dispatch 005 - latency-aware sonification: the cultural afterlives of shortwave
From a kitchen in Argentina to a garden in Amsterdam, a dispatch on the politics of latency and a new experiment in listening to the unfinished signals of the ether.
✦ This Haunted Inbox Where I Archive ✦
A drawer inside the cathedral. Fragments drift through. You may linger, but some things will not be explained.
Latency-aware forensics
As a working class 70s child growing up in dictatorship Argentina, my nascent cosmopolitanism was mediated by the radio. We did not travel abroad. In fact, I only travelled outside the country once I was an adult. However, I was a curious child, obsessed with the radio, mostly with the languages I could listen to but not understand, in my grandfather’s “Noblex 7 Mares” radio. In Spanish, 7 Mares means 7 Seas; looking back I see that navigation and drift were encoded in the name of the gadget itself. It might have been in his radio that I first encountered the now mythical numbers stations. Or it might have been in my mother’s kitchen radio, which I was allowed to use, on my own, to try to tune into anything foreign. During the Malvinas war, shortwave radio was the only way to access news not controlled by the dictatorship, the only way to know what was really going on in the Southern Atlantic. During my childhood, shortwave was a portal to “elsewhere,” to clandestine news (BBC, Radio Moscow, Deutsche Welle), coded transmissions, and foreign music. For a child in a working-class home like me, the 7 Mares offered the fantasy (and sometimes the reality) of transnational connectivity. It was my own personal “audible punto de fuga” (fugue point does not really translate well into English; punto de fuga would more closely resemble notions of fugitivity and non binary logics).
In order to use the radio, I was allowed to retreat with it, either to the living room or to some corner, to be present in the moment. My incipient ritual of tuning, with its static and ghost signals, perhaps taught me patience, auditory acuity, and the arts of interference. It is, perhaps, in this ritual, that I first encountered latency as a condition of being. Not only did I not travel abroad (something that I did not perceive as a lack, but rather, as a condition) but also, I was bound by frequencies and waves that, more often than not, failed to arrive or arrived with glitches. When in a previous dispatch I said that “time arriving late is the medium”, what I also meant is that to be present in the moment with my grandfather’s radio, was not the achievement of seamless immediacy but an encounter with interruption, drift, and the not-yet-arrived.
My grandfather’s radio, the 7 Mares, is embedded in a complex history of information, censorship, and resistance. During the dictatorship years, access to non-state-controlled news was often mediated by these “kitchen cosmopolites.” Looking back I wonder if the shortwave radio’s spectrality, with its mixture of the forbidden, the uncertain and the static-filled was not my first encounter with “hauntological” infrastructure avant la lettre. I wasn’t merely listening, I was, perhaps and without realizing it, learning how to listen, cultivating a sensorium attuned to noise, disruption. More importantly, I was obsessed with the outside.
Against Nostalgia
What I am proposing is not an exercise in nostalgia. If I talk about my grandfather’s radio and I invoke these personal and historical moments, it is not because I am mourning a lost technological era or to sentimentalize the analog as site of lost authenticity. Quite the contrary, since nothing is dead in shortwave radio. Rather, I am interested in mobilizing latency, with its interruptions, unfinished signals and crucially, its persistent afterlives, as a chronopolitical and forensic method.
The temporalities at stake here are not those of melancholic return or the restoration of wholeness. Latency, as I theorize it, is not a marker of deprivation or a call for recuperation. It is the very condition through which experience, subjectivity, and political community are mediated, especially under conditions of censorship, exclusion, and infrastructural violence. What as a child I experienced as a sort of kitchen cosmopolitanism was, for many political exiles, their daily life.
My aim is to trace how shortwave radio, far from being a “dead medium,” remains an active site for the negotiation of presence and absence, of sovereignty and exile, and, most urgently in the present, of emergent reactionary appropriations.
By reading latency not as technical failure but as the ground of chronopolitical struggle, I am interested in how the very structures that once enabled fugitive listening and minoritarian world-making now facilitate new regimes of right-wing broadcasting, affective capture, and algorithmic exclusion.
My interest and analytic of latency is, of course, not limited to shortwave. In a previous dispatch I introduced latency through the fax handshake. Now I move to shortwave because I believe it is exemplary as a medium where latency is not a flaw but a generative resource, first for cosmopolitan and exilic practices, now for reactionary capture.
As I mentioned in my previous dispatch, platform architectures strive to erase latency, to render all experience instant, seamless, capturable and, above all, frictionless. In this context, shortwave radio remains a living archive of the unfinished, noisy or unclaimed. Its afterlives illuminate the stakes of latency not only as historical residue, but as the ground of contemporary struggles over affect, exclusion, and even reactionary political imagination.
