Prime Time One
(excerpt)
Prime Time One (2008) is a work for single sideband shortwave receiver, field recording and processing, designed to produce an evolving music with thousands of years of continual variation from a very limited source: exactly one minute of recorded audio. The first in a projected series, this piece develops my work with non-referential radio sounds and repeating simultaneous phrases based on prime number ratios. It is also a celebration of the tactile beauty of our immediate, natural world, and of the electromagnetic ether: a cerebral, invisible world that is both natural and artificial, made partly perceptible by the human technologies that have helped to create it. The accompanying film of my natural environment along the Housatonic River in Massachusetts and Connecticut reinforces the themes explored in the work, captured in the saturated, nostalgic analog distortion of super8 film, altered by editing, and presented as a series of moving paintings in arch form.