Radio Chthulucene 87.9 FM

I want the quarter to be over but I don’t want to graduate.

I’ve been thinking a lot about a lot about.

I find myself resorting to math even though I don’t know how to do math.

I didn’t listen to any of Lost Children Archive this week. It’s kind of a dense book. I will finish it. It reminds me a lot of my favorite video game, Kentucky Route Zero, which is also a kind of unconventional road trip. The magical realism in the latter is much more an overtone than an undertone though. It was made by art installationists and reads like a book; the only “gameplay” is picking dialogue even though your choices don’t affect anything other than the tone, the mood, what someone might have said. Sometimes when I put Lost Children Archive on, I feel like my choice hasn’t affected anything. Except the book is on. A child is reading grown-up thoughts in my ear. What was said.

I feel like I am having trouble distinguishing fiction and reality. I’ll find myself in thought for up to ten minutes at a time, imagining things that were never said by people I know, by friends. I’ll feel all those emotions, all the anger, frustration, joy—then I’ll realize that none of it happened. But having gone through the emotions, it also feels like it did happen. Because I went through it. At least in miniature.

I finished moving is a euphemism for death. 

I sat on the floor most of the day, recording my audio project. I wanted to incorporate the environment I was recording in. I left all the windows open; there’s a seagull squawk somewhere in there. That makes me happy. Some stray conversations with my roommate are included. That’s an addition. Some of the textual elements are not included. That’s a subtraction. I think of the audio and text as complimentary of one another, but not the same. I think of the move between mediums as an auto-translation, and like any translation, some things are lost and some are gained in the process.

At least for me, it is impossible to read two lines of text at once. But with audio editing, that happens many times in my radio project. I have also been listening a lot to soundscape artist Felicia Atkinson’s work, which incorporates whispers and field recordings into ambient-textured music. Another reason why I wanted the room to be a character in the recording. I also tried to do some ASMR-like actions to add texture into the recording—I jangled keys, made popping sounds with my mouth, hit my fingernails on a water bottle. A mistake happened where the button to record registered on all the audio files, but I kept them in because it signals a transition, kind of like an auditory turning of the page. It sounds a little glitchy and I like that too.

This is one of the last things I’m writing in my time as an undergraduate. One of the first creative projects I did was also an audio project that incorporated overlapping voices and ASMR. It feels very full circle. To begin and end on audio. 

I remember living in the valley—mountains three-hundred and sixty degrees. Every car on the highway echoed. Every cow moo. Every voice. The sound of harvest, almonds falling onto the gravel ground. I captured all of it with my ears, without realizing. If I have learned anything about art practice at UCSD, it’s to build an environment where the most mistakes might happen. And to capture everything.