Radio is a mysterious object. It transports signals across a variety of distances, even from one side of the Earth to the other. Of course, I understand how it works scientifically, but the phenomenon of sending electromagnetic waves from a transmitter, catching it with an antenna, then the aural information appearing from a speaker, still surprises me as if it is magic. Now we have the internet, and that miraculous quality may have evaporated. However, radio was invented more than a century ago in 1894, and would have been a shocking experience for listeners in earlier decades.

I grew up in Japan as a teenager in the 1980s. I had a habit of listening to the radio after snuggling into bed late at night. My favourite programme was Crossover Eleven on the national broadcasting corporation NHK-FM. Since it was outside of primetime hours, there was a niche selection of music and a meditative and contemplative tone of voice and no idle chat.

That’s where I first heard Brigitte Fontaine's “Comme À La Radio”, her song recorded with Areski Belkacem and The Art Ensemble Of Chicago in the late 1960s. Her intimate yet alien voice repeating the line “It’s cold in the world”, which conveys the sense of alienation in the modern world that I later learned from the late critic Aquirax Aida’s sleevenotes for its Japanese edition, deeply resonated in my mind. I felt as if her spirits were transported from another world through the radio. I couldn’t get along with the hyper-conservative Japanese education system and refused to obey its rules, which resulted in skipping formal education. I spent time reading books at libraries and wandering in Osaka and Kyoto at night with a camera in my hand, as I was into photography.

I was a devoted reader of Rock Magazine founded by Yuzuru Agi, who was also the honcho of Vanity Records. He found something in my photos and published them in his magazine. I was a regular at his monthly event in which he DJ’d and talked about the latest trends of underground music.

One day, he played Holger Czukay’s album Canaxis released in 1969, recorded with producer Rolf Dammers, and told us it was an assemblage of sound fragments from shortwave radio. The first track “Boat-Woman-Song” starts from a tape splicing loop of Western choir; then suddenly samples of magnetic Vietnamese chanting, by two uncredited singers, appear. I was struck by the sheer beauty and amazed by the sense of distance established by the voices warping in from another continent. I believed Czukay caught the radio wave from Vietnam while listening to it in his hometown of Cologne. But the song is in a collection of Smithsonian Folkway Recordings released in 1965. Possibly it was broadcast from somewhere else. Anyhow, the compositions collaged the frequencies from different corners of the globe, and that was maximising a characteristic of the medium.

None of the German new wave and krautrock albums sounded like this. I learned that both Czukay and Dammers studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen but it didn’t sound like avant garde music or musique concrète either.

For Czukay, radio was a tool for expanding his aural imagination rather than for investigating the usual vocabularies in any pre-existing genre. According to his essay for the online magazine Perfect Sound Forever he heard Stockhausen's Kurzwellen (Short Waves) for six musicians with shortwave radio and live electronics when it was premiered in Bremen in 1967. He declared: “The musicians were searching on the radio for some shortwave specific in sound and rhythm, keeping it in tune for a while, playing with their ‘ordinary’ instruments and again searching for another sound signal coming from the radio.” Stockhausen was mixing those sounds and Czukay described the concert as a category of “advanced ambience”. Czukay had been fond of radio since he was a pupil, and he might have gotten the idea of playing radio at that time. He continued to play radio as an instrument all through his career, notably on his solo albums Radio Waves Surfers and Moving Pictures, as well as his collaborations with David Sylvian. I love the way he added radio with grainy static noises, and those heavily compressed textures immediately changed the chemistry with other instruments and transformed the whole into a dreamy soundscape.

In 2005, I myself started playing various types of radios at concerts, as well as recording radio programmes with a Sony Walkman when I travelled to other countries as an extension of my field recording practice. Around the same time, I began improvising with Canadian musician, film maker, and visual artist Michael Snow and guitarist Alan Licht as a trio. There was a moment when the three of us were all playing a radio, as Alan also had his own radio practice.

After one of our earlier concerts, Michael gave me a cassette copy of his Two Radio Solos, which tremendously helped me to shape my thoughts on the medium. The album consisted of two long continuous improvisations with a shortwave radio, and we hear a series of fragmented news, various programmes and traditional music from all over the world appearing and disappearing as he carefully controls the tuning knob. Some languages were recognisable, such as English and Russian, but the others resonated foreign and unfamiliar. It was recorded in 1980 at a remote cabin in Newfoundland on the Atlantic coast, where Michael and his wife Peggy Gale spent every summer, and he caught all frequencies with his 1962 Normende radio, back then recorded with a tape recorder, both running on batteries. Michael claimed “no editing, no post-facto electronic alteration”, although one of the tracks sounds as if it’s fast-forwarded. As I pointed this out, he explained to me that it was recorded as the battery power was diminishing. This means it slowed down and when it played back at the normal speed, it became high pitch.

Two Radio Solos fascinates me as it joyfully accommodates and welcomes all accidents including static noises and intense pulses of radio interferences. As he says, “Playing the radio involved a lot of chance.” These days, almost all radio stations have migrated online and the sounds have become nothing but clean and stable. I don’t like being nostalgic, but I miss the tactile senses the radio gave us. What we call radio now is a bit different from the medium it used to be. I wonder what the future of the radio will be in decades to come. It doesn’t matter how, but hopefully the sense of magic remains.

Our special Radio Activity feature can be found in The Wire 499. Subscribers can read the feature at our online archive, where you can also read Rob Young’s tribute to the late Holger Czukay, and Clive Bell’s feature on Aki Onda.