Signal Tracer from Relay by Isot

The first pulse arrived after midnight, barely audible through the frost-crusted receiver—a faint heartbeat from some distant place that might still remember us. "Signal Tracer" emerged during three days of recording in the abandoned communications hub, where temperature dropped so low our breath crystallized on microphone grilles.

We positioned contact mics where the old radio towers meet permafrost, capturing the haunting metallics that open the track—those aren't effects but the actual song of frozen pylons vibrating in arctic wind. Mira discovered that pressing the shruti box against different sections of rusted transmission equipment created those hollow drones that hover throughout, each one carrying unique harmonic overtones from the metal's memory.

The Morse code fragments weren't planned. While recording, we accidentally captured actual shortwave transmissions bleeding through the ancient wiring still embedded in the walls. We left them untouched—ghosts speaking through the infrastructure that once bound this settlement to the outside world.

The piano part came from an instrument we found half-buried in snow drift, its soundboard warped by decades of freeze-thaw cycles. We couldn't move it, so we recorded on site, fingers numbing against keys that required extraordinary pressure to sound. That brittle, hesitant quality became the piece's emotional anchor—broken technology still striving to fulfill its purpose.

During the middle section, when the generator pulses begin to organize into almost-patterns, listeners might notice a subtle shift in spatial dimension. We achieved this by playing back our initial recordings through speakers positioned at different distances across the snow field, then re-recording the result as sound traveled differently through the dense arctic air.

This track marks the beginning of our journey—a first tentative reach into emptiness, searching for any response across the silent white.

In the frozen silence of forgotten villages, we craft slow-building drone rituals from salvaged mining equipment. Our instrumental landscapes map the ghosts of northern isolation. Listen as permafrost memories dissolve into tape-looped patience.