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.

Shipwreck Radio - June 5

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 5 - SHIPWRECK RADIO VOLUME ONE

Another ghostly track off Volume One, though less sinister than June 3. It begins with the welcomings slowed down and pitch dropped slightly, then gives way to a tinny warbling with a pulsing and resonant tone building up in the background to lurk just behind the metallic warbling. This pulsing reverberation bubbles and mutates until it’s joined in the fourth minute by a growing buzz that swells to cut up through the warbling, the ghost of the clattering we’ve heard in other Shipwreck radio songs waiting, just barely audible at the edge of our awareness. The song remains meditative, though in a brooding fashion, and as we approach the seven minute mark we hear the chittering we’ve heard before. Here again, one can be amazed by how Messrs Stapleton and Potter repurpose the sounds of Lofoten, as the sound drones on. A note, here, to say that I mean drones on in the best possibly way, a drone to lose your ego in, to give your full attention to a deceptive simplicity, the changes in the track small enough to lull you in, yet never becoming flat or monotonous. The chittering is almost a purring by the tenth minute, the clattering rising up through the other sounds of the track but unable to reach the surface, the pulsing tone become sharper at its peaks, nearly tinnitus-like at times. By the thirteenth minute the song seems to begin to ebb, as the tone becomes piercing, the clattering more insistent as it struggles to break through the soundscape, chugging along until the pulsing reaches its biting tinnital peak as the song approaches its fifteenth minute and then fades into quietude as all the tones and noise drop away to leave you pondering as the sounds rattle around in your brain.

JUNE 5 - LOFOTEN DEADHEAD

Here it is, the secret key of Shipwreck Radio, twenty five minutes of Steven Stapleton and Colin Potter wandering the arctic isles of Norway and recording the sounds they'd manipulate and twist (strain, crack and sometimes break?) into the Sonic Structures and Enigmatic Episodes of Shipwreck Radio. Without the other songs before, the clips of seagulls, rocks thrown into water and so forth would be trivial, but listened through the lens of Shipwreck Radio as a whole it's enthralling to hear someone walking on a creaking wooden walkway and think of how that was used in the other songs and likewise, after you've listened to the track you'll hear the other Shipwreck Radio songs differently as well. There's no manipulation until after twenty minutes, where laughter echoes into what could be electronic processing, but also could just be the nature of the location where it was recorded. Then in the 26th minute there's a discussion with some Norwegians about singing a song about Lofoten Cod that breaks into mirthful laughter which is then layered and twisted for the remainder of the track. It's not the most interesting ending, which could explain why this was released on the bonus Lofoten Deadhead disc and not a main Shipwreck radio volume, but the track as a whole provides a sonic map to the world that was deconstructed and rebuilt by Nurse With Wound when they created the incredible structures and episodes of Shipwreck Radio.

Shipwreck Radio - Introduction and June 3

 

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.

Shipwreck Radio is a series of albums by Nurse With Wound documenting their residency in Lofoten, Norway during June and July 2004. Invited to stay in the unofficial capital, fishing village Svolvær, Steven Stapleton and Colin Potter were commissioned to produce 3 radio broadcasts per week for local station Lofotradioen of music constructed from whatever they heard or could find around the island. The project was instigated by Anne Hilde Neset and Rob Young of The Wire and by Kunst I Nordland, an organisation committed to bringing contemporary art to county of Nordland.

The duo created 24 broadcasts in total, each of either 15 or 30 minutes duration. Each broadcast was preceded by a jingle of a male voice saying "Velkommen Til Utvær" followed by a female voice saying the English translation "Welcome To Utvær", Utvær being the most remote island in Lofoten, with no permanent residents but 2 lighthouse keepers on hand. Many of the broadcasts treated or manipulated the two introductory voices with one consisting of nothing but such manipulations. 20 of these transmissions have been made available by Nurse With Wound across a number of separate releases with all tracks listed only by the date of original broadcast. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipwreck_Radio

I have been obsessed with these albums since I first encountered them in 2007 when I was collecting and consuming as much as I could of Nurse With Wound. The series consists of three main albums: Volume One, Volume Two and Final Broadcasts, and two bonus albums: Lofoten Deadhead and Gulls Just Wanna Have Fun.

During the market crash of 2008, I was working in brokerage ops opening self-directed trading accounts for fools who thought they could cash in on cheap stock trading, often working 12-14 hour days, six days a week and these albums were on heavy rotation, helping to keep me sane.

Each track on the three main albums, as well as Lofoten Deadhead, bears the date of its original broadcast, and for the last five years I've had a tradition of listening to each track on its namesake date.  There are twenty tracks associated with nineteen dates between June and July, and for each I'll be provided a descriptive review of the track for that date, or two tracks, in the case of June 5. All the tracks are available to stream for free on Bandcamp.com, so my hope is that this series will encourage readers to discover these eerie, meditative and haunting soundscapes.

JUNE 3 - SHIPWRECK RADIO VOLUME ONE

Here is one of the ghostliest of the Shipwreck Radio tracks, the introductory chimes and greetings so stretched and spectral as to be nearly unintelligible. They give way to a short-lived silence, then a low reverberating hollow sound that becomes the phantasmal base the song is built upon. After a minute, the low hollowness is joined by a dull and irregular thudding that lingers at the edge of the track, as well as a wraithlike melody, that is almost brassy. The bass reverberations build up and sound like the deep echoing growl of some nocturnal predator hunting in a pitch black cave. At three minutes a thrumming mechanical noise joins and the clatterings come more to the front, becoming sharper. By the five minute mark the thrumming has metamorphosed into something like a door creaking in the basement of some sinister house built too near the cliff’s edge, though it remains too deep for that, remaining uncannily on the edge of any number of noises that might cause you to shudder in the dark, as the phantom melody levitates above the rumbling bass at the base of the song. Around eight minutes, a melody emerges enough to sound voicelike– a nearly mute banshee wailing on a moonless night, gloomy and meditative. The soft but ominous track dares you to try and find comfort in it, to let yourself to be mesmerized and taken in by its inky beauty. Here is another track that is easy to dismiss when you give it only cursory attention but which is captivating and fathomless when you dive into it with your full attention.