Communications Tower

Over the years, masts situated here have variously relayed TV, radio and now phone signals for Guernsey. For a time during and after the cold war the tower also had the monitoring equipment/instruments for the Torteval Nuclear Monitoring Posts. Originally located in the command post of the nearby Batterie Dollmann, the monitoring post was moved in the 80s to a German bunker further away on private land. Of course it’s this bunker that I’ve recorded several albums for other Guernsey artists in. Whenever you start digging into these bigger projects there’s always a string of coincidences waiting to be uncovered.
As part of the process of making this track, I took a small FM radio transmitter (a very small legal one!) to a field near the mast, along with a shortwave radio, music player and portable audio recorder. Using all this I broadcast the drum part I’d already written over FM radio and re-recorded it to give it a hyper-compressed radio sound. It also fades in and out in parts with other signals and stations breaking through over my very low powered transmitting gadget. I also recorded a couple of sweeps across various shortwave radio bands at the same time as playing the track on location. To give a feel of what was floating on the airwaves around the mast on that particular evening, but also what is swimming around all of us, all of the time.