Radio Chthulucene 87.9 FM

For some reason I thought last week’s blog was the last blog. 

I set up my radio last Saturday. It’s nestled on a metal shelf near a first aid kit and a cardboard box of individually wrapped alcohol wipes for cleaning glasses. I used one to clean my computer screen, which was covered in fingerprints. I left a note near the radio, Student Project—Very Safe!—Do not touch! There were some concerns. I also left a printed version of the project next to the radio. Last I checked, it was still undisturbed. 

I think it’s ok if nobody hears my radio. The waves are still there, going through people’s bodies, only unconverted to audible form. I have been thinking a lot about environment, venn diagrams, and invisibility as it relates to identity. I remember a lot of things from my childhood that I didn’t understand at the time, but gave me context for when I finally could understand. Most of my easy examples are sexual innuendos from The Simpsons, which I was watching out the womb. But other things too: bird species, latin words, types of trees, the word “monocot.” My dad always answered all my questions; even if he didn’t know the answer he’d make something up. With confidence.

I think it’s those nearly invisible, passing things that affect us. I’ve been thinking about well water, which I’ve drunk most of my life. All the agricultural chemicals that must be in my body. I wonder what they’ve affected about me. Have yet to. I wonder if my radio might have a similar effect. If it might be affecting people on such subconscious levels that noone will ever measurably notice. I’d like to think so. I think there’s so many things like that in our lives everyday. Things we will never notice. The radio is purposeful. My brother has a parakeet that sings day in, day out. I can’t hear it unless my family points out he’s being loud. There’s a bird now in my head that sings in the absence of sound. I’d like to think there are things our bodies hear if not our ears.

I’m happy with my project. I don’t think it’s done. I think I could be playing with parentheses forever. It made me wish I’d taken a math class. I keep resorting to math to figure things out recently, but I don’t have the language for it. Which sucks. I’m happy with where it went, where it ended up. I’m happy with what it sounds like. I’m happy with the use of overlapping voices and the bits of ASMR. 

This whole quarter I’ve had someone’s voice not my own but coming from me repeating I wanted to love you with my teeth. I don’t know what I’m going to do with that. I wanted to love you with my teeth. I wanted to. I went. I was. Always was. Was always. I lame, limped. I tried to get an interlibrary loan of Spectres from Shelter Press. It’s a little book—its form a reciprocal, prismatic English and French, just flip it over vertically to switch—of short excerpts, pseudo-essays—blogs maybe about experimental musicians’ music, written of and by themselves.

I put the request in and the library sent me Spectres I, Spectres II, and Spectres III. They actually sent Spectres II first, which I picked up last Thursday. I don’t know why they sent the whole series. I only asked for the first one. The theme of Spectres II is resonance. The last excerpt is from Layland Kirby, about his project The Caretaker, which takes old vinyl records—mostly ballroom music and older than old oldies—and records them from a semi-broken turntable. It’s all twigs in summer—crackles like fireworks, reworks and repetition. But slow motion. He puts this somewhat human-induced somewhat time-induced degradation in conversation with memory and illnesses which interact with memory. 

He recounts going to a record store in New York. He buys a random box of oldies. Records it all on something broken. He self-releases the re-recordings. And something like 20 or 30 years into his career, it’s his break-out album: An Empty Bliss Beyond This World. Kirby says he abandoned the record store crawl after he bought the box. His friends continued; apparently the next store they went into, they were playing Kirby’s The Caretaker music. Kirby says he still hasn’t ever heard his own music in a public place.

And all that I read in a book I never requested. Randomness, I guess. Chance. Spectres. Resonances. Reticence.

My radio on the metal shelf for a week, transmitting my voice as silence.