From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Sangat Frequency
Sangat = Punjabi/Sikh: the congregation, the gathering of seekers; also in Indian classical music, a meeting of musicians. For related frequency-based works, see Radio and Beach Surgery and Frequencies and Beach Surgery.
A decentralized, semi-legal pirate radio adaptation of Beach Surgery broadcast intermittently across Punjab and diaspora communities, structured around the sangat (congregation) model of Sikh and Punjabi musical gatherings. Rather than deliver fixed narrative, Sangat Frequency stages the novel as collective listening ritual: participants gather monthly in homes, langars, and community spaces to receive a durational transmission, then break silence together in raag-like recitation.
The broadcasts layer:
- Live Hindustani singers performing Leif and Katita's dialogue as kirtan (devotional chant) and counterpoint
- Taarab and Baul-influenced instrumentation (ektara, sarangi, improvised strings)
- Field recordings of the watering hole, wind, and the sound of the earth at the Karmán line (the broadcast's recurring underscore)
- Collective breathing, exhalation, and voice from the live sangat — listeners' own breath becoming part of the transmitted signal
The novel's unfinishable quality maps onto sangats circular liturgy: the cycle is not resolved but renewed' with each gathering. Leif and Katita become instruments through which the congregation practices breaking and eternal return as a single act. The cycle's contradiction becomes the sangat's paradox: you return to the same frequency, but the people, the season, the air are never identical.
Organizers remain anonymous [citation needed]. Distribution occurs through encrypted community networks, word-of-mouth, and SIM-card dead-drops in market cities. The collective has resisted documentation, licensing, and institutional archive, treating the work as living oral transmission rather than fixed object — aligned with Punjabi griotic and Baul refusal of written fixity.