Genealogies of Right-Wing Appropriation: Shortwave Radio from Marginal Medium to Extremist Platform
To understand how this medium for fugitive listening became a platform for extremism, it's useful to trace a brief genealogy of its power. The very qualities that made shortwave a lifeline for truth during wars and dictatorships (for example, as mentioned above, its ability to transcend borders, its inherent anonymity, its 'hauntological' feel) are the same ones now being exploited. This history reveals how shortwave was always a battleground for the ether.
I won’t trace an in depth genealogy of shortwave radio here. That would require a whole book project. But I want to highlight some key historical moments:
World War II and the “Radio War”: Propaganda, Clandestine Stations, and Feindsender. Shortwave radio became prominent during World War II as a weapon of information warfare. All the major combatant nations exploited shortwave to broadcast propaganda and news, both to their own populations and to enemy or occupied territories. Nazi Germany’s shortwave service (Deutsche Kurzwellensender) beamed Hitler’s speeches and German propaganda worldwide. The Nazi regime was so fearful of foreign shortwave broadcasts undermining domestic morale that it criminalized listening to enemy radio (Feindsender). Listening to enemy radio was an offense punishable by imprisonment or even death in Nazi Germany. Despite these draconian measures, many Germans secretly tuned in to the BBC’s German-language shortwave broadcasts, such as the famous “Listen, Germany!” addresses by Thomas Mann. I go back to my earlier comments that we did the same during the Malvinas war to bypass the dictatorship’s censorship of battlefield news. The BBC and the U.S. Voice of America broadcast news and anti-Nazi messages into Europe, while the Soviet Union’s Radio Moscow transmitted Communist messaging abroad as early as the 1930s. World War II also saw the rise of clandestine stations and “black propaganda” operations on shortwave: stations pretending to be local German or Japanese broadcasts but actually operated by the Allies to sow confusion or demoralization (e.g. the British Soldatensender Calais mimicked a German army station).
Shortwave’s characteristics (long-distance reach and a certain anonymity of transmission) made it ideal for these “psychological warfare” efforts. Resistance movements and governments-in-exile also leveraged shortwave. The French Resistance and Free French forces broadcast on shortwave to occupied France; anti-fascist partisans in Yugoslavia and Italy did likewise. In the colonies, independence movements would later use shortwave clandestinely to challenge imperial authorities (e.g., broadcasts by Algerian FLN rebels in the 1950s). By war’s end, shortwave radio had proven its power as a medium that could penetrate borders with sound, bringing both truth and lies, hope and fear. It was truly a “weapon on the etheric front”, as Nazi officials called it, and every subsequent conflict, both hot or cold, would continue this “radio war” on the shortwaves.
The Argentinian Montoneros (a political organization heavily persecuted by the dictatorship, many of whose members were dissapeared), ran one such station from Costa Rica between the late 70s and early 80s, “Radio Noticias del Continente”. I don’t particularly remember it but given my habitual tuning of shortwave, I am sure I listened to it at some point, completely oblivious as to what exactly I was hearing.
As Carlos Rodriguez Esperon says about the “radio Montonera” “All of South America was permeated by the development of Operation Condor (NB: a transnational campaign of political repression and state terror coordinated by the CIA and the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone in the 1970s and 1980s). Under these conditions, it became extremely difficult to broadcast from within South America itself. This is how Costa Rica, in Central America, came to play a pivotal role. As a country without a standing army and with a consolidated democracy, it is also the seat of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the context provided the necessary conditions for initiatives of this kind to be developed.”
Cold War Ether: Shortwave was not only used for overt messaging but also for secret communications. The Cold War era gave rise to the eerie phenomenon of “numbers stations” I mentioned earlier. These were anonymous shortwave transmissions consisting of robotic voices reading streams of numbers or letters, presumed to be coded messages for espionage agents in the field. Though not explicitly tied to ideology, numbers stations contributed to the clandestine aura of the shortwave spectrum. Maybe it was this sonic landscape of mystery and paranoia that attracted me? Number stations seemed to confirm that invisible battles and secret conversations were always unfolding over shortwave. Notably, the famous “Lincolnshire Poacher” station (attributed to British intelligence) or the monotonous Russian “UVB-76” buzzer station became legends among shortwave hobbyists. Their presence reinforced the idea that shortwave was a medium for hidden actors and covert networks, an affective template that extremist broadcasters now echo with their own conspiratorial content.
