FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Creators

Emptyset’s 'Signal' Transforms Earth's Ionosphere into Sound Art

The British experimental duo’s new release turns high frequency radio transmissions into a melodic and organic soundtrack.
All photos by James Ginzburg

This Friday September 11, Emptyset, the Bristol-based experimental electronic music duo comprised of Paul Purgas and James Ginzburg, will unveil a brand new release, generated by sound data recordings coming straight from the ionosphere, also known as Earth's upper atmosphere.

To be released on digital and vinyl via Subtext Recordings “Signal emerged through an ongoing investigation into the properties of electromagnetic radiation and the qualities of ionospheric propagation and both its physical effects on radio waves and its potential to auralise atmospheric noise and space weather phenomenon,” Purgas and Ginzburg tell The Creators Project. “With this in mind we looked to explore these possibilities by applying them within a real-time performance, with live elements being reflecting across the ionosphere. Signal was realized as the third part within a triptych of projects including Medium (2012) and Material (2013) investigating the spatial and environmental properties of sound.”

Advertisement

By tooling with a number of physical laws, spatialization techniques, temporality, atmospheric noises, and solar radiation patterns, the duo offers up a series of high frequency radio transmission-created, melodic and organic signals. Generated by a long-distance sonic data exchange between Berlin, Nauen, and the 1950's French radio base Émetteur d'Issoudun, Signal takes advantage of complex natural and physical iterations that deconstruct sound structures to produce one of their most intricate, complex, and minimal soundtracks yet.

“The radio transmission was comprised of an elemental palette of sine waves and white noise that were transmitted on a circuit of 2000km during the performance. The sound is the direct outcome of the signal reflecting across the physically dynamic structure of the ionosphere, being ornamented with the environmental qualities of the propagation process,” Purgas and Ginzburg explain.

Earlier this year, the duo offered this sonic matter to one lucky Berlin-based audience via a commissioned live performance. Then, the duo decided to give the world a chance to enjoy their otherworldly collection: Emptyset's Signal succeeds in maintaining the authenticity of the original performance, while exploring the shape and movement of the sounds emerging from the ionosphere through their studio recording process.

“The production of Signal and the process used to realize it as a real-time performance was by far the most elaborate project we had undertaken, so we wanted to present a faithful reproduction of the results for this release. Very little was done in post-production outside of mastering and editing the performance into excerpts," Emptyset concludes.

Advertisement

Signal will be released September 11, 2015, on vinyl and digital through Subtext Recordings.

To learn more about Emptyset, click here.

Related:

It's Void Vs. Structure in This Cosmic A/V Installation

Enter a Digitized Forest of Lights and Sounds

Take a Hallucinatory Boat Ride Inside a Museum