- Published in:
- Music for Another World Anthology
- Publication date:
- Aug. 2010
Archaeology has always fascinated me. In our twenty-four seven world of hyperactive music charts, fashion crazes, and news-driven politics it is easy to forget, historically speaking, that our modern civilization is but a blink of the eye for our species. Two hundred thousand years ago we spread from Africa, and it is only in the last ten thousand years–a mere twentieth of our time on the planet–that we gradually adapted from a hunter-gatherer way of life to something much more complex.
What remains from those 190,000 years prior to our transition to an agricultural-based society? Well, not much. Unless you’re a trained archaelogist, or happen upon an anthropologist’s wet dream like undiscovered cave paintings, it’s not unlikely that you could spend your whole life with zero contact of any artefacts from that era.
With all our achievements–materials science, computing, great works of art–it would be a different story if we disappeared tomorrow, right? Wrong. Within ten-thousand years most evidence of homo sapiens existence would have been lost to Nature’s insatiable appetite. A few unsual items, not limited to the following list but mostly buried, would still be around: radioactive waste, plastics, bronze statues . . . and radio broadcasts.
Yep, it’s strange to think, but one of our most long-lasting legacies will be the electromagnetic radiation we have transmitted into space. Hence, perhaps sometime in the future some of our descendents–or maybe other lifeforms–will engage in the art of radio archaeology. “Lacuna Blues” was born from this idea. It is the story of a man sifting the electromagnetic wash in search of one very special song.
