‘The Carrier Frequency’ (1984) was a legendary stage work that emerged from the collaboration between the influential performance company Impact Theatre Co-operative and cult novelist Russel Hoban. The incantation of Hoban’s text voiced in the broken verbiage of a post-apocalyptic broken language and the entranced physicality of Impact’s ritualistic performance in a pool of cold dark water printed deeply on those who witnessed it. It reached an impassioned crescendo on the rising score by Graeme Miller and Steve Shill who also performed in the work. The music exploited samples from Hoban’s own recordings of the shortwave radio broadcasts which he tuned in as he wrote, helping him order the green phosphorescent letters on the screen of his Apple computer. Shill and Miller mirrored Hoban’s channelling in their approach to making the score, following the notion that this was the broadcast of some Central Eurasian radio station doomed forever to circulate fragments of static interlaced with desultory public information broadcasts and ‘The Record’, its only surviving fragment of a lost culture.
The score was forged on an 8-track tape recorder sandwiching harmonium and accordion with the output of a digital delay machine that could trap and fragments of audio to be triggered and manually pitched. It is a knowingly crude montage where samples denote fragmentation itself and their reassembly, like Frankenstein’s monster, shows the stitches that join the stolen body parts.
Available for the first-time ever on deluxe vinyl with the full cooperation of the composers and Impact Theatre Co-Operative lynchpins Graeme Miller and Steve Shill.
TRACK LISTING
A Long Paleness
Reggie Windmill
Landschaft
And Now The Record
Longdream
Beat Frequency Oscillator
Without Impatience
A False Altar
The Girl From Tirana