Available
Onda, Aki
Transmissions From The Radio Midnight
"This project, entitled 'Transmissions From The Radio Midnight,' started around 2006, when I acquired a Sony TCM F59 -
an AM/FM radio and cassette recorder combined in a slim, handheld body. Since then, whenever I went on a trip, I would
throw it into my suitcase and take it around with me. No matter which country I was in, upon returning to the hotel room
I made a habit of listening to the radio into the late hours of the night. As soon as I would snuggle into bed, I would
begin tuning the radio in search of a program that I liked. If I concentrated intently on my fingers controlling the
knob, I could sometimes catch two or three frequencies at once and hear the overlap of different languages. Otherwise I
would scan through frequencies and jump around programs to hear the juxtaposition of different languages, such as
Spanish, Swedish, French, Polish, Arabic, Korean, among others. There was no greater joy than the moment in which I
would begin to hear these languages, which were foreign to me, not as words but as aural texture. Was I enjoying
text-sound compositions with alien words? Perhaps it was the abstract fusing of these lingual sounds. It was, at the
very least, something akin to sound poetry. I would often fall asleep while doing this - and so, just as often, the
radio would continue playing in my dreams. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I would wake up to the high-pitched
beep of a test tone bouncing off the walls of the hotel room. On other occasions I would awaken in the mornings to some
unknown program, or, if the tuning was off, simply static noise. For this album, I selected some of my favorite segments
from the recordings made in ten-or-so countries over the span of roughly a decade, beginning in 2008. All of the
fragments are presented just as they were captured. Since frequency behavior is often unpredictable, and since the act
of catching waves was done manually, the recordings capture all sorts of incidental sounds, including various kinds of
static noise and radio interference. The radio is like an ocean of languages. It continuously projects a million
chatterings happening simultaneously all over the world. This album captures and presents a tiny drop of this ocean,
while the ocean itself flows onward - enormous, endless, infinite - for as long as the medium itself lasts. Isn't that
amazing?" ~Aki Onda, September 20, 2022. "This album is based on my previous cassette, 'Voice Studies 17,' released in
2013 by London-based label My Dance The Skull. Subsequently, in 2022, I re-edited these materials and incorporated more,
previously unheard, material. All sounds recorded by Aki Onda with an AM/FM radio and cassette recorder between 2008 and
2018. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Cover art by Aki Onda.
Price
€ 28.95
Genre
Format
LP - 1 disk
Release
15-09-2023
Label
Item-nr
538165
EAN
0000000000000
Availability
Exp. 15-09-2023