sonic sketchbooks
sonic sketchbooks
Categories: Arts
Listen to the last episode:
Around midnight of the 14th of December 2023 the Sun emitted an unusually strong solar flare - an unimaginably vast and powerful eruption of primary cosmic energy. The event was observed and monitored by terrestrial, atmospheric and space-wandering instruments of various government and scientific agencies of we, the humans. And with a welter of extraordinary imagery and catastrophic predictions, was reported widely in global media. This significant space weather event occurred while I was developing this episode in response to a prompt by longtime listener Philip Toydog to ‘do something with UTC’ - Coordinated Universal TIme - and more specifically the sonic experience of UTC familiar to many who have dabbled in listening to Short Wave or High Frequency radio transmissions. As a boy had a germanium crystal radio - a Japanese made SR-150 Science Egg Radio. The Egg in the title described its shape - a clear plastic egg containing a tangle of wires and a giant diode. It required no power - an alligator clip attached to anything metal (my bed frame) that would act as an aerial and a decidedly hospital-like mono earpiece was used to listen discreetly. Tuning was by winding a thin steel columnar screw up or down to locate AM signals. I did enjoy finding the ABC and listening to music programs, but I also enjoyed the spaces between, the ever varying static. A couple of decades later I bought a Sony World Radio with shortwave capability and explored the incredible ephemeral sounds of short wave transmissions coming from who-knew-where bouncing from the ionosphere. One of these was Coordinated Universal Time - a hypnotic crackle-and-fade 60 beats per minute pulsation periodically defined by two American-accented voices - a woman and a man - announcing, once a minute, the Universal Time moment about to be traversed. You can read about UTC in the usual places. Thinking back on my 80s and 90s interest in short wave radio, the enigmatic world of Number Stations came to mind, which in turn prompted a reminiscence of seeing Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film Orphee, at a tiny theatrette in a federal government building in Brisbane where cinemateque films borrowed from the National Library were screened maybe only once a month, on a Thursday night to an audience of maybe 20 subterranean cinephiles. One aspect of that film that fascinated me is the use of a car radio as a site where the titular angry self-obsessed poet listens to and transcribes surrealistic sentences declaimed (in French of course) by a resonant deep male voice, plagiarising transmissions perhaps emanating from the underworld of the dead. Jean Cocteau confirmed that this oracular radio was inspired by BBC radio broadcasts he heard during the Nazi occupation of France – mysterious apparent nonsense of numerals, words and musical fragments carrying coded messages from the British military to French resistance fighters during WW2. Prototypical examples of what would come to be known as Numbers Stations - tools of trade of state-based secret service organisations. There’s much more of course, but save to say this new composition crowds various of these inspirations together with my modular musings into a drifting enigmatic roll on the plasma sands of the ionospheric beach gazing into the stellar maw of our solar system as it coughs a chaotic bolus of x-rays and plasma our way. Gary Warner, 2023 Host/Composer, Sonic Sketchbooks podcast
Previous episodes
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78 - 79 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - UTC Tue, 19 Dec 2023
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77 - 78 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - two sketches Wed, 01 Nov 2023
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76 - 77 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - polytonal wander Tue, 17 Oct 2023
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75 - 76 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - JOHN CAGE 111 Tue, 05 Sep 2023
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74 - 75 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS Mon, 13 Feb 2023
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73 - 74 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - pleximetries Tue, 31 Jan 2023
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72 - 73 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - cicada song Tue, 24 Jan 2023
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71 - 71 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - in a soundscape Tue, 20 Dec 2022
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70 - 70 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - adrift Tue, 13 Sep 2022
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69 - 69 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - tumble Tue, 30 Aug 2022
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68 - 68 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - I couldn't find any trees Tue, 16 Aug 2022
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67 - 67 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - uncertainty Tue, 02 Aug 2022
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66 - 66 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - overheard Tue, 19 Jul 2022
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65 - 65 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - darkness Tue, 05 Jul 2022
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64 - 64 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - grumbling flowers Tue, 21 Jun 2022
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63 - 63 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - strangeness Tue, 07 Jun 2022
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62 - 62 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - It Is a Microphone Tue, 24 May 2022
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61 - 61 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - vespertine Tue, 10 May 2022
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60 - 60 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - Eugene Carchesio Tue, 26 Apr 2022
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59 - 59 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - unknowns Tue, 12 Apr 2022
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58 - 58 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - rivus Tue, 29 Mar 2022
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57 - 57 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - borderlands Tue, 15 Mar 2022
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56 - 56 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - a john berger reading Tue, 01 Mar 2022
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55 - 55 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - and I wondered Tue, 15 Feb 2022
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54 - 54 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - Labouring at Tanja Tue, 01 Feb 2022
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53 - 53 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - January 2022 Tue, 18 Jan 2022
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52 - 52 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - Chordata Tue, 28 Dec 2021
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51 - 51 SONIC SKECTHBOOKS - Lyra8 Tue, 21 Dec 2021
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50 - 50 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - soundplant Tue, 14 Dec 2021
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49 - 49 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - quicktime mixes Tue, 07 Dec 2021
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48 - 48 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - then Tue, 30 Nov 2021
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47 - 47 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - Palimpsest Tue, 23 Nov 2021
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46 - 46 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS Tue, 16 Nov 2021
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45 - 45 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - digital dusk Tue, 09 Nov 2021
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44 - 44 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - fragments Tue, 02 Nov 2021
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43 - 43 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - Hiroshima Mon, 25 Oct 2021
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42 - 42 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - Drone Tue, 19 Oct 2021
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41 - 41 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - Morphagene Tue, 12 Oct 2021
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40 - 40 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - below Tue, 05 Oct 2021
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39 - 39 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - To Higher Ground Tue, 28 Sep 2021
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38 - 38 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS Composition Tue, 21 Sep 2021
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37 - 37 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - Sorte Muld EMF Tue, 14 Sep 2021
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36 - 36 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - COMPOSITION Tue, 07 Sep 2021
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35 - 35 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - Kanazawa 25 May 2017 Tue, 31 Aug 2021
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34 - 34 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - SOMA ETHER Tue, 24 Aug 2021
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33 - 33 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - Tetsuya Umeda workshop Tue, 17 Aug 2021
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32 - 32 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - colourforms Mon, 09 Aug 2021
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31 - 31 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - Museum of Economic Botany Tue, 03 Aug 2021
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30 - 30 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - Kyoto Tue, 27 Jul 2021
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29 - 29 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - lockdown Tue, 20 Jul 2021