Ganging the Wave

Ganging The Wave was composed in 2011 for the Wundergrund Festival at the SNYK (Genreorganisationen for ny, eksperimenterende musik og lydkunst) in Copenhagen at their request as radio was one of the themes for that year.   The software patch developed in 2009 to perform the composition Ganging The Hook was adapted for this project with processed audio recordings of short-wave radio sounds taking the place of field recordings of the East River.  Convolving software was used to process the radio tracks with the spectral and transient info taken from a guitar shaping the final output.  None of the actual guitar is heard, only a ghost of its sound embedded in the convolved mix. "Shortwave radio had been an obsession of mine dating back to my tenth year. Starting out as a listener with a receiver built from a kit, by the age of 12 I had become an amateur radio operator using a mix of handmade and kit components to explore the seemingly infinite realms above the medium wave band of AM radio. Foreign boadcasts were fascinating to listen to and amateur radio communications addictive but by the time I entered high school, my favorite listening was to the sonic abstraction that filled the shortwave bands: intense pulses from teletype communication, enigmatic chains of numbers read in an exotic accent, whistlers and gliders caused by atmospheric conditions, clouds of Morse code. These sounds were as thrilling to me as any extended rock or jazz extrapolation, more vivid than the academic electronic music found on record. With convolution software, in Ganging The Wave, my guitar could become part of this sonic biome." - E# - NYC - 2022