Preface: The Suffering

As a teenager I would listen to Frispel, which was broadcasted on P3 Sunday evenings. It was a pre-taped one hour experimental show, mixing fact and fiction, and focused a lot on creating an interesting atmosphere. Once it was cancelled, I wouldn’t find anything like it until Radiolab many years later, or perhaps some of the odder This American Life episodes. I still have a soft spot for radio turntablism stuff – and the movie Lucky People Center International is one I revisit every couple of years because of the tight editing and rhythm — so this weeks project was a short attempt to create an atmospheric clicky ambient thing, on the subject of suffering.

The music is all fiddled in Reason and the samples are from a lecture with Yo Hoon, available here. The track is finished as it is now; but I hope to return to the topic. Many years ago I did an ambient sound work called Appropriate Christmas which combined 2400 christmas songs into one long meditation, and in keeping with doing things for holidays, I’ll try to look into the nature of suffering and do a longer piece on it in time for easter.

Being a lapsed catholic the subject matter might not surprise anyone, but at least I’m not doing “guilt.” Yet.

Delinquest: And then gone
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Sibiria: A show about nothing.

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Ten years ago I studied “Creativity and Innovation” in Karlstad. The extracurricular activities were more interesting than the studies; We got the student radio going and and had some five shows running each week. I had my own hour, Sibiria, which was patterned on the public radio show Frispel, a brilliant experimental weekly run by Fredrik Grundel at P3. Frispel was a freeform show which mixed samples and spoken content with music and effects, and it was original for it’s time. (If anyone has backups of those shows, please let me know. They’re difficult to get your hands on)

Out of the twenty or so shows that I did, I only have backups of two. A show about nothing came about when I didn’t have any ideas about what to do, and just ended up using bits and pieces I’d accumulated: A friend talking about light beer, the kings new years eve speech, computer game samples, and a whole bunch of audio effects. (I think I did it all using SoundEdit 16 with VST plugins which kept crashing)

This show was made almost ten years ago, so the music and aesthetics are a bit dated. Lucky People Center International had just been produced and I might have seen it by the time I ran Sibiria. For what it’s worth it’s a mostly well edited — occasionally slow going — hour of random stuff. If you wish to download a better quality version, right-click on the following link: Sibiria_2000_A_Show_About_Nothing_192kbps.mp3

(Thanks to Arne-Kjell for providing the MiniDisk player required to save the shows from bit rot)