Introducing noise-arch radio. It's a thing I created.

It's a long-form audio stream of the items in the noise-arch cassette archive collection on archive.org.

Not everything in the collection is great, and some of it is obnoxious, but there are some real treasures in there as well! I find it fun to randomly "tune" in now and again to hear what's playing.

I calculated the total runtime from the metadata in the collection -- it's just over 2 weeks. In other words, the playlist will get re-shuffled about every 14 days. It's a lot of content.

I have no idea how many listeners it can support on such a small cloud instance, and I have given zero thought about scaling it. I assume nobody cares or actually wants to listen to this stuff, so whatever.

TL;DR - I archived 78 episodes (~150 hours) of a radio show and you can listen to them here.

It was probably 19 years ago that I discovered the FM station WCSB streaming on the internet. It was a special time, those Napster days when the internet still felt like something new...and most people were still on dialup or at best a home DSL connection. 1999 held all kinds of new opportunity to discover exciting things in a newly connected world...like finding an mp3 of a rare/hard-to-find b-side or having your head melted by stumbling into entirely new genres of music.

For me, listening to audio streams on shoutcast/icecast and direct from a few misc sources was a crucial part of that exploration/growth/discovery.

The "Noise Rotation" (sometimes fondly called the "noise rot") on WCSB was a 2-hour block of specialty programming that rotated its DJ/host each week. I have no idea when it started or ended, but I can say that it was alive at least from May 2000 through May 2002. I enjoyed listening to it because I could catch bands that I was familiar with (like Negativland and Foetus, for example) followed by a 40 minute wall of droney noise and shit that I'd never heard of. The freeform nature of the programming was really inspiring, and completely different from the college station I volunteered with. It seemed like they could get away with anything!

These days, many radio stations keep archives of their shows, and you can listen to them on your own time. Hell, some shows are just podcasts now that happen to also be broadcast on the FM band and the internet at certain times. But back then, storing and indexing and making a nonstop rotating archive of material was rarely feasible. Also, storage was expensive (a 20GB hard drive might have set you back about $120). For me, I just wanted to listen to shows on my own schedule...so I began recording.

I'm sure that I had a cron job set up to just begin recording the cbr stream and dump the output to a file (probably using wget or curl). Due to the somewhat chaotic nature of college/community radio and computer time drift, I started recording a few minutes before and let it run a few minutes late. Even then, I'm sure that I missed content.

I blogged about the Noise Rotation back in early 2001 and hadn't thought much about it since. At that time, I was excited to have edited down 24 hours of material by trimming and removing ads/commercials. I'd listen to a show every few years, but mostly since access to everything is so plentiful and the quality is greater, I didn't revisit it much.

I'm pretty sure that I stopped recording the show in May 2002 when we moved back to Oregon and just never set it back up.

This year I found the recordings again and decided that enough time had passed that others might now find them useful/fun/important/historical. I spent many many nights trimming the rest of the episodes and normalizing/preparing them for upload. I decided that in the interest of historical preservation and to expedite editing, that I would not remove any host chatter and I would leave all the station IDs and event announcements and disclaimers in place. I removed dead air a few times though. :)

In the process of working the recordings, there were a few interesting times...like the time where the prior (blues?) show just continued because the Noise Rot person didn't ever show up. I'm pretty sure daylight savings bit me on a couple of the recordings, and one of the hosts just talked more than he played music. I think the station went off-air at least one time as well.

The final result wasn't that much data by today's standards (only about 1.6GB), but I couldn't imagine creating each item by hand using the web interface on archive.org. Luckily, tools exist to help with this stuff, so I hacked up a script to help automate things. The first attempt at upload/archive failed after about 3 or 4 files due to automated spam throtting...but a quick email to a support admin at archive.org fixed things up and I was able to complete the process the next day.

I ended up having 78 usable recordings, which comprise about 157 hours of noise. Click here to enjoy or just click the logo above.

Infiltration Lab played a live, hour-long drone/noise set on KBOO FM on February 1st, 2010.

In the unfortunate event that KBOO loses funding or they change their url scheme or de-archives material or bombs hit Portland or whatever, I have also archived the show on archive.org. Hopefully this embedded player continues to work:

A few random tech details: I played the set on my audiopint computer that I built a couple years ago, running some Pd patches that I designed specifically for this show. As usual, the computer (as underpowered as it is!) had no problems keeping up. All sounds in the recording were rendered through Pd in realtime. Some audio material (for the granular synthesis) was taken from a(n unnamed) commercial recording, and the spoken sample material was mixed blind (previously unheard by me) from a psychological tape sourced at the Goodwill bins.

This piece is intended to be a contrast of sorts, a juxtaposition, and an overt psychological response to the reflection of time collapse. There really is no time. If your current self could revert to its earlier self in an instant, what would that event sound like?

Many thanks to Sean for having me. May radio live on!

It's really hard for me to type "dada". After years of brainwashing and typing and whoknowswhat, it always comes out "data". These are actually different concepts.

So there's a local, independent, community sponsored radio station that is doing a wonderfully brilliant 101 hours of dada and surrealism

I'm biased -- I have performed live on this community platform and I have helped out with a festival in the past...but this is really a great thing and I need to get the word out. Portlanders can listen on 90.7 on the fm dial, out of towners can also listen by streaming magic via the internet.

Once time time in time, in the spirit of dada, we proclaimed "stud pony midgets in bondage gear. $5" available at the student health center. It is altogether true and yet not real but quite false in its actuality and refuted in its continued insistence of existence. It is a failure baby and a falsehood meme of blind eye turning of steering quality of knowing. You will deny.

I've been following the gross artwork of Larry Carlson for a while...and to my surprise and joylation, he's got a segment slotted in the fest (see Thursday 6am -- yes, like 7 hours from now).

There's tons of great performances slated, including Argumentix and Celestville (both of which I'm a sucker for). Check out the full schedule for great victory.

Last night in Portland, Negativland performed a live version of their Over the Edge radio broadcast. The performance was also simulcast live on KBOO radio (the main independent free form radio station in Portland). It was great to be able to see these legends in person and to see their methods...which, from what I could tell, were surprisingly simple. On a whim, I decided to look on archive.org to see if somebody had posted a live version of the performance. No luck, but I did find the death of circuit bending. Who knew? :) I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet (nor the handful of CDs I walked away with last night), but I will soon... There's a guy who posted some images of his Hulk hands midi controller conversion. Even tho I'm not sure what the actual mechanism is (is it just a single trigger per hand?) [Ed: I looked at the images again, there's a "spring and can" switch, so yeah, it sure seems like only a single switch per hand], I like the idea...although I wonder if he realizes that Wayne Coyne has been rockin the big hands for a few years already. Major loss of goodness points by showing Max/MSP screens instead of PD.