Post-Cold War Marginalization: The “Outcast” Medium in an FM/Internet Age. The 1990s brought massive shifts to the media landscape. The Cold War’s end (1989–91) led many governments to scale back shortwave broadcasting. This was a sort of “peace dividend” that saw budget cuts to international radio. Why maintain expensive transmitter networks when the ideological war was won (in the West’s view) or new priorities emerged? Simultaneously, FM radio and television became dominant in most domestic markets, offering higher fidelity or visuals for local audiences. The rise of satellite television provided a new path for international broadcasting (e.g., CNN’s global TV, BBC World TV) that targeted elites rather than mass shortwave audiences. And crucially, the mid-90s saw the commercial growth of the Internet, hinting at a future where audio could be streamed globally without needing towers and transmitters.
In this climate, shortwave radio was increasingly seen as obsolete or “old-fashioned.” Major broadcasters like the BBC World Service, Voice of America, and Radio Canada International gradually cut many shortwave services through the 1990s and 2000s, especially to North America and Europe, where they assumed audiences could access content via FM relays or the web. Across the world, younger generations were less likely to own shortwave receivers.
Genesis of Far-Right Shortwave in America (late 1980s–early 90s). Among the first to realize the potential of post-Cold War shortwave was a cohort of right-wing and conspiracist radio hosts who found themselves marginalized on mainstream AM/FM radio or simply eager to reach a like-minded audience nationwide. Pioneering this movement was Tom Valentine, a veteran ultra-conservative commentator. In 1991, Valentine launched “Radio Free America,” a political talk show that many cite as the first sustained far-right program on shortwave radio.
Contemporary Case Studies: Shortwave Extremism in the 2020s
Despite the exodus of many hate broadcasters to online platforms in the 2000s, shortwave radio did not go silently into the night. In fact, as of 2025, shortwave remains a patchwork haven for extremist and fringe content, often interlinked with broader right-wing media ecosystems.
Transnational Resonance – Europe’s Niche and Russia’s Revival?
The far-right exploitation of shortwave has been predominantly an American story, but there are important international dimensions. Europe in the late 20th century saw less shortwave domestic extremist broadcasting, largely due to stricter broadcasting laws and the availability of other platforms. However, Europe was target audience for many U.S. broadcasts. In the 1990s, German authorities complained about neo-Nazi and Holocaust denial content coming over shortwave from U.S. stations – content that would be illegal to produce in Germany but was accessible on German soil via radio. For example, William Pierce’s broadcasts on WWCR and WRNO could be heard in Europe, prompting German officials and Jewish organizations to protest this loophole in international law (since U.S. free speech protections allowed what Germany banned). Similarly, Pastor Pete Peters and other Christian Identity preachers had followings among some European extreme-right circles who listened on shortwave or via cassette recordings. In the U.K., where domestic hate speech on radio is prohibited by Ofcom, a workaround emerged: British National Party or neo-Nazi groups occasionally bought time on U.S. shortwave stations to get their message out. One such group rebranded their program with an innocuous name to slip onto a station’s schedule without obvious red flags.
Affective Aura and Nostalgia: Beyond the practical, shortwave offers an emotional experience that digital media do not. Listeners often describe the thrill of hearing voices from far away, the romanticism of static, the challenge of tuning in. It feels more participatory than scrolling a feed. Far-right groups often wrap themselves in nostalgia for a supposedly better past; shortwave, being a vintage medium, dovetails with that. There is a strain of “techno-nostalgia” in the extreme right: a fetish for analog gadgets, old military surplus radios, vinyl records of fascist marching songs, etc. It’s part of a broader hauntological aesthetic where they seek fragments of past glory or imagined golden ages. Shortwave audio, with its warbly, fading signal, literally sounds like a ghost from the past. Hearing a heated speech on shortwave might conjure images of how folks once listened secretly to Churchill or Roosevelt on the wireless, it lends the content a dramatic gravitas. Extremist broadcasters exploit this by using retro rhetorical styles. For instance, some Identity preachers adopt an old-fashioned preaching cadence, sounding like 1930s radio evangelists, which grants them an air of authority. Similarly, political ranters like Turner or Alex Jones pepper their talk with historical references and even play old Americana music or patriotic anthems, reinforcing the time-warp feel.
There is also the “clandestine” aura: as I mentioned earlier, static and interference can make the broadcast feel forbidden or dangerous. Anthropologically, secret communications have allure, like kids with a walkie-talkie feeling cool speaking on a special channel. Shortwave extremist radio externalizes that for adults dissatisfied with mainstream society: “We’re speaking freely on the one medium They haven’t taken over.” Listeners get the sense of being part of an underground, which is emotionally satisfying for those who view themselves as rebels or persecuted truth-tellers. The communal aspect such as writing reception reports, joining mailing lists for shortwave fans, etc, further builds identity. It is telling that when WWCR temporarily cut militia programs post-Oklahoma City bombings in the 90s, some mainstream Americans started tuning in out of curiosity (the “militia curious” as journalist Katie Thornton says). There’s a psychological draw to hearing what is not meant for mainstream ears; shortwave delivered that exotic forbidden fruit in a way that was accessible (just a radio) yet esoteric (you had to find the right frequency at the right time). Even now, in the age of abundant online conspiracies, shortwave retains a cachet among some younger conspiracy theorists for exactly this romantic reason. In a sense, it’s like going to find a secret treasure instead of it being handed by Google.
