Considering Radio Moscow

Julie Andrews once sang, "the hills are alive with the sound of music." This is true even in moments of supposed silence.

Indeed, we are pestered, barraged, besieged by sound at all times — in the form of radio waves. No one is safe. Even the Buddhist monk, shuffling off to meditate in a sanctum of apparent solitude, is dogged by these critters; they bounce around him wildly, incessantly; begging to be revealed by some receiving device. Sometimes radio waves will peek out from their dimension uninvited, through dental work or ungrounded old-fangled amplifiers.

Most people consider radio waves harmless; a benign tool, useful for transmitting sound. In fact, they're electromagnetic radiation swarming through the atmosphere. If that weren’t sinister enough, they are also agents of the most grotesque ideology. Yes! Ideological radiation. Their ideology is either propagated through so-called "pop music" or through what's known as "talk radio." Talk radio is a standard feature of taxi-cabs, and is designed to invoke latent feelings of indignant nationalism in passengers, while deepening the cab-driver's commitment to conspiracy theories. There are actually two types of "talk," one being public radio, with its Anglophilic, even Victorian sensibility (designed for the bourgeois class), and the outright fascist promulgations of "talk" on the AM band. And yet they would be virtually indistinguishable if dissected by, say, an alien visiting from another galaxy. Especially if s/he didn't know the language.

There are also "music" radio stations which should never be turned on — in any circumstance, ever.

Both talk radio and music radio are the domain of the corporatist hyenas who've successfully enslaved the airwaves that Marconi and Tesla worked so hard to put to good use for humanity. Nowadays, almost all radio waves in the US march cravenly alongside Congress and the other media, enforcing a global imperial/capitalist system as they perform only by virtue of the ruling class' acquiescence.

It wasn't always this way however; as Cook Records' Radio Moscow and the Western Hemisphere demonstrates, from the early '50s through 1991, even the most upstanding American citizen was unknowingly bathed in subversive socialist propaganda. Radio Moscow, the official international broadcasting station of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), beamed in anti-capitalist rhetoric and Soviet-centric critiques of US foreign policy 24 hours a day, with a pleasant-sounding voice interminably blasting the hypocrisy of the imperialist blood-sucking banker class in the "home of the free." The station enjoyed the most powerful and far-reaching transmission network on the planet, with shortwave stations based in Siberia sending messages coated in icicles of loathing and smug certainty of inevitable victory! Talk to old-timers who were alive in those times and they'll recount how they would sometimes feel a mysterious chill up their spine.

Cook Records' Radio Moscow album is a collage of messages regarding American intervention abroad (Central America, Vietnam, etc.) closely resembling the screeds you'd see now on a left-wing weblog — and the situations are hauntingly familiar. Radio Moscow and the Western Hemisphere bookends each left-wing diatribe with narration by popular veteran radio commentator Norman Brokenshire, who clearly had a taste for found sound: in the '30s, he gained broadcasting immortality when, having run out of things to say on his broadcast, proclaimed, "Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the sounds of New York" — and dangled a microphone out the window.

Brokenshire expresses bewilderment or amusement at the charges being leveled against his nation. His dismissive tone is natural, of course — after all, no one likes being scolded by a foreigner. Still, Radio Moscow and the Western Hemisphere is clearly not partisan for the Soviets; nor doth it protest too much. The point seems to be more about archiving and proliferating interesting sound than anything else. The Cook label specialized in such noise collages.

Emory Cook, who ran Cook Records (and subsequently donated his catalogue to Smithsonian/Folkways) was a sound engineer before he started Sounds of Our Times Records in the early '50s; the label that later assumed his name.

Cook was an audio supremacist. In a 1956 New Yorker profile, he complained that hearing was “always being kicked aside in favor of sight… There’s a time and a place for everything, and that includes sound.” Cook vaunted the experience of listening and released many albums full of everyday sounds, such as Voice of the Sea (ocean noises) and Eye of the Storm (recorded during a thunderstorm). One of Cook Records' most successful albums was Rail Dynamics, which recorded trains going to and fro in a rail yard. The imprint also issued spoken volumes, including several featuring the pontifications of visionary American architect, author and inventor Buckminster Fuller.

Emory Cook wasn't overly fond of professional pro-star musicians, but he did like music, and produced many records of calypso groups in particular. But his main interest was unusual and yet also quotidian sounds like the radio waves coming in from Radio Moscow. If I were a normal reviewer, one who had been successfully brainwashed by the United States' fascist education system, I suppose I would make some snide comment about how dated, silly, absurd, campy or sinister this record is. But I have no education, and so for me it evokes joy, nostalgia, agreement and sorrow. In a country where every cable company rejected the recently launched English-speaking version of Al-Jazeera, but eagerly run Spike TV, foreign propaganda by shortwave would be a welcome and friendly agent, a delightful alternative to the syphilitic transmissions we call radio and media.