Label: Dinzu Artefacts

ご本人よりサイン入りエディションを入荷!!鈴木昭男氏やDavid Toopとの共演、そして何よりポータブルレコーダーにてフィールド録音を日常的に行う30年に及ぶプロジェクト[Cassette Memories]にて知られるサウンドアーティスト恩田晃氏。基本はカセットフォーマットでの出版を行う米カリフォルニアのレーベルDinzu Artefactsより発表された、非常に珍しいLPフォーマットの2023年作[Transmissions From The Radio Midnight]。氏が旅行に行くときは必ずスーツケースに入れ持ち歩いているという、AM/FMラジオとカセットレコーダーが一体となった"Sony TCM F59"を使ったシンプルなラジオ録音。2つまたは3つの周波数を同時にキャッチした時に聞こえる異なる言語のレイヤーを捉えたもので、 静的なノイズや電波干渉など様々な種類の付随音も入り混じり非常にカッコイイ仕上がりとなっています。



This project, entitled Transmissions From The Radio Midnight, started around 2006, when I acquired a Sony TCM F59 — an AM/FM radio and cassette recorder combined in a slim, handheld body. Since then, whenever I went on a trip, I would throw it into my suitcase and take it around with me. No matter which country I was in, upon returning to the hotel room I made a habit of listening to the radio into the late hours of the night. As soon as I would snuggle into bed, I would begin tuning the radio in search of a program that I liked.

If I concentrated intently on my fingers controlling the knob, I could sometimes catch two or three frequencies at once and hear the overlap of different languages. Otherwise I would scan through frequencies and jump around programs to hear the juxtaposition of different languages, such as Spanish, Swedish, French, Polish, Arabic, Korean, among others. There was no greater joy than the moment in which I would begin to hear these languages, which were foreign to me, not as words but as aural texture. Was I enjoying text-sound compositions with alien words? Perhaps it was the abstract fusing of these lingual sounds. It was, at the very least, something akin to sound poetry.

I would often fall asleep while doing this — and so, just as often, the radio would continue playing in my dreams. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I would wake up to the high-pitched beep of a test tone bouncing off the walls of the hotel room. On other occasions I would awaken in the mornings to some unknown program, or, if the tuning was off, simply static noise.

For this album, I selected some of my favorite segments from the recordings made in ten-or-so countries over the span of roughly a decade, beginning in 2008. All of the fragments are presented just as they were captured. Since frequency behavior is often unpredictable, and since the act of catching waves was done manually, the recordings capture all sorts of incidental sounds, including various kinds of static noise and radio interference.

The radio is like an ocean of languages. It continuously projects a million chatterings happening simultaneously all over the world. This album captures and presents a tiny drop of this ocean, while the ocean itself flows onward — enormous, endless, infinite — for as long as the medium itself lasts. Isn’t that amazing?