I’ve been thinking about the radio
About the towers on the mountain
And the people far away who choose what’s on them.
Some Scared and angry and building bunkers, the men who own the ways we communicate, all just a line item somewhere in the lowest dustiest corner of a spreadsheet.
Some of this thought path has been paved — the short postcard form of this program is now on a dozen terrestrial stations and counting. Though these are of course of the public radio variety, with different gate keepers.
Though the gates abound, it seems that swinging them open is more likely than pleasing the algorithms: the response controlled, non-human machine-learned attention-eating beasts that have snuck into our dining rooms, our living rooms our bedrooms, the place where I stack my
books.
But the place where my desk is, out in the mountains, still feels a bit untethered, even as I tether it with my presence. Likewise it is Not untouched, as there is no such thing, as it’s all touching each other all the time.
Here by default, the sound is an archive. The artisan well and all the willows that the out of place water has fostered, how the long grass it’s grown moves in the wind. The missing limbs and branches of trees long felled, the planes and cars and whirring of snow makers on distant but earshot mountains. All the story of the place in wave form
This year I’ve been digging into my own archives, examining the sounds I’ve collected, and assembling them in new ways. As the access to information feels increasingly precarious, flooded, owned, bent…I’ve been imagining new networks of distribution, looking for some that others have built; networks that flow both ways. I’ve been examining my own archive of ideas and audio and, somewhere on the edge of the landscape that the algorithms can just barely reach, I keep a folder of sounds it could never understand. What does wind —or a wind harp—or an idea that can’t quite be explained, what does that sound like to an artificial ear?
Probably nothing. But to us, it can sound like everything.
I’m Fil Corbitt
And this is year 6 of the wind
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