neveroddoreven

>> World Receiver, Pt. 2 Nul !Hnzpkcbeo6 07/23/11(Sat)18:24 No.8240033
World Receiver did not play songs, but rather let loose an elegant and unbroken stream of sound. It was made up entirely of samples put together haphazardly with a lethargic beat keeping it together. Within the nooks and crannies of the dense soundscape that emanated from the station you could make out bits and pieces of telephone conversations, clips from old movies, super slowed-down riffs from eighties hits, and everything in between. Flies buzzing. Mariachi serenades. Babies laughing. It sounded like the world, condensed into a sound and regurgitated. It would continue to play for approximately three hours and then fade out, and the station would fall back into silence until the next night.

My obsession with World Receiver became stronger with every night that I spent on the front seat of Dad’s car, allowing myself to be mesmerized by the texture and sounds of the station. I would sit there and listen intently, though sometimes I would fall asleep. I remember my grades suffering thanks to this self-afflicted insomnia.

Despite the eclectic nature of the broadcast, I began to notice recurring sonic elements in World Receiver, aside from the more eclectic and sporadic ones. Basically, it started to sound more familiars. The sounds of my everyday life crept upon and began to dominate the sounds of the station. Bicycle bells rang, chalk softly scraped on a blackboard, the idle whispers of vacant students, all mixed into the sound and hard to discern. With each midnight listen, these changes became increasingly apparent.

World Receiver, Pt. 3 Nul !Hnzpkcbeo6 07/23/11(Sat)18:31 No.8240080
I remember telling a few friends about World Receiver. Most of them were uninterested. Others tuned in once or twice and found it boring. About the only person who was as enraptured by the whole prospect as I was, was Anthony. We started to discuss the possible nature of the station and our favorite parts of the recordings with regularity, and it became sort of our secret thing. But it soon became apparent that we were not listening to the same music.

On any given day when we discussed the previous night's broadcast, Anthony brought up sounds that were completely absent in my experience. Rattling chains, the soft crackle of a flame, the sound a car makes while driving over gravel, and periodic, high-pitched screams like tiny needles shot out of the sound. And he figured this was what I heard when I tuned in, too. This is when we started recording World Receiver.

World Receiver, Pt. 4 Nul !Hnzpkcbeo6 07/23/11(Sat)18:36 No.8240115
Back then we were still using cassettes, and I had to borrow a friend's radio equipment to successfully record the station. I took it to my house, sat at the foot of my bed, antennas raised, and waited for the stroke of midnight. The announcer's comforting voice soon seeped in, and the three-hour soundscape extravaganza began as it did every night. As per usual, I didn't hear any of the things that Anthony described--not the gnashing of teeth, the irritating buzz of mosquitoes as they fly towards and away from you at night, the thud of something heavy and hard being dropped on wooden floor, all of these he described in precise and anecdotal detail. I realized that I also made very specific associations to the sound in World Receiver. It was probably because everything that came out of sounded nostalgic, shot out of the core of someone's life, yours and everyone's.

I successfully recorded that night's session onto the tape, and so did Anthony. The following day after school we got together at his house and played the tapes for each other, huddled in his room with an even older and shittier box to work with. But it did its job. First I put in my tape and pressed Play. What came out was not what I had heard the previous night.

World Receiver, Pt. 5 Nul !Hnzpkcbeo6 07/23/11(Sat)18:40 No.8240131
>>8240115

When played out of the tape that I used, World Receiver's sounded like a recording... of a recording of a recording. Like a seventh-generation bootleg or something. It was extremely decayed beyond reason, considering it had been recorded just the previous night, and the sounds came out languid and covered in layers of static and breaks, choked out as soon as they were emitted. As the minutes advanced, it became exponentially worse. At the ten-minute mark, all we could hear was the squalid beat behind all the surface wall of sound, sinister and constant. But soon enough that died out, too. We were left with nothing more than tape hiss. Trying to rewind and play the tape again resulted in nothing.

I was more than a bit puzzled by the results, though Anthony figured that I probably had used really old or bad equipment or something of the like. He put in his own tape next, and was surprised when the exact same thing happened. The sound was decayed and gnawed away at beyond recognition, and it was disintegrating more with every passing minute. Much like with mine, it fell apart completely a bit after ten minutes, bearing the underlying beat as well. But it was not the same.

