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I also want to let you know that Spectres of Shortwave is currently screening online, for a limited time (March 4), on this science film website: https://www.labocine.com/film/2172
I think it costs $3 for the month to access all of the films on this site.
Feel free to let others know.
Many thanks for letting us know, Amanda!
Post Readers: I’ve been to a screening of Spectres of Shortwave—it’s a wonderful film and certainly a must-watch for anyone who loved Radio Canada International.
Some artists work in oils, say, or marble. Amanda Dawn Christie works in radio. Not radio in the sense of performing on air. But radio in the sense of the giant cultural and technological phenomenon that is broadcasting, and specifically shortwave broadcasting.
For decades, shortwave was the only way to reach a global audience in real time. Broadcasters such as the BBC World Service and Voice of America used it to project “soft power.” But as the Internet grew, interest in shortwave diminished.
Christie’s art draws from shortwave’s history, representing it in sculpture, performance, photography, and film. Her focus is the life of the Radio Canada International (RCI) transmitter complex, located in Sackville, New Brunswick, near Christie’s hometown. The transmitter was in operation from the 1940s until 2012. “Those towers were always just a part of the landscape that I grew up around,” says Christie. It took a radio-building workshop to spark her interest: “I built a radio out of a toilet-paper tube…. I thought I did a great job because I picked up Italian radio. It turned out I did not—I was just really close to this international shortwave site.”[…]
June 13 juin
Film Screening / Projection @ 7pm / 19 h Cinémathèque Québécoise
Montréal, Québec
Radio Simulcast @ 23:00 UTC in Europe German Shortwave Service – 3895 kHz
A film about radio waves, relationships, landscape, and loss.
This experimental documentary film about the Radio Canada International (RCI) shortwave radio towers, presents the site through four seasons, leading up to, and including, its demolition in winter of 2014. Images captured on 35mm film accompanied by personal stories from by people who lived with the site, interwoven with field recordings made by placing contact microphones onto the towers themselves.
Screenings of this film are accompanied by a radio simulcast, so that while viewers watch the film on a big screen in one part of the world, listeners can hear the sound track over radio waves in another part of the world. This Montreal screening is accompanied by a shortwave simulcast in Germany.
The Requiem For Radio QSL Card (Source: RFR Facebook)
I received a number of messages from Post readers who logged one or more of the simultaneous Requiem For Radio broadcasts. Many discovered that each frequency of the broadcast was actually a separate track of the piece.
Indeed, SWLing Post contributor, Shelby Brant, posted the following comment yesterday:
Listening right now, 11580, 9690, 9620, and 5130 are on, but nothing on 6850. To get the most out of this you really ought to have a receiver on all the frequencies at the same time, because each station is broadcasting something slightly different, but if you listen to all at the same time, they go together.
Later, Shelby added:
Here’s a link to a very impromptu video I put together of how I was listening to the broadcast, I managed to gather up 4 receivers (this was after I posted earlier) and tuned them to the 4 active frequencies. Part way through I turn the other three receivers down and tune to the individual stations one at a time to give an idea of what the 4 sounded like on their own, then it goes back to all 4 together again for the end of the video
View of the western cluster of curtain antennas from the roof of RCI Sackville’s transmissions building. (Photo: The SWLing Post) –Click to enlarge
(Source: Mauno Ritola via the WRTH Facebook Group)
From Christian Milling: A classical piece for 5 voices will be also sung where bass comes eg. from Nauen, alto from Moosbrunn, tenor from WRMI etc…
The European tx antennas are directed towards Canada / NAm.
Airtimes:
25th May 2017 2300-2400 UTC
26th May 2017 2300-2400 UTC
27th May 2017 2300-2400 UTC
Schedule:
WRMI : Radio Miami International 11580 kHz
WBCQ : Free Speech Radio 5130 kHz
Nauen: Shortwaveservice 9690 kHz
Moosbrunn: Shortwaveservice 9620 kHz
Boston Pirate Radio 6850 kHz
The content is identically on all three days. A QSL is planned.
Moncton artist bringing back sounds of former Sackville Radio-Canada towers
A Moncton artist has brought back to life the sounds of the 13 CBC Radio-Canada International shortwave towers that once stood in Sackville, N.B. on the Tantramar Marsh.
“It’s kind of like you’re conjuring ghosts of radio towers,” explained the artist Amanda Dawn Christie on Shift N.B.
Requiem For Radio: Full Quiet Flutter
The experimental sound art project Requiem For Radio: Full Quiet Flutter involves a scale model of the original towers, but a large model — about 16-metres wide, six-metres deep and five-metres tall.
Christie said the towers have red lights resembling the originals. They are made from pipes with four copper pads on each tower.
She added that when someone touches one of the copper pads, a wireless signal is sent to a computer, which then sends a sound file back to that tower of the actual, recorded sound the original tower made when it was operational. The sound is transmitted through a speaker on the model tower.
[…]But the model towers are more than something to be gazed upon and admired. They are musical instruments that Christie and two other musicians will be playing at one-hour performances on May 26 and 27 at the Aberdeen Cultural Centre in Moncton. The performances will also be broadcast on radio stations in Moncton, Montreal and New York.[…]
On Tuesday, 29th November 2016 from 0230-0300 UTC
on 7250 kHz (to NoAM) we will broadcast our first English edition.
The topics: we speak with Rimantas Pleikys about radio jamming in former
times and today. He wrote a book about it and made a very interesting film
documentary.
And: 4 years ago, on 28th November 2012, Radio Canada International shut
down the Sackville transmission site. 2 years later the facility was
scrapped. Amanda Dawn Christie made a film called Spectres of Shortwave that
is shown at diverse film festivals at the moment. She tells the story behind
the film.
By the way: Spectres of Shortwave is shown on 28th November in Sackville at
7PM local time. Perhaps you want to join it.
All broadcasts are coming from Gavar Armenia site with a power of 100kW,
at azimuth of 330 degrees.
Reception reports and comments are highly appreciated to
<info -at- shortwaveservice.com>
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