Shipwreck Radio - July 28

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.

 

JULY 28 - SHIPWRECK RADIO VOLUME TWO

Here we are, the final chronological track of Shipwreck Radio—it starts with the opening chimes and welcomings stretched and compressed like taffy. After the opening, we get the low rumble, slowly building in the background, and then a shrieking whistling, that will dominate the track, comes piercing in. Around a minute, a ghostly wavering tone, like a moaning wind joins as well. Sometimes the whistling takes on a more ringing quality, but sometimes it's just piercing and biting as it floats above the ghostly moans and low background rumble.
These sonic structures swirl and dance slowly as the track glides along, both soothing and sharp. At six and a half minutes the moaning wind is turned into a soft, stuttering beat, before it fades away, replaced by a new wind that floats quietly behind the now grinding high pitch. At ten minutes the high tones double, into a buzzing and a ringing as the wind sweeps behind them. The whistling begins to peak at higher and higher tones, piercing into your skull as it dares you to turn off the track, the gentle wind blowing in to provide a comforting layer to retreat to when the shrill tone fades for a second, right up until the 15th minute when the whistle fades quickly ushering in the end of the track.

Shipwreck Radio - July 24

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.

JULY 24 - SHIPWRECK RADIO VOLUME ONE

Another eerily meditative track, July 24 starts with the opening chimes sped up and the opening welcomes given a warbling effect. Then we get the low rumbling, dragging sample, that sounds like a stick being dragged along corrugated metal at the bottom of an abyss. Building on top of that comes another mechanical rumbling, creating an intertwining rhythm that is joined by an more electronic jutter around two minutes. The stuttering fades in and out, and by three minutes, it’s clear that the origin of the stutter is a bit of unrecognizable vocal sample.
As the track continues its ruminative rumbling, higher tinny metallic rings enter, some sounding almost like cymbal crashes as the base rumble chugs along, the juttering carried along with it. The track continues to seethe, daring you to dive into it and stay afloat on its churning sonic surface; the patterns may repeat, but they are just off-sync enough to the aural ocean choppy and unsteady as the various sonic structures fade in and out, some becoming clearer for a moment, almost recognizable before being pulled under into the jostling of the track.
Near the fourteen minute mark, the last ingredient is added, a sound like a metallic cord, being twanged that evokes a kind of noisy , almost rubbery, chewing sound as it echoes, repeats and is processed and put into play with the swirl of the other sounds. Then finally, a metallic crash and the sound of a dropped metal bar closes out this track, the unsettled groove that had carried it along abruptly gone, a bracing finish for a track that dares you to attempt to follow it.

Shipwreck Radio - July 21

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.

 

JULY 21 - SHIPWRECK RADIO VOLUME TWO

In many ways this is a prototypical Shipwreck Radio track, it starts with the greeting and welcoming charms sped up slightly and then repeats them slowed down moves seamlessly into the track as a main. It’s got all the elements we’ve come to expect from Shipwreck Radio songs, the ringing metallic sample, rushing roars and waves that could be vocal samples. The rushing roars, like rough choppy waves, make up the base of the track, sometimes rumbling in the background and sometimes surging to the foreground. The metallic ringing is joined by a low metallic scraping and both those periodically crest above the roar of the background.
Around the five minute mark a tinny metallic reverberation joins which is followed by the more familiar ringing, the track remaining resonant and reminiscent of previous Shipwreck Radio songs, while also remaining distinct, faster in tempo than many of the other tracks that mine the same vein of Sturm und Drang sonic structure of the low rumbling waves and ringing metal. At nine minutes it becomes a cacophony, more insistent and urgent in feel than the earlier tracks, which featured a menace that built slowly, where this track hits you at times like a torrent of water. The pace and insistency are maintained until the 14th minute when, abruptly, the track begins to slowly fade away, the roar waning and deteriorating until it breaks apart into silence.
Here again is another Shipwreck Radio track that successfully walks that uncanny line of familiar samples and complex and interesting structure.