World Receiver, Pt. 6 Nul !Hnzpkcbeo6 07/23/11(Sat)18:45 No.8240143
>>8240131

Whatever it was Anthony had recorded the previous night, it was not what I had been hearing out of World Receiver. It was similar in its liberal use of samples from all over the place, but different all the same. Anthony hadn't been lying about the things he heard in the broadcast. His version of World Receiver sounded like a harsh and impenetrable industrial record, the opposite of the soft and flowing ambient I had been hearing every night. There was heartless machinery revving up rhythmically, there was clanking and rips of static and waves of Theremin screech. There were babies screaming and chains clanging and deep thuds. And the beat was not the same as mine. It was more urgent, more pointed, but also less constant, sometimes falling out like a broken snare drum. All in all, it was much more sinister.

At this point we started wondering if we were listening to different stations, because clearly we hadn't recorded the same thing at all from what little we'd heard of it before it well apart. But we weren't, as far as we knew. And both of our recordings began with the "World Receiver"introduction. It didn't seem likely that there were two such stations out there. And then there was the fact that the tapes had decayed so quickly. Examining the cassette later revealed that the equipment itself was fine, but the recording had disappeared completely and the tape was blank. It was if World Receiver's sound could not be captured; it could only exist in the radio waves, emanating freely.

World Receiver, Pt. 7 Nul !Hnzpkcbeo6 07/23/11(Sat)18:51 No.8240167
>>8240143

Our discussions and experiments with World Receiver continued for several weeks. We tried recording it once again with better equipment, but the outcome was exactly the same. We tried to pinpoint the samples that we heard, trace them back to their origin. We thought we had a few nailed down sometimes, but in reality there was no way to tell for sure; everything was too distorted, sped-up, slowed down. As the only two audio nerds in school, our discussions dominated all of our other interactions and we stopped talking about everyday life altogether, preferring to take a stab at the enigma that was that radio station. Given that nobody else cared, nobody else understood what we were talking about.

I also came to ignore Anthony's attitude towards everything else at the time. He had become quickly obsessed with the station even faster than I, and sometimes I think that he was even more engrossed by it, completely putting off schoolwork or his other friends in favor of discussing and staying up for the stroke of midnight. I don't think he missed a single session of World Receiver between the time he discovered it and the end of it all. And for those reasons I also began to ignore his life beyond school, his appearing with occasional bruises or, once, a black eye. I would casually ask about it, he'd said he'd gotten into a fight, and that would be that.

>> World Receiver, Pt. 8 Nul !Hnzpkcbeo6 07/23/11(Sat)18:56 No.8240189
>>8240167

Though Anthony's interest in the station grew with every passing day, I was sort of growing out of it after a couple months of so of World Receiver. I think I was kind of burnt out of it all and talking about it all day. I wanted to see my other friends and do more normal things. Anthony had long since lost that perception and only had ears for World Receivers and theories on its mysteries. But we had hit a brick wall. We couldn't record it, we couldn't determine where it was being broadcast from (we had no idea of how to triangulate a signal), and the sounds never really changed; they were constant for him and for me. The strange announcer's voice was the only hint that there was someone human operating the station, and beyond that, it didn't help at all.

One day Anthony didn't come to school. He stayed at home for the remainder of the week and amongst my classmates there was some gossiping about how they were having family troubles and his mom had apparently suffered a miscarriage late into pregnancy. I didn't even know they were expecting; Anthony never told me anything of the sort.

World Receiver, Pt. 9 Nul !Hnzpkcbeo6 07/23/11(Sat)19:01 No.8240225
>>8240189

He eventually re-emerged the following week, gaunt and tired, bruised and stricken by bouts of narcolepsy, as if his sleep schedule had shattered into dozens of naps taken over the course of the day so as to always allow him to tune into World Receiver. The others talked behind his back but gave him a certain distance, acknowledging his grief, I suppose, and he only talked to me. The first day that he came back to school he sat next to me during lunch and, nonchalantly, began to talk about World Receiver. He never brought up problems in his family, his feelings, his personal life, anything. I figured it would be inconvenient to mention them myself.

Anthony said that World Receiver had changed for him once again; now it was more focused, more zoomed-in on him. He chalked this up to the fact that he tuned into the station every single night; at that point I only did so sparingly. He pointed out that the superficial sounds, the more extravagant and esoteric ones, had disappeared, and now he only heard the arrhythmic snare at the heart of it all, with passing sounds and samples of muffled yelling, field recordings, the buzzing of electric porch light, the sounds of suburbia, as he called them. And his obsession didn't let up, of course. He started talking about how all his attempts to record World Receiver had failed, and how he was keeping a log of the sounds that he heard, and how they disappeared gradually with every night.

