There’s a wonderful scene in “Lost”, where the castaways find a radio and scan the airwaves, eventually finding some unidentifiable and timeless Hawaiian music as the sun sets.
That’s the thing about wireless. It’s everywhere, but ephemeral. You have to reach out to gather it in, and most of it lives only in the moment.
This is something that turned up via my “Save our Sprout” pop-up, courtesy of Kevin Carhart. He would sit in his dorm room in the 1990s, trawling the airwaves and recording the results; in doing so catching the gossamer filaments carried on the radio waves. And one such capture included Tom Schnabel on KCRW playing “Looking for Atlantis”.
Emerging out of the static on a warm evening. It’s not world changing or particularly significant, but I’m sitting on a beach on the other side of the world, and it seems to me there’s something deeply romantic and wonderful about it.
Lovely observations here.
The golden age of wireless 🙂
This is really slight, which is why I’m burying it on “my” old thread. But pull up a photo of the American politician Jeff Flake some time, and then squint your eyes. I have feelings of empathy when I look at the guy because he resembles a digitally morphed image of P&M circa Langley. Does he not? (Then I find out about Flake’s views, which throws cold water on empathy.)
Actually, writing this reminds me of the Golden Age of Music Listservs, and the carefree quality of posting about something no matter how flimsy. Around the same time that I was making my tape-music symphony from the dorms, I was also a subscriber to Ryan Bassler’s “PREFAB SPROUT E-MAIL NEWSLETTER”!
Which can be found here of course:
http://www.sproutology.co.uk/sproutbait/ryan-basslers-online-newsletter/