Playing Respects (Radioplay written by Van Orhari at 37:18)

Retrogress Transmissions is a series of broadcast excerpts, recorded in a hillside cabin in Boone, North Carolina. The audio was captured using a modified Neptunium radio capable of picking up progray waves. The exact date from which these “program ray” waves destiginate is unclear, but it has been speculated that they are to be sent back at some point between 2900 anno Domini and, more controversially, 350 I.M.E. (Interfaith Mountaintop Era). The space between these two dates remains undefined.

[Block quote from “Outsider Engineers: Ontological Ruptures in Electromagnetic Field Studies” by Frank Delany. MIT Press, 2017.]

…device’s inventor, who insisted on being identified only as the Califone Cowboy, challenged institutional theories of the audio’s nature. Citing numerous white papers on climate change predictions, lyrics by dub reggae band The Congos, long-term nuclear waste semiotics, and Revelations 11:15-19 (N.I.V.), Califone asserts that these “non-musics” are retrograde radio broadcasts meant to convey warnings and aspirations. Though he has no positivistic means of proving their intention, Califone insists that “media priests” residing in the future have sensed their existence fading from possibility. According to the Cowboy, these transmissions are either a desperate attempt to preserve the media priests’ existence, or a hopeless expression of love for their once-forebearers. If this is true, our successors have attempted to represent their soon-to-be lost version of modernity through sound and audio-image, in hopes that their designs prove archetypal.

Retrogress Transmissions

Freighthopping (Mixed Media Collage) - Van Orhari & Kit E.