchen, and, growing up, it was my little lifeline to culture and discovery. John Peel, Annie Nightingale, Alexis Korner, Linton Kwesi Johnson. I’m sure it’s just memory and nostalgia that made me instantly think, wow, I’d love a radio on the kitchen counter with a proper dial. I don’t need one, obviously. But I’m bookmarking it anyway, against that time in the future when I don’t have access to the internet and still need that little lifeline to the world of sound.
Listening to: Radio Mothership, out of Woodbridge.
Posts about notebooks and work:
Notebook Processing (inspired by Jeff Lemire’s notebook practise)
John Rogers On Using Notebooks In Your Daily Creative Work
Printernet Notebook, Non-Networked
Going Analogue, Returning To Digital
As a writer, looking for evidence of readership and engagement on Twitter makes you into the drunk looking for your lost keys under the street light.
I still remember that – remember being sent to quantify it by publishers and other entities, even — and I wish someone had said the above to me then.
Somehow forgot to log this one.
Travelogue [Nepal] is the first in a series of collected international audio diaries. The premise is quite simple: the two galavant the globe with field-, EVP- and phone recorders and other devices where they record the essence of everything from the tiniest microcosms of nature on up to the polluted, diesel–fuelled roars of postmodern globalization. What surfaced are soundtracks that act as sonic documentaries of their travels.
I like combinations of ambient and field recordings, but they don’t always have the warm, human organic feel of this. Even the recordings of machines seem to have human voices in them.
One of those moments where I fully acknowledge and appreciate the privilege of being able to hear and own such things.
Four writers and their notebooks:
I was not surprised by the number of notebooks in which Henry James recorded his ideas for stories – he had an intensely active mind, a vivid imagination and, being social – a constant diner-out – he was the recipient of all sorts of snippets, gossip and asides. And he was lonely, another trait of the note-taker. It is not a surprise that he did not get around to using all this material. Some writers struggle to come up with a new idea. Others keep notebooks.
Publication of The Believer magazine is returning to originating entity McSweeney’s, after the people they sold it to, The Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, sold it on to a clickbait farm, who placed it under the purview of a content vertical called the Sex Toy Collective.
Jason Arias on designing the cover for the novel TIME SHELTER: this is not the one that got used, but it’s my favourite of the versions, with that Hilma af Klint vibe:
A section of my podcast list for your amusement:
If you’re on an iPhone, do not for god’s sake use the Apple Podcast app. I use Downcast, lots of people recommend Overcast or Pocket Casts.
This offering offers a purified approach to Undirheimar’s sound with a more simplistic and constant pulse, inviting the listener to let go of any attachments to ordinary reality and fall in the black abyss of the primordial chaos-void. An immersive ritual experience of raw, Thursian shamanism and sonic sorcery.
The people at Cyclic Law just have great taste, as far as I’m concerned. This is going to go right next to Phurpa on the shelf.
Inside, Jackson Lamb squatted in an armchair like a yeti in a biscuit tin: spilling over its edges, but not seeming to care.
BAD ACTORS, Mick Herron