If you’ve read mention of the great Chicago-based broadcast/podcast Radius here quite often, but haven’t quite cracked its sonic code, given how informedly abstract its audio can get, then a comfortable place to start might be its current edition, number 38. This one is by **Gavin Prior**. Titled “Babbleon Cork,” it is a 20-plus-minute excursion into the sounds of Cork, Ireland, where Prior wandered about, recording device in hand, and captured the sounds of the city. As the title suggests, these sounds are largely a matter of human speech, thick regional accents making opaque what seems tantalizing in its near-familiarity, at least to a fellow English-speaker. It’s fascinating how a fair amount of dialect and slang can have the transformative impact of a digital audio tool. In addition, Prior employs those very tools, subtle electronic effects, the result of which he likens to a collage, one in which foregrounded noises and looping are engaged to produce something not fantastic or abstract so much as it is hyperreal.
He writes, in part:
>”The emotional content of the direct speech is soundtracked and enhanced by the abstract, “instrumental”elements in the collage. The result is a short album which captures the energy of the city mixing layers of abstracted sounds and the fluent, irreverent utterances of the Corkonians themselves.”
Track originally posted for free download at [theradius.us](http://theradius.us/episode38). More from Prior at his [gavinprior.wordpress.com](http://gavinprior.wordpress.com/) website and at the record label [desertedvillage.com](http://www.desertedvillage.com/), which he co-founded. The above image is from a set of collages he created, available from his [flickr.com](http://www.flickr.com/photos/80765916@N00/sets/72157632111139155/) account.
William Gibson’s oft-quoted maxim “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed”is an Internet-age corollary to perhaps the most cited line by William Faulkner, Gibson’s fellow novelist born in the American south. The Faulkner line: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Both statements come to mind regularly when something from the great netlabel Dusted Wax Kingdom is spinning. Dusted Wax regularly posts music from the former Soviet Union, and related countries, that sounds like it was recorded in the Bronx shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall. The majority of Dusted Wax’s music is instrumental hip-hop, voiceless lines of artfully shambling beats. The beats may benefit from digital tools, but they bear all the marks of oldest-school hip-hop: vinyl surface noise, lightly reconfigured samples, a menacingly sedate pace. Among the latest from Dusted Wax is *Urban Soul* from “Russian beatsmith” **Bruks Production**, based out of Moscow. Among its key tracks is “Latin Thugs,” its brief horn sample echoed above slow rolling percussion ([MP3](http://archive.org/download/DWK203/Bruks_Production_-_04_-_Do_Not_Give_Up.mp3)):