World Receiver, Pt. 10 Nul !Hnzpkcbeo6 07/23/11(Sat)19:06 No.8240253
>>8240225

At this point I was a little disconcerted about Anthony's complete disregard for everyone and everything else and told him as such. First I tried to bring up things other than World Receiver in conversation, as subtly as I could, but he would change the topic right back to World Receiver without even a casual remark. This continued for a few days until it made me angry. It frustrated me that I could no longer talk to him about anything, it angered me that he seemed to be a completely different person, and it infuriated me that he refused to take on his family situation head-on, taking refuge in some stupid mysterious radio station. Of course at the time I was self-entitled and naive, like most teens, and told him as such. He just took it, staring at the floor, like a child being admonished. After a long pause he said "Okay", softly, as if apologizing.

For a few days after that we didn't talk, as it felt awkward. Others asked me about Anthony and whether he was okay. I shrugged and said that his family was going through a difficult time and that we should give him some space. Most everyone agreed. But without me, Anthony had nobody left to talk about. Nobody else wanted or cared to know about World Receiver, after all, and that was all he had been reduced to discussing. Soon enough I suppose he stopped seeing the point of coming to school and failed to show up for class. The faculty didn't really react.

World Receiver, Pt. 11 Nul !Hnzpkcbeo6 07/23/11(Sat)19:14 No.8240279
>>8240253

Anthony's death came as a shock to everyone in the school. A couple weeks after he stopped coming we were notified that he had regrettably died in an accident. He had suffered an epileptic seizure and fallen off his house's second story, breaking his neck as a result. Passed away that same night in the hospital.

The more lurid details of his family life didn't surface until later, when they became the juiciest topic at school. Apparently his father was a drunk and prone to abusing his family, and his mother wasn't much better, which caused the miscarriage in the same place. Apparently the bruises and black eyes that Anthony showed up with every once in a while weren't the result of street fights. For God's sake, I didn't even know that he suffered of epilepsy; nobody did. He had stopped being Anthony shortly after World Receiver, I guess. The whole thing was very tragic and the grade was haunted by him for the remainder of our school life, to the point where there was a dedication for him during our graduation ceremony some years later. In reality he didn't have many friends other than me, but everyone still felt bad. The school board launched an "awareness"campaign and so on. I didn't really know what to think.

World Receiver, Pt. 12 Nul !Hnzpkcbeo6 07/23/11(Sat)19:20 No.8240299
>>8240279

It was hard to feel immediately sad about Anthony being dead because, well, when you're a teenager the idea that people really die and their lives end still feels foreign to you. Your entire life is ahead of you and chances are that nobody close to you has died yet. Furthermore, with Anthony's case, my memories of him after World Receiver were completely different from those that came before. Before I told him about the station he was a complete person, rounded out, with flaws and quirks, with reasons why he was my friend. After the fact he had become a factoid-dispensing machine, an audio tinkerer, a devotee of World Receiver to a degree where it had engulfed every other aspect of his humanity. In a sense I had already felt separated from him for a long time, and the guilt and regret--guilt for never wondering about his problems, regret for telling him about World Receiver in the first place--didn't overcome me after a week later or so. Then it hit me and I cried and talked to people about it, and eventually I became normal again, freed from the grips of our strange, mutual obsession.

I remember that the day of Anthony's funeral, which I and practically the rest of our grade went to, I sat down in my dad's car much like the very first time to listen to the station, sort of in his memory.

>> World Receiver, Pt. 13 /end Nul !Hnzpkcbeo6 07/23/11(Sat)19:27 No.8240328
>>8240299

Soon enough it was midnight and I awaited, anxiously, for another broadcast. I felt a little scared; somewhere in the back of my mind I was aware of how monumentally this station had affected me in past months. But I had no time to think of such things, as the introduction came along, emanated sweetly from the radio crackle, "From the bottom of the night, World Receiver."

There were a few moments of silence and then the music faded in. It was the same comfortable wash of sounds and samples that I had fallen in love with in the first place. But it only took me a few minutes to realize that some changes had taken place. I heard it in the background first, and had to strain my ear to notice the difference. Something pounding and hard. Little needles of static prodding the tunes. Vocal samples cut off awkwardly. The sound of cold machines in a factory, of fire, of engines revving, was slowly overtaking the broadcast. I sat there frozen with a strange mix of curiosity and fear. When the baby's piercing cry came in, I shut it off and jolted out of the car.

I never listened to World Receiver again, nor have I really told anyone about it. To be honest, I've forgotten what station it was, and given that it was pirate radio, the police must have shut it down by now.

Well, I don't really believe that. I'm sure that World Receiver is still broadcasting, and will continue to do so. It doesn't seem like it could possibly be any other way. It is constant and ever-changing, and impossible to capture. And I'm sure it will be there for me when the music stops.

Old but good