“…Maybe if I pray every each night I sit there pleading
‘send back my dream test baby, she’s my main feature’
My TVC 15, yeah, he just stares back unblinking
So hologramic, oh, my TVC 15
One of these nights I may just jump down that rainbow way
Be with my baby, then we’ll spend some time together
So hologramic, oh, my TVC 15
My baby’s in there someplace, love’s rating in the sky
So hologramic, oh, my TVC 15
Transition
Transmission
Transition
Transmission”
– David Bowie
On a blustery September evening we sipped martinis on the porch of an old cottage a couple hundred feet above Lake Michigan. Changing weather patterns evident in the wisps of chill undercut the balmy air; Warm air is precious at summer’s end, particular this far north — Arcadia, in Northwest Michigan. Aside from the waves crashing below, or an occasional comment, it was quiet. At one point, Tim turned on a radio to see if he could connect with a radio station. The static spoke to the distance we were from a metropolitan area. A station from Wisconsin came in faintly, fading in and out with the wind, a crackling voice we recognized as Garrison Keillor and his program, A Prairie Home Companion. It sounded so far away, almost from another planet: Keillor’s trusting voice from across Lake Michigan telling a story about Lake Wobegon. It was far away. The transmission broken into static periodically, reminding me of distance and fragile connectivity, and the Saturday night as a kid fooling with my radio when I somehow picked up the Grand Ole Opry show from Nashville. Country music was even more exotic than The Polka Variety Hour was to me at the time.
Radio Tarifa transmits this feeling from the cultural perspective of North Africa. Dating back 25 years or so, the recording imagines a radio station transmitting from Tarifa, the southernmost point of Europe in Andalusia. The signal comes through faintly, with static, on the other side of the Straits of Gibraltar, Muslim morning prayers can be heard. This music crosses more than the Straits. It is music that draws from the fusion of Spanish, Moorish Arab and Jewish music that existed circa 1492, with an infusion of contemporary ideas and instruments. “The music on this record takes the listener on a journey of the imagination, to a world that did not exist before and yet seems astonishingly comfortable and familiar,” writes Charlie Gillett in the liner notes to the recording. “Despite the originality of many of the instrumental juxtapositions, there is never a moment of doubt that they were destined to happen — it was just a matter of where and when.”
People living in border cities along the Canadian/Lake Erie coast (and, on some nights, deep into Ohio) in the 1960s and ‘70s could hear CKLW-AM from Windsor, Ontario. It made strong ratings by playing largely American music — Motown and rock — with occasional required Canadian content like the Guess Who and Gordon Lightfoot. Most notable were the sensational newscasters that arrested your attention with lyrical headlines of Detroit crime news. CKLW probably did more to create the aura of “Murder City” than any of the Detroit or American media of that period. Picking up CK on Interstate 90 on a wintry night in Ohio was a reminder of my distance from home and how it surreal it was to hear about a grisly murder “on the Eastside of Detroit” while contesting with a lake effect blizzard
Transmissions from different places have fascinated human beings since the days of Marconi. Ironically, as telecommunications have brought us into greater connectivity, we have become more isolated. Radio Garden, an app developed in Amsterdam, connects listeners with radio stations almost anywhere in the world. Jeff Ihaza, writing in theoutline.com, notes the anonymity of place in this app. “There are no city names or borders on the map; exploring the world on the site is an act of discovery not unlike turning the dial on an actual radio (the site makes sure to include the sound of static as you filter through stations). Move your cursor bit to the east and you’re listening to a station in Serbia, a few inches south and you find yourself in Turkey. Every location provides its own distinct, sometimes surprising sound.”
Ihaza goes on to assert that Radio Garden provides an antidote to the failed social media experiment. “It’s no secret that our most popular modes of connecting with one and other online are broken. The consumerist functions embedded deep in social media have created an incentive structure that obscures the very purpose of online communication. Radio Garden, which also features a wealth of illuminating research about the cultural exchange possible through radio, is an interesting, perhaps even familiar, viral internet project, but something about being able to scour the earth’s radio in real time feels essential — like the internet’s crazy, beautiful dream might be hidden underneath all the noise.”
On New Year’s Eve, 1999-2000, I felt like Reginald Fessenden (a Canadian, who beamed the first radio program on Christmas Eve 1906 to commercial ships in the Atlantic Ocean), as I transmitted New Year’s greetings to the good people of London, England via internet chat room, as they marked the new Millennium. Distant transmissions…reminding us there probably is somebody out there.
“Ground Control to Major Tom
Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you hear me, Major Tom?”
– David Bowie
