Visceral Entities by john grzinich

released February 13, 2025

Radio Memories

I have a great deal of memories associated with radio which, has in turn, had a significant influence on my musical and sound related interests. My memories are not so much connected to particular songs or artists (although there are many of those), but to an understanding of the nature of radio itself. Until a certain point in my younger life I always understood radio to be a localised phenomenon, that is, the broadcasts were from the area where I was living (upstate New York at the time). Radio was something that provided entertainment for people and there were a few options (as formats) either with types of music or news and talk. I used to scan the analogue dial to explore the different signals coming in and for whatever reason, always felt there was something else "out there" beyond the music and the talk. In this imagined space of the transmission ether, frequencies could be detected but not clearly tuned in to that same way you would land on a station or a program.

My father obviously saw my curiosity in radio (having build radios himself as a teenager), because one day he brought me the strange radio from the basement and offered it to play around with. Indeed I did. This radio was different. It had more bands to search, not just the usual AM (amplitude modulation) and FM (frequency modulation) where all the stations were. It also had SW1, SW2, MB and LW. The abbreviations were written out too; Short Wave One and Two, Marine Band and Long Wave. These only helped to arouse my curiosity. The first exploratory sessions easily expanded my listening horizons. Unusual voices streamed in from different parts of a world ‘out there somewhere’ unusual voices and programs (some form of radio dramas?). This was probably my first significant exposure to hearing languages other than English. At once the my world of upstate New York opened up to the planetary sphere, in its unbound, unfathomable distances, brought to me via open radio territories. At once I felt connected, "tuned in", to the air of the radio ether a”s unknown other" that I had previously not felt. The unusual noises in between the voices heightened the sensation of floating through listening to ever modulating frequencies swirling in the air, the sine tones, beeps, pulses and drifting static, that all gave depth to this new form of radio. At once I began my studies of the spectrum to listen to the often temporally drifting signals that crossed my radiophonic device. From that point on I preferred the multi-band model my father gave me over the standard two band ‘boom box’ I received the previous Christmas.

My most notable memory from this time is associated with the mysterious Marine Band. Marine Band had very little human content either from my lack of understanding or suitable geographical location in which to catch the signals. But one sound stood out clear and defined from the other noises. It was a continuous monotone pulse that came in an arrhythmic pattern and seemed to go on endlessly with a few occasional pauses. The patterns would sometimes repeat and sometimes vary. I eventually learned this was a code, Morse Code specifically, because we had learned about it in school. This unusual code was signalling system used as a precursor to the telephone because originally it could be transmitted long distances over land using wires, being encoded and decoded by a person at each end. I imagined this code, now over radio, was communicating messages from a marine world of ships at sea between each other or the land, yet one can never really know. But here was Morse Code, still in use, yet occurring in a different medium from what I learned.

This awakening to a new sonic realm showed that radio could be used for many purposes by different people across the globe. Radio was no longer established programs produced by select people, it was a medium for all types of communication, available to nearly everyone to listen to who had access to a "transistor" device (fairly common at the time in most parts of the world I later learned). From then on I continued to explore the outer regions of the radiophonic spectrum in order to temporarily reach into new sonic and cultural territories of the world. This early awakening to the possibilities of radio helped influence my current feelings about radio, that must be considered much more of a public utility for broadcast communications in the widest sense, rather than the rapidly degenerating commercial industry that it primarily has become today.

John Grzinich
2004 / 2024
Location of memory: Bedroom, Hyde Park, New York
Year of memory: circa 1980

Text originally published in RADIO MEMORY
Edited by Brandon LaBelle
Errant Bodies Press: Audio Issues Vol.4
2008