transparent abelard: Overwhelming Waves: Radio Wide World Narrated for Radiophrenia. Texts, Scores, Bibliography, Links, Additional Notes, Whatever Comes to Mind

listen via soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/jeff-gburek/overwhelming-waves-radio-wide-world-retrospective

listen/support via: https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/overwhelming-waves-let-the-black-crosses-fade-split-ep

"The cause of the six-sided shape of a snowflake is none other than that of the ordered shapes of plants and of numerical constants; and since in them nothing occurs without supreme reason—not, to be sure, such as discursive reasoning discovers, but such as existed from the first in the Creators's design and is preserved from that origin to this day in the wonderful nature of animal faculties, I do not believe that even in a snowflake this ordered pattern exists at random."

— Johannes Kepler

(text ad lib interpolation of Foucault's idea of "the visual gaze" in painting-- improvised, not rehearsed...transfer over to the guardianship of the ear -- riffing off the idea of the dromenon of Greek religious theater Jane Ellen Harrsion writes about -- where the audience member of a performance mimic the stage action mentally, physically, according to the entrained concept of the Eleusinian Mysteries -- the idea being that the listener is among many listeners and also imagines themselves as among the imaginary community of listeners whose listening is being heard -- ceaseless exchange ceaseless exchange ceaseless exchange ceaseless exchange ceaseless exchange

over the wide arcs of (always inner?) space// inner to what, enveloping who...

where I had a dream I was standing on top of the ionosphere

----_____----____----____----++++++____******************************

7/_______ I use radio noises the way a painters uses pigments, color, sono-pigments

After Twelve Comes Thirteen | Thirteen Comes Twelve (time reversal/rehearsal)

here on the trembling lip of the Anthropocene

the (g)listening dew

and the question spanning the late night hours...what has become of you? what have we become?

what have we done? (to the earth, mom)

"The moon, our own, earthly moon is bitterly lonely, because it is alone in the sky, always alone, and there is no one to turn to, no one to turn to it. All it can do is ache across the weightless airy ice, across thousands of versts, towards those who are equally lonely on earth, and listen to the endless howling of dogs."

ssssssso wrote Yevgeny Zamyatin, in 1923 in the his "Story About the Most Important Thing"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Zamyatin

....between 1987 and 1999 the American composer Pauline Oliveros

http://www.paulineoliveros.us/about.html

transmitted sounds to the moon

over 800,000 kilometers away

back and forth

384, 400 km

round-trip

in order to hear and

to play with the signal of our own voices bounced back

after a 2 and a half second interval -- some of the original signal being absorbed, lost in the craters of the moon -- or reflected into lost ears -- we don't whose --

-- although the moon had been grappled with physically by astronauts --this creative use of our nearest large stone neighbor employed radio specialists & transmitters

and the patience of listening to the sonosphere & latency

Echoes of the Moon is one of the most interesting radio-oriented music & interactive sound art pieces -- it reaches out into the sky --

in a gesture of human consciousness finding it's global limits

and it exemplifies what Douglas Kahn calls

the earth-scaled art & technologies

earth sounds have there own resonance regions

and on this journey we will explore the invisible via the audible

as I have capture the shortwave spectrum bouncing of the ionosphere

over the course of many years

here on the trembling lip of the Anthropocene

the glistening dew

what has become of us?

what has become of you?

this is the radio speaking

this is the radio behind (muted voice)

the radio speaking

and the radio between the stations (stuttered/gapped voice)

radio natur

radio mycorrhiza

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhiza

radio as a midnight nature portal

this is an essay of radio signal and radio noise

one could argue there has been an ongoing extinction of shortwave radio since the internet took to the air, the medium may itself be on it's last leg

but I am here to open the portal and to listen to what is still out there

what I'd like the listener ultimately to feel is the sense of the enveloping invisible radio spectrum, that it all around us as a kind of plasm, a super-organism, or a sheath of electromagnetic energy

that surrounds us -- connects us -- even without their being any focal point broadcast

[[ i think of it sometimes like the myco-rhizza, that symbiotic network of sharing between the fungus and the roots of green plants in the forest: hidden from view, sharing information packets of mineral nutrients, glucose and water back and forth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhiza

I wish you to come away with = ((((((((

a sense of mystery of the radio as multi-dimensional, time-traveling

potentiality for attunement --......

