Shipwreck Radio - June 22

It’s that time of year when a (no longer) young man’s thoughts turn naturally to the Sonic Structures and Enigmatic Episodes of Shipwreck Radio. Read the introduction to this series here.

JUNE 22 - SHIPWRECK RADIO: FINAL BROADCASTS

The first track we get to from, and coincidentally the first track off of, Final Broadcasts, it opens with the opening welcomes and chimes echoing wildly between the left and right channels. Then a ringing builds and pulls in a roar with it—the two samples, the ringing and the roar, almost vocal at times, swirl and play off each other, before they’re joined by a tone that’s almost like a crashing wave. Here are the three main components of the track, a simple audio palette that becomes something much greater; its hard not to picture a starlit walk, a little too dark to be truly safe, along a seaside cliff, the waves crashing below. At times you can almost hear voices calling out in the roaring wind, and as the ringing returns to cut through the nocturnal roars and crashes, it begins to sound more and more like an alarm. The night is dark and full of terrors, and as your mind roams with the track, the dark depths hinted at by the sounds here seem almost tempting, a call to a darker place, just hinted at, as the roars and howls of the sampled sounds, the ringing alarms, all seem to herald a darkness that would be cliché in a metal song. Here is a sense of the sinister that pulls us back through the eons, to that primal base of our brain which fears the gloom of the moonless night and thrills at it as well. 

Around the 12 minute mark, the roaring becomes more claustrophobic, seeming to echo down a murky tunnel. A low, profundo tone building in the background—a rumbling drone, like the deep drawn out moan of a demon cast up from the depths. The ringing reemerges slowly as well, building gradually until it’s overwhelmed by the roar, nearly a scream and then the tones of the track become more ragged. As we near the fifteen minute mark, it’s as though we’re caught in a tempest, thunder boiling in the distance, winds howling around us, the ringing calling out an alarm. There’s a gentle and soft rain-like sound that comes in after the 16 minute mark, but it’s quickly overwhelmed by the alarum of the ringing, insistent and blaring before it fades, leaving us with the moaning wind before it bursts in again, loud and disquieting, before fading back. This repeats again, the ringing more muddled as the track passes the 18 minute mark, nearly becoming a scream, the ringing sample stretched nearly to breaking as it cries out, ebbing a little, but lasting over a minute until the profundo drone in the background is left to carry us along. 

The ringing tries to return several times, bubbling up in the background, is joined by a metallic scraping, but can’t quite break above the boil of the bass tone of the background until 20:30 when it seems to crash into the low towns, a churn of the ringing and hissing swirling together, the moaning voices tossed up momentarily out of the seething. It fades away near the twenty third minute, only to return, more sibilant as the hissing dominates, then giving way to metallic wails. The wails fly above the low oceanic background tones and by the twenty six minute mark almost fade away, taking a place in the background as the ringing returns, lower, sounding at first like a crashing wave, then growing slower and lower as the track settles into a descent, the last winds of a storm rushing away, light on the horizon as the clouds crack and break, leaving one with the impression of a danger just passed, but knowing the danger could someday return.