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Spot # 1 Vancouver Island’s largest shopping centre - 2,736 parking spaces, mostly covered!

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Spot # 2 “Shop at any one of the downtown stores displaying the big “D” on the door.”

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Spot # 3 The store of the day: W & J Wilson.

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Spot # 4 Downtown bonus days # 1 - “Victoria has never had it so big.”

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Spot # 5 Downtown bonus days # 2 - “The biggest sale Victoria has ever been party to.”

The original tape

Here are a couple of views of the radio station where I found this tape. The top is a Google Earth image of the transmitter shack and three antennas of  radio station KATD in Collinsville, California. Colinsville is near the Sacramento river delta area, northeast of San Francisco. The bottom image shows the transmitter shack (the small white building behind the trailer) and three antennas to the right. I don’t think the old trailer has any relationship to the radio station. In the middle or late 1970s, a friend of mine had a job checking the transmitter and recording meter readings. In those days, the station was called KKIS (K-Kiss). On several occasions he invited me to accompany him to this location. One time, either inside the building or outside in a dumpster, there were a lot of open reel tapes. They looked as if they were to be discarded, so I grabbed a bunch of them, and one of them was “Downtown Victoria Spots.” By the way, two other tapes  from this find are featured on Negativland releases. On track 19 on the first record, listen for “The office of Civil Defense has issued the following message” from an Emergency Broadcast System tape. On the second Negativland release, “Points,” listen to  “A Nice Place to Live.” The voice starting out with “Greetings from  the Los Angeles County Fair, etc…” is another one of the tapes from Collinsville.

W & J Wilson Clothing Store featured in spot # 3

A few images of Victoria, BC

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Lastly, here’s a rendition of “Downtown” by the Ray Conniff Singers.

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This is dumb, but I just had to let you hear the sound of me sneezing. I recorded it on a Sony  ICD-SX700 voice recorder on February 14, 2010, Valentine’s Day. I was sitting in a vehicle in the Walgreens parking lot on Rainier Avenue South in Seattle and I started to sneeze, repeatedly.

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Part 1

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Part 2

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Part 3

During the fall and winter of 1997 and 1998, I made several recordings of falling rain at my home in Martinez, California. The rain was some the most intense I had ever witnessed. California was in the midst of an El Niño.

These were made using a DAT recorder, and with a similar setup to recordings I’ve made more recently in Seattle. The main difference, however, is the distance between the two microphones was much greater (over 100 feet). One of the microphones was mounted on an aluminum pie pan, which I hung in a bush on the hillside behind my house, and the other microphone was mounted under the eaves of my house near a downspout.

I used RG-59 cable TV wire, complete with “F” fittings for the more than 100 foot run from the pie pan microphone to my mixer.  Because of my job as a cable TV technician, I had access to this type of wire and it worked quite well for audio.

The recordings are quite long and probably somewhat boring unless you really like ambience. In addition, my recording technique uses lots of compression, and tends to show itself with a lot of white noise coming up at times. The audio level noticeably increases and decreases on quieter parts and louder parts, respectively. With that in mind, I hope you can imagine what a really wet day in California can be like.

Electret condenser microphone mounted on pie pan

Pie pan and microphone hanging

Backside  showing “F” fitting

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Here’s a little film I found on the internet. It’s a bit goofy (like me) and hopefully it will make you laugh.

Go to Ustream and I am “weatherman test.”

Thank you for listening. I’ll leave a message here if and when I do this again.