Radia 130, Season 13 show 6, from Resonance104.4fm

stories and other ramblings

The fascinating business of fliping through travel collage albums is better experienced in sound than image. A personal preference, I concede, but think the extra space that sound leaves to imagination and image toils. Albums are made memories and the surrounding case, that frames it. Can be general (a personal mishmash of everything) or pinpoint an experience. The later is what we have here. An old story, told by a shaman from Nepal, is the leitmotiv that guides the piece, framed by another (presumably) music appointments recorded in the field: strings, church bells, church singing. A point of interest, related directly with radio in the classic sense (hertezian broadcast), is the high-fidelity sometimes required to enjoy the full detail of the work proposed, detail that can/will get lost during actual hertezian transmission. The ubiquitous nature of digital availability makes artists forget that the small filigree sometimes existent on his work will be lost for the noise in the usually low cost receptor or during the extraordinary radio frequency voyage from transmiter to receiver. For the ones listening in FM, mono or stereo, a recovery of lost experience occurs: that of the effort of grasping everything that is not there, like the transmission could be a pierced and faulty document where the reader must provide the missing bits. Is is a call for some sort of auto-censorship and care about their works? No, not quite, more a side note on the unavoidable deterioration of sound induced by the medium limitations. As said this deterioration can be an enhancement of the experience, everything depends on how you look at it.

by Ricardo Reis on 09/24/07