Squelch

Back up in the mountains this weekend and boy, is there a lot of snow! The house is covered. It's become an igloo.

This morning my son decided to clean out my closet upstairs. This is where all the old radios, records, cables, cheap mics, cd players (super vintage item) and loads of other stuff reside.

As he was running around with the Heathkit VHF Monitor (pictured above) with a cheap radio shack "Electret Condenser Replacement Mike" plugged into the Antennae jack, I saw that he had also taken out the GE Monitor 10 Analog radio (pictured below). I have many good memories with this one. It features AM, FM, VHF Lo/Hi, Air, UHF and two Short Wave bands. We've spent many a late night sitting out at the campfire, looking at the clear mountain skies, listening to the shortwave channels - international blasts from China, weird American religious rants, BBC broadcasts and the glorious wealth of scrambled signals that come across as weird electronic chirping.

We recorded some of these chirpings and put it all over the following piece:

Mike Delta Mike

Yes, those are Optigan drums. You'll also notice the ghostly Euro girl voice at the end and that is NOT something we've captured, unfortunately. That comes from the amazing Conet Project's 4-CD collection of shortwave broadcasts known as "numbers stations". These are anonymous, one way communications used by intelligence agencies to communicate to their spies. Read more from Irdial Records, the folks who pulled this album together. I highly recommend purchasing this 4 CD set. Do it now.