NEW AMERICAN RADIO ARCHIVE
 
Voices in the Dark
1991
Jacki Apple
A radio work for outer and inner space, in four sections. The cosmos is an audio archive of information broadcast to the stars, a repository of human (and perhaps other) histories in which time melts and language dissolves into signals. All those "voices" traversing the universe looking for a pick-up! Imagine gridlock in the big data bank in outer space. Voices in the Dark is about interstellar conversations, radio waves, and sonic archaeology. Is there anyone listening and how do they interpret what they hear? How do we/they distinguish between real events and people, and media-generated fictions? Are we the "they"? We say we want to make contact with the Other, when in fact what we search for is a mirror of ourselves. This composition combines a narrative text with various musical, vocal, and sound components snatched from the airwaves, overdubbed, sampled, remixed, and electronically orchestrated.