Are you sitting uncomfortably? Radio Astercote goes out on that hidden frequency, between the tick and the tock - where it's always nearly teatime, and all you have is your transistor and the dark.
A collection of acid folk, pastoral prog, hauntology, ambient and strangeness
Album list 03/2024 | 5953 tracks | 538hrs 23 minutes | 68.6GB
At my listening station at home, I've been collecting sounds to broadcast. I daydream about setting up a Rasberry Pi and streaming straight from my parlor to yours : something about the sense of immediacy and contact. Yes, I can give you a playlist or a recommendation, but radio speaks of togetherness.
But internet radio stations have cost: legal fees, bandwidth, and also environmental (streaming, like so many cloud-based technologies, evokes an insubstantiality as if it was above material consumption. But the cloud is just someone else's computer, a physical thing with noise, heat and mineral consumption. I'm attracted to the idea of having the radio server in my house, to see and touch the machinery of it, and to bear the moral cost of energy in my own home bills, and to know it has a physical existence)
So fantasy it must be remain; but I am in love with it. I rescued a sturdy old table of honey-oak and wicker, to display my vintage hi fi system (it's from the 90s!) and hide away my laptop and hard drive underneath. Is this an altar? The magic of the 3.5mm jack and the Audio In port gives much better sound quality than I could afford in modern plug-in speakers, as well as the sense of listening to a radio (as this machine could play it, as well as compact disks and casettes). And then it awakes: a known stranger in the room.
This is not a list of recommended albums or songs. Indeed, I haven't listened to most of it. It's just enough to jumble up and feel familiar. As the collection grows, it is going to be hard to keep the balance of creepy noises against the ever-growing bulk of folk, and as I look down the list there are important things I already need to add to it.
In future, I would like to add more spoken word programs - tagging them so they can be filtered out if I prefer - and then having it quietly mutter away in the background of my day.
Radio Astercote can be used as an oracle.
What this list is, is a way for you to reconstruct Radio Astercote in your home. This minimises energy costs for all, and allows you to maximise audio quality (anything worth listening to is worth hearing at 320kbps through real headphones or speakers).
I keep each album in a folder, and use Windows PowerShell to automate looking through every folder of folders for just album names, and then putting them into a text file
Get-ChildItem -Path 'E:\FILE\PATH' -Name -Recurse -Attributes Directory| Out-File -FilePath 'E:\FILE\PATH\output.txt' -Encoding utf8