In closing, it is worth mentioning that I don’t see the current right-wing appropriation of shortwave as a “return” but rather, as a mutation or rupture in the history of latency and fugitivity.
The Garden as the Ultimate Latency Machine
My garden is my own ground zero of latency. Here be no "frictionless design". The seed is always a deferred arrival: Planting a seed is the ultimate act of engaging with the "not-yet-arrived". It is a negotiation with uncertainty and a ritual of patience. It is also growth as asynchronous process: A garden doesn't grow on demand or in a linear fashion. It responds to its own complex, layered temporalities of sun, water, and season. It is a system of interruption, drift and slow, biological time over which I have little control beyond its care.
shortwave garden I – chronopolitical compression
Experiments in listening, latency, and improvisation with plants, data, radios, and unfinished signals.
As a continuation of my research on latency-aware sonification, this summer I am staging experiments using my terrace garden as a living infrastructure lab. In this first experiment, I am not creating a field recording or documentation of a listening session; instead, I am attempting a synthetic temporality, a “collapsed” soundscape that is structurally impossible in real-time listening, but is entirely faithful to the logics of delayed signals, perhaps something that resembles a polyphonic montage: the aggregation of signals as overlapping spectral presences, each with its own geopolitical, infrastructural, and affective trace. Polyphony here is not meant as a musical metaphor, but I’d consider it an ontological description of simultaneity under infrastructural conditions. What I attempt instead, using the plants themselves as antennas and receptors is an active intervention in the temporal logics of broadcast and reception. As I said above, if shortwave itself is a medium of drift, delay, and atmospheric unpredictability, what happens when I approach broadcasts from radically different origins and times? Perhaps, the result is what I would call a chronopolitical compression event where I stage temporal collapsing as method. Here, I am interested in the radical asynchronicity and non-coincidence of global infrastructures. The “piling” of frequencies and broadcasts is not random: it is a methodological collapse of the partitioned, time-zoned, and nation-stated logics of broadcast modernity.
In this experiment, the resulting soundscape becomes a spectral archive, a hauntological residue of multiple presents where each “signal” arrives as a trace, untethered from its real-time event, and “haunts” the sonic space of my garden. What I record here is not clarity but interference, drift, and superposition.
Again, I am interested in the logistics of the contemporary: the infrastructures that route, delay, distort, and aggregate affect across distance. The resulting soundscape is a recursive index of how the global “now” is always a multiplex of out-of-sync presents where each signal bears its own latency, ideology, and infrastructural violence.
Rather than “mapping the world” via shortwave (as I used to do with my grandfather’s “Noblex 7 Mares”), the resulting soundscape is not a totalizing grid but a site of collapse, excess, and noise and, ultimately, a counterarchive of my migrant experience and of what it means to live inside asynchronous infrastructures. I do not seek to document the real-time reception of distant broadcasts, but to collapse their temporalities. If the migrant experience is one of continual deferral and out-of-syncness, this latency-aware experiment is an attempt to stage an encounter between otherwise non-coincident presents. Each signal (you will hear Chinese, Spanish, Dutch, Iranian, among others), arrives not as a discrete, punctual event, but as an infrastructural trace, a spectral layer in a chronopolitical composition. This is my attempt at collapsing linear time and frictionless connectivity; it is a methodological intervention that renders audible the asynchronous, recursive logic of global media. What emerges is not a sonic map, but a recursive archive of interference, latency, and unresolved presence.
Additional readings/ Sources
Thornton, Katie. “The Divided Dial – Season 2.” On the Media, WNYC Studios (podcast transcripts, 2025). etc. – A detailed journalistic history of shortwave’s far-right turn, including first-person accounts from RFPI monitors and militia content.
Latham, James. “American Extremists Use Technology to Broadcast Hate Worldwide.” SPLC Report, Aug. 29, 2001. etc. – Overview by a progressive shortwave station co-founder on how U.S. shortwave stations became hubs for hate propaganda globally.
Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Harvard University Press, 2002. - On how modernity’s new sense of time was operationalized through cinema, contingency, and the logic of the archive. Essential for theorizing temporal montage and the infrastructural mediation of latency.
Ernst, Wolfgang. “The Delayed Present: Media-Induced Tempor(e)alities & Techno-traumatic Irritations of ‘the Contemporary.’” - For his theorization of media’s role in producing asynchronous presents and techno-temporal disruptions.
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