Turtles Have Short Legs
Architectures As Infrastructure: Sound and Vision
Every week for past two years on xray.fm, DJ Gilliflower has built worlds from scraps—both sonic and visual. Turtles Have Short Legs isn’t background music; it’s architectural. Miaux’s lunar synths fade into Alice’s fragile chanson, Lauten der Seele’s spectral cabaret dissolves into Rusalnaia’s pagan folk, Turkish psych bleeds into Roy Harper’s pastoral melancholy. A séance conducted through transistor radio rather than Ouija board.
Each episode gets its own collage: vintage ephemera, found imagery, postage from parallel timelines. Not illustrations—transmissions. Visual echoes of the frequencies that ripple through the airwaves. The audio and visual practices are tightly coupled: both treat their materials—sound and paper—as systems to be cut, layered, and re-assembled until they reveal new correspondences. A forgotten cassette hum becomes a bridge between decades. A postcard fragment rhymes with a field recording.
This is systems design applied to curation: intuition as architecture, juxtaposition as grammar, resonance as organizing principle.
The Fundraiser
This fall, XRAY FM—Portland’s volunteer-run community station—is holding its annual drive. Anyone who donates $25 or more receives:
- One original handmade collage (postcard-sized, one-of-a-kind)
- A Turtles Have Short Legs sticker
It’s a small way to hold a piece of the show in your hands—to remember that independent radio is infrastructure built from care, attention, play, and year after year of showing up weekly to do the work.
Community radio exists because people like Nancy keep the signal alive.
Support XRAY FM. Keep the turtles grooving.
Disclosure: DJ Gilliflower is my spouse, and she's beyond awesome.