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Why Your Folks'll Hate You

Must be recipes online. How to build, whatnot.

I don't build, I combine. Stuff abounds. Stuff I have. Suggest likewise for you, any and all. If you got this stuff, stuff like it and the interest, give it a try.

Standard CMA Boilerplate -- don't blame me if things blow up, break, vaporize the universe, your brain, first born, whoever, whatnot. Enjoy responsibly.

So, a combination of goofy onhand gizmos to make fuzzy fake theremin sounds --notably get three radios that operate on AM band, put them near each other, only use the sound of one, tune them to cause the audible radio to oscillate/whistle etc., try moving/tuning radios in relation to each other to alter pitch/volume, also use hand proximity to tuning dials to alter pitch. Walkmen, any not so new radios with tuning & volume dials, thumb wheel controls, are good candidates for this. Explore. Mix & match.

Okay, shorthand for three AM radio based theremin set up done. Will skip personal stories. Suffice it to say just having this stuff around is an implicit biography. What you have, keep, use is the same.

Tweaking ability such as is, acuity, is related to my life long & ongoing TV addiction, learning young in the messy, overbuilt analog world. Oldish radios that can interact, fail/succeed in these subtle ways, are a very late solid state hangover of that world into the present one. Digital control and encoding and other such are meant to sidestep and eradicate all that. To have any awareness or rapport with that old weird tangle is to be at least a bit old & weird & tangled oneself. So, hey, there's that.

Other stuff that can get you into more trouble, indicate an enduring, if anti-social, playfulness. FM band feedback.

If one happens to have an FM band mini transmitter (like those that used to abound as handy short range wireless signal gadgets--mine was a stray hand-me-down--or diy tweakers may yet find kits if so inclined, dunno), the transmission can be a multiple connection, to various radios etc. And one can loop the signal through an FM radio to create feedback. All sorts of happenstance factors can alter the response. Volume, tone, tuning
controls, speakers,room tone/eq (if feedback loop is done open air) are all factors that too fun & performative to be considered entirely rationally. So it goes.

But remember the boilerplate. Ears,speakers, circuits, brain may never be the same. Or they may do just fine. Can't promise. But if curious, willing to find out, well

Something of what I wrote re my noise as my country and western. Well, what's recalled offhand. Forgot all the bullet points but mainly part social history, part memoir.

What I was long clueless about was the working class post WW2 diaspora of rural whites going for defense jobs. The stats, even the broad trends are beyond me. But Sunset Park somewhere in PA is some bit of country fan convergence for ex Southern formerly rural white folk.

Black Americans had some share of the same wartime/postwar boom. Many headed north to Chicago, Harlem NYC, etc to transplant recreate black music. Ergo R & B, Chicago electric blues, the growth and change of Jazz, gospel, soul--beat goes on. Union leader for sleeping car porters, A. Philip Rudolph bucked early wartime vigor in the US to demand war factory jobs for blacks and likely spurred on many trends and changes. Post Pearl Harbor, he had to say -- do this or we strike. Not easy (also credited for lobbying for 1948 desegregation of US armed forces). But that pesky world depression had been hanging on. Many people weren't doing so great beforehand.

Working class rural whites nudged north to war effort factories. The Monroe Brothers, Charlie and Bill et al,left Kentucky for jobs in Indiana. And brought along the music that would morph into Bluegrass. Transplanted, homesick workers like themselves were the audience.

Anyhow, in short, folks move, bring sounds of home, mutate same. Move, play, repeat.

The broad metaphor/comparison to wartime & postwar C&W that I saw was something like: "I came from one place to another. I remembered/brought along/strived to reenact X, and ended up creating Y."

I could dig deeper for my own memoir of noise to fill out details, but for now just looking to supply the rough scaffolding archetype of displacement/recollection/mutation as a common storyline for many. Maybe you. FWIW.

Please note, yes, facts may prove shaky. Maybe think "poetic license" and tell any analogous story of yours/close acquaintance.

Thanks.

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Whistling In The Margins

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