Stereo radio work | 26′06″
With Robert Gregory, text and voice
Commissioned by New American Radio at the invitation of Helen Thorington
Tracing the Radio Landscape (1992) | 26′06″ | Stereo radio work commissioned by New American Radio. The linked archive file includes the original New American Radio introduction and outro. Complete recording preserved in the New American Radio Archive at Wave Farm.
Featured image: reconstruction of the Philips FX744A radio, turntable and reel-to-reel console I remember from childhood. The shortwave radio used to create Tracing the Radio Landscape was portable.
ABOUT TRACING THE RADIO LANDSCAPE
Tracing the Radio Landscape began as a series of listening tests. At the time, I was moving between the living rooms of several friends and family members. I carried the same portable shortwave radio with me, setting up temporary listening sites to discover whether moving through the broadcast spectrum would produce similar or different results in each location.
The domestic environments were not themselves the subject of the recordings. My attention remained primarily on the radio and on what became audible through it. I moved continuously through the spectrum, sometimes pausing when a signal or sound attracted my attention. I would also adjust the radio and recording levels to bring forward or verify faint information suggested by what I was hearing.
I attempted a comparable exploration in each living room, although the amount of time available to me varied from one location to another. The title refers principally to this movement through the broadcast spectrum: tracing an unstable landscape made of signals, interference, distant voices, fragments of music, and radio silence.
The recordings were made in mono. Shortwave listening, however, does not necessarily develop into a composition on its own. Much of the collected material contained long periods during which very little happened. Because the commission required a work of broadcast duration, I used the computer to select and organize the recorded material, concentrating the discoveries and composing the completed work in stereo.
The process was similar to one I would later use in Tone Poem in Surround: finding audibles within a larger body of recorded material and arranging them so their conjunction could suggest relationships that were not evident in the uninterrupted recordings.
Bob Gregory responded to the sounds as I selected and organized them. Radio offered him especially rich material, and the text he developed was correspondingly dense. Once the soundtrack had been composed, Bob performed his text in the studio against it, following a process related to the one we had used in Portrait: Bob Gregory. His words became another way of moving through the radio landscape—not an explanation of what had been found, but an interpretive presence within it.
The completed work follows the act of searching: moving, pausing, amplifying, losing, and finding information within a medium whose content and conditions remain beyond the listener’s control.
CREDITS
Gustavo Matamoros — concept, shortwave-radio recordings, sound composition and production
Robert Gregory — text and voice
Lenn Perskie — recording engineer, Toucan Studios, Miami
Helen Thorington / New American Radio — commission