Shipwreck Radio - June 6

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 6 - SHIPWRECK RADIO VOLUME TWO

The opening welcome is echoey and slightly tinny; after the beeps the track goes silent or nearly silent, then the soundscape slowly bleeds back in. First a ghostly and wavering tone, then a slowly building, cyclical plastic rhythm. On top of that, around three and a half minutes in, a second and more metallic melody is folded in, to complete the base of the song. It’s pure Nurse With Wound, simple in its components, yet rich, mesmerizing but still slightly unsettled and unsettling. Just after 5 minutes the next ingredients are added, first a juttering, mechanical sample that crashes through the tones and plastic rhythm in varying volumes, then another, more sinister tone that comes to lurk in the background, complementing and complicating that first ghostly tone. At some point you realize that something like a muted string line is also hiding in the background, building and emerging around the ten minute mark, as the mechanical juttering becomes more frequent and insistent, becoming nearly constant in the next minute, then fading again. The plastic rhythm starts to seem insectoid, the string like tone threatening to crest the surface of the song as the thirteenth minute arrives and then slipping back below the surface again. Now the plastic rhythm floats, chitinously, and nearly alone above the still spectral tones, until the song begins to fade, the juttering machine making several muted returns, but never breaking through as it did before, though it takes the plastic rhythm with it as it exits, leaving the uncanny tones that opened the song to wane again into silence as the song finishes. A phantom silence to end the track as it begins, an uncertain quiet, almost pulsing with the imagined tones of what came before.