Better In My Day Mix

 

in honor of the upcoming anniversary of my birth, a selection of songs that is equal parts tongue in cheek memento mori, peculiar birthday allusions & references with a few aspirational touches to complete the mix.

 Ich gehe jetzt

Das Biest ist noch nicht richtig wach
aber auch noch lange nicht hinueber
Grad hat es sich hin und her gewaelzt
und im Schlaf mit den Zähnen geknirscht

Ich gehe jetzt

Nach mir die Flut
nach mir Tornados
nach mir Tsunamis & Säuberungen
nach mir die Härte
die Kälte die Dürre die Glut
mehr als je zuvor seitdem der Mensch denkt
Es wird Zeit
das die Erde sich endlich verspinnt
sich verwandelt aus der Hülle sprengt
Ich gehe jetzt

#	Artist	Track
1	Gazelle Twin	Better In My Day
2	Teho Teardo & Blixa Bargeld	Still Smiling
3	The Fall	50 Year Old Man
4	The Damage Manual	Top Ten Severed
5	The Birthday Party	Happy Birthday
6	The The	I’ve Been Waitin’ For Tomorrow (All Of My Life)
7	Nurse With Wound	July 21
8	Shallow Gravy	Jacket (Live At Timmy’s Birthday)
9	Chris Connelly & William Tucker	July
10	Foetus	Time Marches On
11	The Young Gods, Dälek	About Time
12	Current 93	Black Ships Ate The Sky
13	Einstürzende Neubauten	Ich gehe jetzt

Shipwreck Radio - July 18

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.

JULY 18 - SHIPWRECK RADIO VOLUME TWO

The opening welcoming and chimes flow in like waves, then the track launches into a melancholic and haunting melody that sounds like ghostly voices. The undulate and shift slightly, several choruses folding in on top of each other, forming a constantly changing pattern of haunting moans. Behind the chorus float brassy samples, echoing the voices as they dance around each other. There’s a pause near the halfway point, with a few seconds of silence, before the chorus begins again, the peaks and valleys of the flowing melody growing more pronounced. While the track never grows complex, it also avoids the issue that July 13 had, of being too simplistic and expected; instead the swirling and pensive choruses of moans and brassy samples remain dynamic, never settling into a tedium.

Mittwoch Mix - Covered Platter - Tasting Menu Mix

Continuing my Tasting Menu Mixes, the Covered Platter mix, like the previous mixes, features twenty of my favorite bands & musical artists, either covering another artist or traditional song or being covered, combining this Tasting Menu project and my perverse love of cover songs.

#	Artist	Track	Original Artist
1	Gazelle Twin	Heartbeat	Wire
2	Sunn O)))	Che	Suicide
3	Chris Connelly, Wiliam Tucker	Search and Destroy	The Stooges
4	Cold Specks	We No Who U R	Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
5	The Soundcarriers	The Seventh Seal	Scott Walker
6	Boris	Fundamental Error	Gudon
7	Justin Broadrick	Harvey	Earth
8	Pig Orchestra	Are ‘Friends’ Electric?	Tubeway Army
9	The Young Gods	Speak Low	Kurt Weill
10	Nurse with Wound	Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair	Traditional
11	Foetus	Shrunken Man	The The
12	Einstürzende Neubauten	On Patrol In No Man’s Land	James Reese Europe
13	Los Bitchos	Trapdoor	King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard
14	The Legendary Pink Dots	Super	Neu!
15	Crime and the City Solution	Motherless Child	Traditional
16	Elysian Fields	The Indifference of Heaven	Warren Zevon
17	Blixa Bargeld	Soul Desert	Can
18	Andrew Liles	Unnatural Thing	UFO
19	Coil	Going Up	Ronnie Hazlehurst
20	Current 93	Idumæa (feat. Shirley Collins)	Charles Wesley

Shipwreck Radio - July 13

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.