((0000OOOOOooooooooooooooooooooo

1) for neurological transformation, brain-change, re-wiringto become aware of fact that radio communicates not only broadcast information but also it's pure essence, it radiological pulsation

2) a materialist era proto-para-psychological aid

3) an immersion in deeper and therefore more subtle physicality

4) the experience of hearing something before it's meaning and usage is "invented"

5) the radio as The Open -- a wilderness of -- things as they are --

this is a plea to re-wild the planet

(by re-wilding the brain)

to listen in between to sounds unknown

-- an endless play between form and formlessness --

an open call to

fill your half-empty with the half-full

HELLO IN THERE!

this is Radiophrenia and I'm Jeff Gburek

sound artist from the USA

currently found bouncing signals in Eastern Europe

and yet

there's a good chance you are listening to this via a live stream

where things are smooth and reception good

but

Hey! this is Jeff Gburek

in the constructed world

and I'm here on a special TRANS mission, with another vision,

about the messier days of radio

when you had to turn the dial and there was interference

and indeterminacy like crazy

(voices noises)

(cable noise buzz)

that buzz you are getting is the Earth, the Ground

and more commonly the sound of the Earth resonating, sending

ripples of electromagnetic storms through the statistical static

and the distant buzz of the mind-night suns

(schumann resonance) https://www.brmi.online/post/2019/09/20/schumann-resonances-and-their-effect-on-human-bioregulation

My experience with the radio buzz began

many many years ago (1993 actually) while I was studying Italian literature in Firenze

there came a moment (that would recur)

wherein the radio became the ultimate poem or poetry

enter John Elmanahi -- voice over --

for after the witching hour there came a crackle between stations, a drift and mingling of sounds unconscious of one another, a luminous mega-brain flashing with oracles

and the veil of the radiosphere was suddenly flapping in the breeze

there was something about it so compelling and psychedelic and surreal

that I starting recording onto cassettes exactly what I could hear

Radio Wide World had been played on the radio in Montreal and in New Mexico

and later would be published in a 4 CD limited edition set, largely forgotten

until it came to the attention of media arts students and curators in Chicago (Jeff Kolar and Meredit Kooi)

where they ran a pirate radio stations and it would become a Radius feature in 2011

--- proof in here: https://theradius.us/episode11

--- support here: https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/track/remix-for-radius-fm-2012

these ionospheric crackles I would later learn

were in fact electrical storms off in the distances, very long distances

even potentially on the other side of the planet

there were the sweeping noise that reflected the earth's electromagnetic signature

whistlers and snaps -- of my static electricity --

know my own electro-magnetic field has sounded into the audio stream

when I touched the antenna a station would appear or a new metrnomic click

I too was some kind of transmitter, my own body had an aura that mingled with the ether

but nothing really changed all that much, just a sense of expansion of perception

was this transpercption? I called it the radiosphere...

We were bouncing around inside the bubble of the planet earth... still reflecting our biosphere... but later I learned

there were also extraterrestrial noises -- that I was listening to hybrid noise monsters --

the extraterrestrial noises were solar flares, coronal ejections,

Jovian and Saturnian flares and in discovering these phenomenon

brought me into contact with the works of Thomas Ashcraft

website here: http://www.heliotown.com/

(whom I will speak about/ quote from/ later in this program)

and we could also hear the sounds of radio signals bouncing off asteroids

and satellites and the ham radio operators and the spies

their numbers stations and their jamming frequencies

"Radio is not always a technological control device supplied with energy from a battery or plug in the wall; sometimes it is the energy"

but the most peculiar phenomenon of all

was hearing live signals burst into fragments,

split into several different streams, asteroid scatter,

sounds -- a Daffy Duck squawk and a quavering waveform --

and with this a strange repetition of the same message across the bandwidths

as if tra-versing several samsaras of signal

repeated signals -- the first was a Spanish broadcaster on one radio

then on another radio a few milliseconds later

the very same transmission but shunted down the timeline ((--0o0--))

but I was sitting in one room in small city in Tuscany, not moving at all

sometimes a delay between two radios tuned to the same position

but more puzzling was when the transmission would skip, float across the band

(the hams, I wasn't aware, I was in their range also)

there were many moments were I felt like I could be losing my mind

but as I continued these nightly seances

the style of skip and bounce was recognizable

even if not predictable -- and I could never force it

nor induce it's occurrence

it was this time-defying phenomenon that amused and mesmerized me the most

it was a spatialization and also somehow an orchestration of time

where was the wave that carried the sound? how did it bend and fold back?

did it move randomly in the swamp of signals

or was it a function of still other signals

that I had not been able to hear?

many years later I would learn about heterodynes, the literal science of wave-forms, encodings, much of which is technical, even beyond my vocabulary

-- but in I began to wonder if my radio was broken or that

my radio experiences were simply examples of the decline of western radiographic civilization, ordinary malfunctions --- but in 1993 the aesthetics of the broken and glitch hadn't yet been invented, the science of the mistake hadn't surfaced --

I was however experiencing in those evenings a kind of radio hey-day and its sweetly decadent swan-song -- by the year 2000 the internet had taken hold of listeners --

and with it the rich and strange cosmos of radiophonic noise would vanish

horror vacuui -- nature doesn't like a vacuum

a principle whose meaning has changed for me over the years

and in the case of the short, medium and long wave radio

meant that the curvature of space and time was never empty

that the static itself was some kind of substance

white noise they say was the flat mixture of all frequencies

but then again nothing is pure

in the radio spectrum there was a struggle of signals, a tumultuous interactivity

and slippage along the arrow of time

stations would disappear and in the gaps new stations would appear

that all things had interdependencies