Raga Multani FM (free download)
by Herzbeat Hotel

"Raga Multani FM" was conceived as a radio broadcast retrieved from a mental and temporal limbo. This piece employs magnetic recording as a means of archiving information through electricity, and also the evocation of ghosts/phantasms and spectres contained in those archives through the use of radiophonic broadcasting.

The starting point was an object of uprooted memory: a computer program conceived by Benedictine monks from Bangladesh, whose liturgical and musical activity combines classical indian music and christian psalms, in a multiple collision of cultures and technologies; this software reproduces a variety of ragas and christian psalms and hymns. Raga Multani was selected to be used for the present work.

The software-performed raga was converted into electricity through the use of valves and recorded on reel-to-reel tape; the process was repeated a number of times, with the addition of sources of electromagnetic radiation and the spectral intervention of residual voices and sounds still trapped in the tape.

The resulting track was broadcast by a FM transmitter and received by a standard radio apparatus, and it is the recording of this broadcast that constitutes the piece's final version. During the process, the original sound matter was transformed by the action of the aether, electromagnetic radiation, iron oxide and the tape's decay; the transmutation of the original matter was amplified by each repetition, in a similar manner to the repeated distillation processes employed in Alchemy.

The fact that the final track, an accumulation of static, electrical impulses rendered audible, and fragments of the original sound-matter, is the result of a repeated process of recording and reproduction, and ultimately broadcasting, allows for the original, automatic, software-produced version to reacquire several strata of memory.

Raga Multani FM was created for presentation at RadiaLX 2008: International Festival Of Radio Art