JULY 13 - SHIPWRECK RADIO: FINAL BROADCASTS

The opening chimes and welcome are nearly uncanny in their clarity, then the track goes right to a heavily processed vocal sample and already unrecognizable phrase where the only intelligible words are “Shipwreck radio“. The sample repeats, each time more processed than the last, the sounds drawn out into long buzzing drones. Between each iteration, is a silence, which, like the quickly inhuman sounding vocal sample, is drawn out longer and longer each time. This, unfortunately, is my least favorite of the Shipwreck Radio tracks, unlike many of the other tracks which seem deceptively simple, this one is just… simple, with the repeating (if longer each time) pattern of processed buzzing vocal sample and then silence. Most other tracks would establish a pattern and then subvert or break it, but regrettably, this is not the case with July 13. There is no surprise awaiting you down in the depths of July 13 as it drags on for 30 minutes, the pattern is establish early and drags on, with the only predictable change of each iteration being longer than the last…But one lackluster track out of the twenty that comprise the Shipwreck Radio sessions? That’s not bad at all.

Shipwreck Radio - July 10

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.

JULY 10 - LOFOTEN DEADHEAD

The track begins with the opening chimes and welcome distorted to nearly the point of unrecognizability, and then instead of leaving that behind, as many of the other tracks do, it seems to use that initial distortion as the base of the track. That is joined by barely audible gull caws, manipulated to sound more like chirps creep into the background; the initial distortion still churning, until a metallic and electronic scraping tone is added near the two and a half minute mark. The distortion surges at the three minute mark, boiling over, the electronic scrape caught in the maelstrom and chop, the chirp of the gulls circling above like ill omens. 

The scraping becomes a buzzing near the five minute mark, cutting through the eddies of the distortion but this break doesn't last long and the distortion swells and crashes by the six minute mark—waves of it breaking upon the shore of the soundscape, the gulls still calling out ominously against the storm. The scraping is gone and we're left with the surges and roils of the distortion until after the nine minute mark when the scrapes make their resurgence, clearer and crisper now as the distortion seethes around it. After the eleven minute mark the distortion splits, and a lighter distortion bubbles on top of the deeper rumbling, like foam on storm waves, the gulls returning to chime their warnings as the track remains tempestuous, refusing to ever give in to quiet or calm until the very last seconds.

Shipwreck Radio - July 8

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.

JULY 8 - LOFOTEN DEADHEAD

The opening track off the Lofoten Deadhead companion album, it begins with the opening chimes and welcomes slowed down—sounding as though they were descending slowly into a bottomless abyss. Then the track begins in earnest, with what sounds like a mournful low brass melody, a gentle ringing metallic rhythm above it. At the two and a half mark, a slowed and stretched gull caw joins this melancholy pondering, with less processed gull calls following it a minute later. The bird calls increase in frequency and variety as the mournful brass and chiming metal continue, giving the impression of a somber and clouded afternoon on the seashore. 

After the six minute mark, we get a brief bit of waves and then the low brass and chiming fade out, giving way to bird calls and more sounds of waves, a hint of footsteps on a rock shore. The melancholy is gone; giving way to a slightly sinister set of stretched electronic tones below the bird calls by the eight minute mark and then after the nine and half minute mark strange echoing and highly processed bird calls join the more naturalistic ones, giving one the impression of going to an uncanny shore as the processed bird calls drown out the unprocessed ones. The calls are largely alien in sound after the eleven minute mark—strange high chirps and stretched out warbling caws, whistlings and noises that echo as though you’ve left the shore for a strange dark cave; a long way from the gloomy shore the song began at. In the final moments of the song the bird calls are entirely electronic sounding, more like the chirping of robots than any organic life. 

While I must admit a preference for the slow and mournful beginning of the song, the slow transition of the bird calls from natural to artificial sounding provides an excellent example of how the natural sounds gathered by Nurse With Wound in Lofoten can be transformed; the calls echoing at the end reverberate not just in the soundscape but also with the weight of their original nature.

