Shortwave - (an extra by abacushex)

This is a list I came up with in early 2020, prior to my minidisc interest. Also, despite the possible feel of it, this was prior to me ever having heard of vaporwave or signalwave. A lot of the content here dates further back, even to the late 50s. Ken Nordine was like a Rod Serling of radio, but with a sly humor and benign curiosity rather than the slightly sinister chill of Serling’s ‘The Twilight Zone’. His career in radio and commercial voice-overs spanned a good 60 years. His signature radio show was called Word Jazz, and while it was essentially in the spoken word genre, it was also like nothing else.

Ken is clearly the anchor of this list, with other touches such as my nostalgia for the era of shortwave radio, communicating over vast distances through the ether, and the space-age idealism that people responsible and competent were in control, keeping the time, watching the weather, maintaining the bus schedules, and otherwise ensuring the machinery of civilization was up and running. Ken has a considerably large body of work; the pieces chosen here were because they felt like he was tapping into that effort, like he had all the atomic clock engineers, NASA officials, meteorologists, and train conductors on speed dial.

The disc is in SP mono; there was simply nothing that could be removed to shrink it to fit in stereo without sacrificing the flow.

Ken Nordine, looking like a Fox Mulder of the airwaves…

Track Listing

Part 1 - Connections

• 01- PBS Identification 1971 (Tycho edit)
• 02- Agents (Ken Nordine)
• 03- Climb Up Awake (Ken Nordine)
• 04- Change the Rules (Ken Nordine)
• 05- 6826khz - Unknown Morse Code (via KiwiSDR)
• 06- Descent (Stendec)
• 07- The List + The Script (Ken Nordine)

Part 2 - Forecasting

• 08- Coloring the Air (Ken Nordine)
• 09- Looks like it’s going to rain (Ken Nordine)
• 10- The Raven (Jeff Bridges)
• 11- Windpower (Thomas Dolby)
• 12- 8502khz - US Coast Guard (via KiwiSDR)
• 13- Under the Coke Sign (Boards of Canada)

Part 3 - Mind & Math

• 14- Get up - Go to work (Ken Nordine)
• 15- Light Year & Tipping (Ken Nordine)
• 16- Think a Thought (Ken Nordine)
• 17- Perlence Subrange 3 (Autechre)
• 18- Train of Thought (Ken Nordine)
• 19- How the brain works (Ken Nordine)
• 20- 14940khz - Unknown Number Station 1 (via KiwiSDR)
• 21- Fibonacci numbers (Ken Nordine)
• 22- 11082khz - Unknown Number Station 2 (via KiwiSDR)
• 23- Gyroscope (Boards of Canada)

Part 4 - Mind & Time

• 24- CHU Canada Station ID (via KiwiSDR)
• 25- Genius (Ken Nordine)
• 26- Tick Tock Fugue (Ken Nordine)
• 27- Clocks (Ken Nordine)
• 28- What time is it? (Ken Nordine)
• 29- NIST WWV Station ID (via KiwiSDR)

Part 5 - Departures

• 30- Space Intro / Fly Like an Eagle (Steve Miller Band)
• 31- Ikea (Jeff Bridges)
• 32- 14070.15 kHz - Unknown Signal in Slovakia (via KiwiSDR)

Technical

For all the Nordine tracks, some were podcast captures from old Word Jazz episodes, some were high-quality from Word Jazz compilation CDs. My brother, a major Nordine fan, provided all those sources and he did any editing for those in Audacity.

Musical pieces and the tracks by Jeff Bridges are from CD or 256Kb AAC. KiwiSDR (software-defined shortwave radio) was captured via AudioHijack, and editing was in Fission (both are softwares on macOS).

For getting it onto minidisc, Foobar2000 was used to apply ReplayGain across the board. Last stage recording was done real-time, optical out from computer to a Tascam MD-350 on SP mono. Foobar2000 downmixed to mono on playback over optical out was required because the MD-350’s idea of mono is to record the left channel only. Tracks were divided manually and then labeled in WebMDPro on a Sony MZ-NE410.