Hertzian frequencies, radio interceptions, fragments of voices, singing sands, shortwave transmissions, archival recordings, vanished worlds, chaotic harmonies, daunting moments of confusion, an audible entropy, elation, and an endless search for beauty into chaos.

“I hear this displacement of refrains. I am not fixed within signs but adrift within signals. Like a bat or a dolphin, I hear scanned frequencies otherwise inaudible to my human limitations, and these voices and tones captured from the aether seem to me to be our equivalent of those voices of gods who spoke words that flew; music asserts its regional and cultural affiliations and yet at the same time it drifts unmoored in the ocean of sound.” — David Toop

The box set gathers four previously unreleased studio compositions by the New York and Berlin based group, and a booklet including an essay by the musician and writer David Toop and a conversation with the founder of the label. The four compositions are the result of extensive journeys and field recordings in the Mediterranean basin, the Black Sea, the Rub' al Khali desert, and the region around Odessa once known as Bessarabia.

ULYSSES SYNDROME — “In the autumn of 2009, some 2,800 years after Homer, we embarked on an old gaff-rigged sailboat to follow the ancient path of Ulysses. Equipped with scanners and aerial antennae, we recorded the hertzian frequencies all along the shores of the Mediterranean basin; our intent was to sonically recreate our own interpretation of the myth. Through the use of multiple radio scanners we were able to create a very specific platform, a sound archive. These scanners simultaneously overlapped sounds in their own free and unexpected ways, creating a trove of accidental encounters bouncing back and forth from the Middle East to Africa and Europe. During this journey we became a sort of nautical historians of words and noise. We intercepted vast fragmentations of history. The interplay of these fragments along with the infinite nature of the sea offered various tonalities, each unique to its region: a chaotic harmony, an audible entropy. The sea alone offered us something very exclusive, a very specific layered thickness that can only occur with depth. In order to capture all of these layers we opened ourselves completely; otherwise this intricate layering could have escaped us. These fragile harmonies that surface only on their own accord became the source and the composition. Once back in the studio we went through a meticulous selection process; we wanted to be certain that every sample transferred the appropriate language and sentiment of each culture. The map of our voyage became the score of our music. The sound and the sea, the past and the present, they became one.”

MEDEA — “The Black Sea is the antithesis of the Mediterranean. It is dark in colour, but its darkness extends deeply beyond the visual. It is a darkness with such depth that it can be felt, it insists on being felt, at times almost too intensely. This darkness is what guided us; in ways, it is Medea. Following the path of Medea and the Argonauts we travelled between the coasts, sailing into the Slavic empire facing the immensity of the Middle East and the darkness of the mountains of the Caucasus. Its vast depth allowed us to sink even further into sound; to truly inhabit all the different tones and waves collected there. Each separate region has a life, a past life and a resulting sound all of its own; what connects them is the darkness, so controlling that it seemed to almost forcefully extend itself to the rugged and unforgiving landscape surrounding it. There is something about the way landscape shapes human memory, and how the physicality of it creates an undertone, a background noise with a defined although complex character. The results can be heard in a significantly slower tempo, working with low frequencies, atonal harmonies and eastern scales. Times of exhaustion which gradually lead to elation, daunting moments of confusion which, with patience, resulted in heightened clarity.”

EMPTY QUARTER — “For 45 days we travelled through a mostly uninhabited desert, known to the Bedouins as Rub' al Khali. Its literal translation stretches from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf, extending over four nations; it is the largest continual desert in the world, acting as a crossroads of Middle Eastern civilisation. Removed from modernity, the scanner radio is the only functioning device for communication. From Bedouins voyaging through the desert to oil miners or sailors of cargo ships, all of those who need to communicate depend on them. These scanners, retrieving each sound and voice, result in the creation of an unintentional shared sound space, a collective. Whether the voice is seeking exact coordinates or sending the call to prayer, this space is used by all, for all. In a desert this vast it is easy to lose sense of yourself, of time and of space. These voices which normally would be ignored are now crucial, as they are sometimes the only connection to others; they become, perhaps, the sound of sanity. Following nomadic traditions we allowed the movements of the sand and wind to act as our guide. When the landscape is constantly changing and everything is beyond your control, you must allow yourself to be guided.”

BESSARABIA — “The atrocities held in the history of Bessarabia, a former region of eastern Europe, are not known to many. Instead they were forced to be forgotten and almost permanently erased. Only recently, after inquiry from living relatives and ageing locals fearing the truth they witnessed might be lost forever, have the details emerged. In collaboration with a foundation we were given access to taped recordings of surviving Jews. Recorded in 1959, these tapes ended up improperly stored in a basement in Kyiv; for the past sixty years these voices have been trapped in a space suffering the unforgiving consequences of time and elements. The damage incurred still can be heard, in the faintness of the morphed voices forcing themselves through various glitches. These imperfections act as an audible reflection of the damaging history. While now all that remains on the tapes are just a few fragmented voices, together these fragments become a collective voice, one of survival. In order to feel and to understand the stories we returned to where they were first silenced. We travelled through the 27 villages and towns, along the Black Sea and the Carpathian mountains, to the sites where mobile execution units were erected for mass shootings, and to the mass graves people were forced to dig themselves. Wherever the gravest atrocities occurred, the places history doesn't want you to go: this is where we went and recorded. What remains visually is a forged sense of normalcy, an almost forced forgetting; someone could easily mistake it for idyllic, grass has grown over the graves, the sun still shines. There are no gravestones, nothing marking the dead past. Below the graves, though, are the remnants of those executed; these remnants are what we recorded. All of the location recordings were made at night. Vision gives a false illusion of life and light. There was no light. In order to prevent itself from repeating, history needs a memory.”