Posted by: Hilary Martin on May 22, 2007 08:57 PM | Comments (0)

I'm Hilary Martin and I've been makin’ tape of various kinds for almost 10 years now. I became involved in New Adventures through my excellent & creative friend Stefan Rose. He enticed me to attend Sound Travels on Toronto Island in 2002 with the promise of a ferry ride escape from the city. I got hooked right away by a soundwalk through the woods to the beach, which involved me closing my eyes and allowing my ears and my friend to guide me through the closed, twiggy terrain to the open lakeside. It was like instant radio drama on the cheap.

The rest of the Sound Travels weekend, spent roaming around inside the circular electroacoustic environment created by Darren Copeland’s 8 channel diffusion system plus musicians from across Canada and around the world, hooked me too. Speakers floating in a field like the monoliths in 2001 hold a certain appeal for me.

My experience over the past 5 years is that no matter what genre NAISA turns its attention towards (during its four themed festivals per year), the base-line is pretty much the same – something familiar mixed with something that you would never expect to find in the same room. And it works.

It’s a genre-party.

Say you decide to throw a party and invite people from the separate areas of your life (your job, your bowling league, your neighbourhood, the place where you volunteer). You hesitate because you’re worried that they won’t have anything in common to talk about.

At the party, they discover that they are, in some bizarre way, familiar with each other through *their own* separate areas of *their* lives. The sound engineer from your bowling league mixed for a performance involving the dancer from work who did the video project with the activist guy you volunteer with who also does robotic puppetry and did the installation with the radio documentary producer who did the web sound map of the Yellowhead Highway through Saskatchewan on a whim when she drove across the country with her family last summer. Two of them met at the supermarket when they reached for the same can of crushed tomatoes. Who knows. They share their mutual recognitions and stories. They know someone’s cousin or dropped the same course in college. And then they’re all surprised that you were worried that they wouldn’t have anything in common.

So part of what I love about Deep Wireless is that its a genre-party. A singing electrode in a greeting card meets transmission towers meets improvised dramatics meets someone mixing sound in Japan meets someone hitting a gong talking politics on stage in front of me. Somehow it is all linked together. That's my theory. Maybe it’s because I’m from Newfoundland so I just expect life to be like that. Maybe it’s why facebook is so popular. We (sometimes) love to discover that we are weirdly connected.

Off to the Ambient Ping at the Drake Underground. More later.

More from Deep Wireless 2007 :
« Deep Wireless & CBC radio's Outfront | Thanks Bob, and Hank, and Patrick, and Howard »