Signal-wave (also known as broken transmission) can be understood as the musical correlate of the liminal. Emerging from the margins of the internet music culture, as a nocturnal and uneasy satellite of vaporwave, it is commonly constructed from pieces of obsolete broadcast debris: weather alerts for storms long past, commercials for products long out of production, fragments of news announcing events long past. In other words—it’s an intentional oxymoron.

These source-samples are not subjects of creative re-mixing and re-purposing known from other sample-based musical genres. Instead—they are just hollowed out. The genre evokes and amplifies a single affect: the deliberate erasure of the listener. Signal-wave does not address an audience. Rather, it creates a space by subtracting one.

The ready-made character of the source material has only one purpose: to manifest that which outlived its own relevance. Stephen King’s Langoliers offers a useful allegory: creatures existing out of time whose sole purpose is to devour the world once its moment has passed so that time may continue. Signal-wave seems composed from what the Langoliers overlooked: the leftover time that should not—cannot—exist, yet persists as a local failure of the mechanism of erasure and renewal (an ultimate revolutionary gesture of resistance in this day and age, one might argue).

And yet another paradox emerges: although sourced as samples from real-time broadcast transmissions rather than fixed media, signal-wave imposes, in the next step, mechanical-sounding, if not even randomly appearing repetitions. A looped broadcast is a whole other beast than a looped recording; far from mere rhythmical functionality, such repetitions play a crucial role in evoking the eerie—the feeling of a presence of the absence (the positive darkness, as in apophatic theology). A looped slice of a real-time transmission is like a fleeting present moment ignored or rejected by the flow of time because of some unknowable astral-scale disaster. Unnatural persistence as a result of a failure of the next moment to arrive. Think of it as a still frame not on your VHS videotape, but in the world itself. The continuum reveals itself as a mere modality.

This is why the genre occupies the same ontological register as waiting-room music, hold-line tunes, and elevator ambience. These are musical psychopomps—sonic companions of transition, that have lost their destination. Liminality here is not movement between states, but the real-time experience of being suspended in transition. The experience of the contraction of time, pure transition achieved by becoming immobile.

My last point is, finally, the role of noise in signal-wave. Here it is not an aesthetic garnish but the functional operator. Whereas lo-fi genres often treat noise as warmth, authenticity, or material trace, signal-wave treats noise as the voice of space, of the aether, of the distance itself. Noise does not invite the listener inward; it exerts a kind of aural anti-gravity, pushing the listener away and opening a void between sound and human intentionality. It alienates at the level of ontology.

If noise is, as Maggi (see the excellent book Satan's Rhetoric: A Study of Renaissance Demonology) suggests, the demon’s speech, then signal-wave produces a differentiation of the demonology in music:

• Hiss — the seductive whisper of analog decay;


• Static — the inhuman articulation of distance, the presence of absence;


• Digital hum — the artificial murmur of algorithmic generation.

Signal-wave marks a passage from the death of affect to death as affect—a persistence of sensation after the human has left the frame. It is not music about disappearance, but music that continues precisely because the listener has disappeared.