Swiss Radio International

Yesterday I posted about Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's Dazzle Ships album from 1983. It seems that OMD had a thing for radio (specifically shortwave) and communication in general. Besides "Radio Prague," other tracks include "Telegraph" "Radio Waves" "Time Zones" and their follow-up album Junk Culture had a track called "Tesla Girls." I'm still trying to figure out the meaning of the title but I would assume it had something to do with early radio pioneer Nikola Tesla. Other songs like "This is Helena" and "ABC Auto-Industry" utilized radio broadcasts within them. The last track on the 2008 reissue of Dazzle Ships is called "Swiss Radio International" and, like "Radio Prague," consists of that station's interval signal. The 14 notes were repeated for about 5 minutes before the start of SWI's broadcast. OMD's drummer referred to it as "The Ice Cream Song" because of its similarity to ice cream truck music. Take a listen:




Swiss Radio International ceased broadcasting on shortwave in 2004, a disturbing trend brought on by the ease of listening via the internet. A different SRI sticker was posted here.

Swiss Radio International

SRI is the international arm of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation. They started broadcasting via shortwave in 1935 but stopped in 2004 to focus exclusively on their multimedia platform at swissinfo.org, which is available in 9 languages.

Did you know that Switzerland didn't join the United Nations until 2002?!