FM.era by des hume

When I was 8 years old my parents gave me a small cassette/radio boombox for christmas, a charcoal gray cylinder with an antennae that could be stretched over a metre long. My first cassette tape was a gift from them - a copy of Peter Gabriel’s So. My second cassette tape was the Backstreet Boy’s Millenium, which I purchased months later with my birthday money. Thus the foundations of my tastes were born.

I loved my boombox. I borrowed albums and audiobooks from the library, engaged in early piracy recording songs from the radio, and built a small collection of tapes that lived in a canvas bag under my bed. My favourite thing was to pull it under the covers after my lights had been turned out, switch the radio on with the faintest possible volume and press it to my ear. There were worlds to explore every evening - snatches of news, radio plays, late night hip hop playlists, chat shows, radio preachers, and best of all the ghostly hints of channels just barely audible through the static. With my antennae swiveled in the right direction I could pick up channels from the hundreds of kilometres outside of my bedroom, and beyond. There were endless waves passing through the air, and I wanted to capture all of them.

Trends have shifted - CDs and mp3s took over, and laid the foundation for the streaming juggernaut. The thrill of exploration has been overtaken by the ease of curation - anything you want can be in your ears in seconds, and algorithms now dictate the rise and fall of pop music. I don’t think this is a bad thing, it’s opened up the world to artists who would never have had a chance to access the industry machine - but I still listen to the radio, and I’ve discovered some of my favorite artists from snippets that I’ve caught in the last seconds, play logs I’ve tracked down, and sounds that I’ve strained to hear peeking through the hiss of white noise. There is something special that happens when you have to put in a little bit of work to discover an artist - something that brings you closer to them and makes those songs a part of you. That world is still out there, with a vibrant community of music lovers making magic happen everyday on air. This record is a love letter to them.

However, this is not an album about the radio. This isn’t a COVID record either. It’s a joyous game of dress up, trying on genres and identity, exploring sex, fear, perversion, anger, love and gender through a carousel of sound. I love this album. I loved making it - recording it alone in a small apartment, mixing it in a week-long burst in between jobs and building its visual identity with friends. I made this album to satisfy my own gemini spirit, never content with any one thing. I made my version of a pop record, and I look forward to what comes next. This is the ephemera of my hard drive. This is the FM.era, and you’re all invited.

The des hume initiative is a for-profit organization dedicated to researching utopian social dynamics.

Join us. We have been waiting for you.


welcome@deshume.org