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Short Wave · Oct 31, 02:11 PM

In a redundant and romantic gesture, I’ve gone and bought a short-wave radio. Not something one really needs in the internet era. It’s the sound I want of course. Not that incorporating morse, ether chatter and doppler voices howling through static storms is a new idea. Many antecedents for that in recorded music. It’s just a journey in my own nostalgia, and that’s something that informs my music, along with the desire to incorporate the implied sense of space when sound comes along radio waves…. voices floating on air from here to there. I don’t know why direct cables don’t carry the same feeling — the purity perhaps? Space is such a fragile concept sometimes. I want to remember the distances travelled along with the yearning for intimacy.

Or as I wrote over a decade ago, in the first paragraphs of Music Matters, my memoir and assessment of music, music and place:

I am lying on the floor playing with the short wave radio. Weak evening sun creeps through the gaps in the tree branches behind the house. Attenuating with infinite patience, the distinction between Berlin and Benin, I am stretched and dissipated through space, my spirit dreaming: it’s with sound that I move past mountains. With the slip of a finger comes the song of static and ether, broken only by the obtuse chatter of intermittent Morse code and faraway music; with every inflection of guitar timbre and voice, I hear the articulate expression of an intimacy that can barely be spoken of in the conscious, spoken for, life. Through song I feel the character of each land, the nuance of its people, the correlation with my self. I embrace each individual piece of sonic architecture as one that houses a universal human spirit. This landscape is that of pop music from around the globe.

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