Spoken Word with Electronics

Episode 38, Side A: "Awake in the Freezer Aisle of the All-Night Grocery, Peaking Happily & Alone." by Spoken Word with Electronics

Episode 38, Side B: "Hurricanes and Displacement" (Charlie Pickle, Pt 20) by Spoken Word with Electronics

SPOKEN WORD WITH ELECTRONICS #37: Happy GRIEVANCES! We Have Endured THE YEAR of Festivus.

Hello, all – Happy Grievances! Welcome back to the show. This week is our holiday episode for December, and we're decorating the pole — with nothing! This year has already had its ornaments of bullshit and insanity, no need for glitter or decorations. I'm having a Zoom party for one over here. It's Festivus! The good holiday that Seinfeld made famous. And in so many ways it is the perfect holiday for this year. In a year like 2020, Festivus is a good natured outlet to just let the grievances out. All holidays have their moments where they become more substantial. Columbus Day wasn't anything until he came back with all those slaves, Thanksgiving was nothing until the genocide of American Natives, and Christmas was nothing but a birthday before Thomas Nast invented our modern Santa Claus.

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All these holidays made use of their moment to become a permanent part of our collective experience, and few years set a better stage for Festivus to become a genuine and real event to process the insanity of our current reality. Festivus is officially on December 23, incidentally. But in honor of the most ridiculous "pick your grievance" year, I'm suggesting it go full-bore, with bank closures, no mail delivery, even shut off the Atomic Clock for the day. You have a problem any of that, include it in your grievance list! If we can have Daylight Savings Day, which many people complain about for months, we can certainly have an officially recognized Festivus, where many people would only complain for a night.

To acknowledge the new federally protected day of grievance, this episode is partly a tribute to Jonathon Wolff, who invented the world's cheapest (and perhaps most lucrative) sitcom theme, composing the Seinfeld theme in half of an afternoon. With regard for that slapping fake bass note, learn about envelope following, which turns any signal into control voltage (a pitch envelope and a gate) and hear how something as identifiable as a sitcom theme can be used to control synthesizers and drum patterns in undetectable ways.

Episode 37, Discussion: "WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH Envelope Followers!" by Spoken Word with Electronics

Episode 37, Side A: "Festivus Greetings from Spoken Word with Electronics" by Spoken Word with Electronics

Episode 37, Side B: "A Bus Will Be Here Soon" (Charlie Pickle, Pt 19) by Spoken Word with Electronics

SPOKEN WORD WITH ELECTRONICS #36: FUN MADNESS with Control Voltage Radio Tuning

Unintended uses of Radio Signals to make Insane Noises

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the show. The lead image here demonstrates that a radio can be a hat, but I'd like to dive even deeper on radio. Radio is more powerful than we give it credit. Its transformative possibilities as ubiquitous electromagnetic waves make it truly wonderful and ghostly. Did you know a common anxiety in the early century was picking up radio reception in your teeth, btw? But the most insane thing to consider about radio is you are constantly surrounded by hundreds of concurrent station broadcasts, in varying frequencies from around the world, blasting on your head simultaneously.

In many ways, this signal bombardment is similar to reality. One concept of what happens with LSD is the filters that control which signals we see are turned off. That's one trick of hallucination: You see (or think) all the signals at once, making a distortion. This is also considered madness. So when we are "sane", our mind does the work of filtering what thoughts or moods to selectively see and feel. In radio, the receiver, or radio tuner, does that for the radio transmissions. Instead of hearing all the stations at once, it allows you to only hear one station at a time, on the dial number you've selected.

This "single station" concept is awfully boring, though – especially when you consider any city's radio feed might have 15-20 stations playing at the same time on the FM dial. Why can't you hear all the stations at once! This is much more exciting, and I'll demonstrate a method to approximate such a joyful sound this week, using control voltage to play a radio tuner in a mad way where the the stations are notes on a keyboard. We'll use an array of control voltage sources (a Pot Action Recorder, Stepped Voltage CV generator, and a few CV sequencers) and an Arradio module.

Prior to that, I remember my dad's wonderful Marantz 2200 series receiver, which he gifted my brother and me, partly, I feel, to not feel terrible about upgrading to something else for himself in the 1980s. (Just give the kids the old one!) I think the Marantz was better than the upgrade, though, and it gave me a lifelong addiction to radio dials and switches, as the Marantz had GREAT switches and dials. You can hear this memory in the lead track, "Basement Living Was Really Good".

Finally, this week's episode concludes with "White Man's Blues", introducing you to Charlie's co-worker Duncan, who is a big Double Trouble fan.

Want to delight the undelightable? Episode Packs of Spoken Word with Electronics are great holiday gifts, incidentally. They're marked down to $5 a piece through the New Year on Bandcamp: https://eptc.bandcamp.com/

That's cheaper than a Radio Hat! Thanks for supporting the show.

Have a very good week, Ethan

Episode 36, Demonstration: "Voltage Controlled FM Radio Tuning" (Arradio Eurorack Module Demo) by Spoken Word with Electronics

Episode 36, Side A: "Lean In to Hear the Talking Clock" (CV Radio) by Spoken Word with Electronics

Episode 36, Side B: "White Man's Blues" (Charlie Pickle, Pt 18) by Spoken Word with Electronics