On Repeat: archive.org, Shortwave, Glitch

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ The musician keinseier posted this gorgeous little ambient glitch recording on YouTube, and I had it running in the background for much of the week. He’s based in Hamburg, Germany. More of his music at keinseier.bandcamp.com.

▰ Tom Whitwell, the inventive London-based guy behind various music technological wonders — like the Turning Machine, the 8MU MIDI controller, and the Music Thing Modular Workshop System — posted nearly 60 short recordings of shortwave radio frequencies. Shortwave Scan May 2025, as the collection is titled, comes with a great licensing statement: “NO rights reserved, use these sounds how you like” (albeit with a qualifier: “Raw radio recordings include audio material that might be copyrighted by other people – no license to use that material is implied”).

▰ The Internet Archive (archive.org), about half an hour by foot from where I live in San Francisco, is now live-streaming its archival activities, and when it’s not business time, they put up archival footage. I vote for ASMR hours, during which they just put mics next to some of the equipment.