Radio Free Pyongyang, June 3: New frontiers in radio weirdness

This summer at Trent Radio, I’ve been doing something a little different from my usual fare. The show is called Radio Free Pyongyang, and originally started out as a vehicle for me to play with sound collage, especially with material from some great audio archives like the Conet Project. It’s been pretty fun, but keeping up with finding new archives week after week is a challenge. (The fun kind of challenge!)

This week, however, I was spurred on to try something even more new by two influences. First, Bennett Bedoukian, who I’ve shared a night with on Trent Radio every season since I started this crazy adventure in community radio, has been doing a great program called Interface immediately after mine where he makes all sorts of wonderfully strange sounds with a sampler and some effects processing. Second, at the last No Pussyfooting practice, I was playing around with some long-dormant effects pedals of my own, and with using my iPad for it’s drum-machine-and-synthesizer capabilities.

As such, I combined the two for an experiment of live synthesizer Frippertronics. On the iPad, I used Tabletop with iMini (and a few dalliances into Voxen), run through a Boss Harmonist HR-2 and a Line 6 MM4 Modulation Modeler, and then direct into the board. Once in the board, I used the “remote” channel as a ~10 second delay, which also – to my pleasant surprise – also reversed the stereo field, giving some fun ping-pong effects.

You can take a listen here, edited only to remove my hesitating introduction and a station ID:

Part 1:

Part 2

MP3s are available here: part 1 and part 2.

Radio Free Pyongyang broadcasts every Tuesday night this summer, 7:30-8:30pm Eastern through Trent Radio, 92.7FM in Peterborough and streaming online. Who knows? I might do something like this again sometime.