Hali Palombo, 29, is a composer and sound artist who works in found and lost audio and media, frequently including shortwave radio, and creates visual art and video installations from slow-scan television. Her January release Cylinder Loops collages audio from antique wax cylinders, and in March she launched an intermittent podcast, Unknown America, that delves into historical oddities and obscurities. She’s been making field recordings of Wisconsin tourist attraction the House on the Rock (“It’s terrifying—I’m very inspired by it”), which she plans to use for a seven-inch coming out this summer via local label Ballast.
What interests me about shortwave radio is you can hear people and music and sounds from quite literally all over the world. And it isn’t extensively moderated and curated like FM radio is, or even AM radio. In 30 minutes you can hear 50 different countries. You can hear someone sitting in a truck babbling or an amateur radio operator who’s 90 years old talking into the ether, to nobody, and you can hear very unusual music that is sometimes being played live. You can hear Morse code. It’s an infinite generator for audio that you’ll hear once and never hear it again. It’s just fascinating and exciting in every way.
Cylinder Loops is a wax cylinder collage record. Every track is about a minute and a half long, and I sourced the wax cylinder samples from UC Santa Barbara—they have a massive library of wax cylinder samples that are completely free to use. I cobbled them together into stand-alone little tracks that I felt emphasized certain qualities of the cylinders. Like if there was somebody speaking, I wanted to highlight that by maybe putting a little bit of soft music underneath it.
After that I developed a really sharp interest in things that are so pervasive and so obvious yet generally ignored—people don’t really recognize the beauty in them because they aren’t paying close enough attention. That for me applied to my interest in found audio and lost audio, these bits of audio or images or photographs or bits of paraphernalia that are kind of forgotten and fall by the wayside and are just discarded.
Another topic was the Collyer brothers, New York City’s first widely documented hoarders—they were active in the early 1900s. That’s more of a well-known topic. I think some people know who the Collyer brothers were.
