good morning ~

(click the link / out of focus hillside to listen)

today’s track is an ouroboros of sidechained gates

we are doing a 2nd pressing of sunbeam vinyl :)

making another run, this time the discs themselves will be a lovely translucent lavender - - now available for pre-order on bandcamp:

Ben Seretan & John ThayerSunbeam of No Illusion

also - - I am hopping on a cool bill at the Half Moon in Hudson next Wednesday - - me plus Dead Gowns plus Nova One, tickets here

this is the New Yorker article I mention below, this is our amazing local community radio station. If you’re not in the terrestrial broadcast zone, you can listen to a stream. They also have a really remarkable selection of other listening possibilities including a synthesizer that translates the local weather into audio and a live stream from the Avalon Lounge.

Got an oil change yesterday and when I went to go pick up my car and settle up with the garage there was an older lady sitting in the little lobby zone listening to something on a little device in her shirt pocket and staring off through her sunglasses into the distance. Had to stand there for a few minutes waiting for the desk person to come back with my key, so I got to hear a lot of what the lady was listening to, which was plenty loud enough for everyone to hear.

...wearing jeans and a white shirt, pulled over on 90, possible overdose, send additional units...

Seems like she had some kind of police or EMS scanner and was keeping tabs on the zone. Tried to determine whether or not she was a first responder or on call in some capacity, but she didn't seem with it enough to be in the active work force. I think this is simply what she chooses to stay connected and pass the time.

I read this great piece in the New Yorker recently about how folks in the remotest parts of Argentina rely - sometimes fairly urgently - on AM radio. For people who live out in the campo its the most reliable way to let a wide area you now you've lost track of an animal or that a relative's medical procedure was successful. The airwaves funnel and coordinate information, and if the person who needs it doesn't hear it directly themselves then maybe a neighbor will eventually convey it. Transmission by radio, transmission by neighbor, human to human transmission.

Which reminded me of my time as an overnight DJ at my college's community radio station. The first semester I was allowed on the air I had a time slot that was in hindsight totally preposterous - 2 - 4am on Thursday nights. And at the time I was really into americana, alt country, etc. so that was what I played, pulled a lot of random LPs out of the country section of the station's shelves. I wonder now what I thought I might accomplish by playing a Chet Atkins record at 3:45am (not that anything I did at age 18 was meant to accomplish anything specifically). But regardless of what I imagined it to be like, there was a fairly dedicated listening audience. Fred - who hosted a show called the Homeless Report and later had to be banned from the building after an incident - tuned in every week and gave me really granular feedback on my on air persona. And almost every week I'd get phone calls from dudes working the 3rd shift who appreciated having something sad and old fashioned to listen to while they operated forklifts in the night. The radio station in those days also got an impressive number of handwritten letters from prisons. If you sounded at all femme on air, you could expect a letter or two. And from the selection of notes I read they were categorically polite, articulate, and written with an immaculately neat hand - lots of practice.

The thing that is so beautiful about the radio is that it is a wide, publicly available broadcast. You speak into a microphone, you play a record, and that audio is electrified, beamed out like lightning from hilltop towers. And as far as the signal will reach, your words and your selection of music is available to anyone tuned to the right frequency. I have always loved the "scan" button on car radios - swimming through the sea of electromagnetic vibrations, catching glimpses of other people's lives and perspectives, the surreal familiarity and low budget production values of regional car dealer ads as you travel to new parts of the world. I also love the moment when one radio station gives way to another - you have left one particular broadcast area and driven over the threshold into another. You are now receiving new information.

It's all part of the openness, the bounty, the optimism of sending out signal with no particular intention of reaching anyone specifically. Or with the very romantic hope of reaching a specific person by wide means. And what I find often really distasteful about the media landscape we live in now is that things are so narrow, so niche. Algorithms - in my experience - are so horribly narrow, you get caught in such particular feedback loops. I so aggressively reject the Spotify-style "for you" playlists. I want to live in a world where I discern, where I myself make decisions about the kinds of things I want to pay attention to - I do not want a computer program - however sophisticated - determining what I like on my behalf. I want to comb through the music library, I want to change the frequency to which I'm tuned. I want to turn it off when I want.

One amazing thing about the experimental community radio station where we live now is that - fairly predictably - they'll be spots of dead air. WGXC and Wave Farm are incredible resources that corral recordings and contributions from many dozens of community members. It is truly a marvel that they run the station the way they do. Bound to be gaps, impossible for everything to slot together perfectly, impossible to avoid technical issues. But now I find the sound of silence coming over the radio to be a beautiful moment of respite. Feels something like a bluejay landing on your windowsill - not rare, necessarily, but something to be appreciated. It's the telltale mark of an imperfect broadcast, something that isn't fully optimized and automated but rather assembled by folks and their intentions. Every time there's silence I stop whatever I'm doing to listen, to sit in it. And yeah there's always a little bit of anxiety that the tower's down or that something is really amiss, maybe I need to send somebody an email. But more often than not the programming resumes and the people in the radio come back to life.

But what about you? What audio keeps you company in the waiting room? What messages are you broadcasting? And how specific are they? Are you in control of your taste?