Its taken a while for me to get my hands on this double CD but the wait has well and truly been worth it… Shipwreck Radio is a series of seven manipulated-sound radio broadcasts that were produced by Stephen Stapleton and Colin Potter of Nurse With Wound as part of a two month marooning-for-arts-sake in a tiny fishing village on the Lofoten Islands, just off the coast of far-northern Norway.
They arrived there in June 2004 with minimal equipment and were instructed to produce three programmes a week on the local radio station using only sounds recorded in their wanderings around the islands. And so they ventured out, capturing the sounds you might expect to find in an arctic fishing village – ships, seabirds, the mutterings of fishermen, the cracking of receding ice. But in their travels they also encountered the unexpected – a festival of marching bands called “Codstock”, locals enthusing over the Grateful Dead, and a community of Namibian refugees.
Back in the studio, these sounds were treated and layered to produce slow-burn digitised soundscapes (and the occasional slab of strident breakbeat) that became increasingly mangled and malformed as the never-setting sun began to take its toll on the circadian rhythms of Stapleton and Potter…
On the show today, we featured this condensed remix of the “breakbeat” broadcast from June 15. Its fairly atypical of the album so I’ll also post this remix of the sleep-deprived-hallucination cum audio-travelogue that was broadcast on June 17. It really doesn’t do it justice – but I don’t have the space to post the complete 30 minute version…
If you like what you hear, you might still be able to pick up a copy from Aquarius Records, or you can visit the site of distributor, ICR Distibution. They don’t have any copies of the CDs available for sale on their own, but you can pick it up as part of a double set which features Volume 2 of Shipwreck Radio (which has only just been released)
Posted by Warren at November 18, 2005 11:09 PM | Field Recordings