World's Music
Myke Weiskopf weaves synth pop and shortwave for a new sound
By Taylor McNeil
Most musicians wouldn’t admit that their lasting inspirations came at age ten. But that’s when Myke Weiskopf (CAS’00) first discovered Laurie Anderson and shortwave radio, twin influences that continue to drive his art.
Watching MTV late at night — “I was raised with little discipline,” he says — he knew he was on to something he saw Anderson’s Sharkey’s Day, a 1984 music video hit. Her offbeat electronic music was a revelation. “My perception of what music can be and of what it means to make music and make sound art just opened up as a result of hearing her,” says Weiskopf. He soon started recording his own brand of pop music in his basement, selling the cassettes in suburban Chicago record stores.
Around that time he was randomly pushing buttons marked “SW1” and “SW2” on his boombox when he heard the strange noises and multiple languages of the shortwave bands. Another new aural world opened for Weiskopf, especially the music. “I remember hearing Radio Bulgaria, with these crazy additive meter accordion songs at a thousand miles an hour, singing spiraling off, and just being blown away,” he says. “It was a life-changing moment.”
Those two worlds mesh comfortably on his recently released CD 30: A Retrospective (Obscure Disks), recordings from his teen years and the three records by Science Park, a synth pop group he formed while at BU, as well as current sonic explorations that incorporate found sounds from shortwave. Take Science Park’s “Ascension Island,” a pop confection that owes much to the eighties synth explosion. Then there’s “What I Was Going to Say,” a moody instrumental mixed with raw extracts of distant voices from shortwave.
Now Weiskopf is moving beyond making music. He hosts extended sets on WHRB-FM, Harvard’s radio station, such as a twenty-four-hour program of Bulgarian folk music in January and another on Egyptian Umm Kulthum, a legendary singer he first heard on Radio Cairo via shortwave — not to mention a program on Laurie Anderson.
Coming up is a series of special programs he will broadcast on shortwave via a station in Maine. Although shortwave is slowly fading as more international broadcasters move to the Web and satellite radio, its archaic quality, with isolated listeners scattered across the world, appeals to Weiskopf. He details his fascination on his blog, ShortWaveMusic, which also includes his recordings of music from exotic locales rarely heard here, such as from Western Sahara.
Much like his more recent music, with its experimental explorations of found sounds, Weiskopf’s shortwave interests don’t appeal to everyone, and he doesn’t expect them to. But in this increasingly segmented world — where every subculture can easily congregate online, anytime — maybe that’s the future, even as Weiskopf continues to embrace the technologies of the past.