Mittwoch Mix - Cold Star Mix

Einstürzende Neubauten's "Kalte Sterne" might be a perfect song—it is, at the very least, always somewhere in my top ten list of songs. Here then, is a mix anchored by that slice of near-perfect noise pop with other songs that straddle noise, ambience, dread, dance and joyful hopelessness.

wir sind alle Monde dieser Welt

alle Sonnen dieser Welt

aber nach uns kommt nichts mehr

kalte Sterne

(Sieh zu wie wir funkeln)

#	Artist	Track
1	Noveller	The Thing
2	Einstürzende Neubauten	Kalte Sterne
3	Tiny Star	Galaxies
4	KMFDM	Moon
5	Seeming	Name Those Stars
6	How to Destroy Angels	And the Sky Began to Scream
7	John Carpenter	Night (Zola Jesus and Dean Hurley Remix)
8	Xordox	Dark Matter
9	Pye Corner Audio	Stars Shine Like Eyes
10	Zonal	Black Hole Orbit
11	Temple Ov Saturn	The Stars Will Fall When Death Approaches
12	Sister Machine Gun	Cold Star
13	Chemlab	The Moon (Deadliner – Suture Remix)

Shipwreck Radio - July 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.

JULY 6 - SHIPWRECK RADIO VOLUME ONE

Here is another track where the opening chimes are drawn out into a stutter and the welcome is processed into a pulse that barely hints at the original source. Once that sputtering opening has passed, we move into a low sonorous tone with a gentle gonging rhythm riding upon it. Alongside the metallic, gonglike ringing, there’s an almost cymbalic, dragging metal tone that builds and repeats. As the song approaches the four minute mark, all these sounds build and intensify, then a pair of hissing whistles joins, slicing through the sonic structure of the track, setting the stage for the heart of the track; the low and gentle thrum of the base tones, the meditative rhythm of the two metallic elements, like gongs in a peaceful temple, and then the disquieting whistles, complicating and breaking the otherwise pensive soundscape. 

The hissing divides and dances with itself, nearly drowning out the underlying sounds as we approach the seven and a half minute mark, the meditative opening of the song seeming to fade away, a mere reminder as the whistling dominates the track, lurking in the background as the warbling shrieks pierce deep into your skull. The whistle never quite manages to drown out the meditative drone and ringing though, leaving the listener to find it beneath the sharp edges. Then after the eleven minute mark the hissing is chopped up, stuttered out like the opening chimes, and what should be stabbing is somehow softened as though the shorter whistle doesn’t have the piercing power that it did when it was long continues shrieks.  This lets the contemplative base of the song, the low rolling tones and the reflective metallic rhythm re-emerge, until the thirteenth minute mark when the spiking whistling begins to lengthen ever so subtly, becoming uneven, until it speeds into pulsing dings at the fourteen minute mark, the base having faded away, leaving these pin sharp hisses until they too fade away as the song ends. 

Here is another well-wrought transmission from Shipwreck Radio, building a simple, mesmerizing, contemplative base and then complicating it… Showing how one can hold onto the meditative even in the face of blaring distraction… and then, when one focuses, showing how you can even find the ruminative quality in something seemingly unpleasant as a  keening whistle.

Shipwreck Radio - July 4

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.

JULY 4 - SHIPWRECK RADIO VOLUME TWO

The opening chimes splutter and there is just the barest hint of the customary welcomings, then the song moves into a low grumbling tone. A sliver of a ringing tone lurks below the choppy growling that dominates the track. About four and a half minutes in a disquieting whistling joins the track, breaking through the chop; woeful and piercing. The whistling wails above the low bass rumble of the base of the track, threatening to tear into it two tones, and around seven and a half minutes the song begins to be broken up by infrequent electronic glitches that break the soundscape for just a fraction of a second at a time. Near the nine minute mark, the whistling does finally spit into two shrill tones, a distressing duet gliding above the clangorous base. 

At eleven minutes the whistling seems to crack again—almost shredding into a dozen tones before it begins to stutter, less shrieking as it pulses now, the high constant tone broken into a fraying rhythm. The whistling continues to pulse along, broken and fractured, but less screeching until there's another break in the song just before fourteen minutes and then the whistling pulse doubles on itself becoming frantic and fast, reminiscent of violin stabs in a horror soundtrack before it fades away to the end of the song. Easily one of the more difficult listens of the Shipwreck Radio recordings, but no less rewarding for anyone who wants an arresting meditation