Posted by: Hilary Martin on May 26, 2007 11:25 AM | Comments (0)

Steve Wadhams says he is a shoemaker, who works with sound. He's a producer at CBC's Outfront, yet today we're listening to a piece of his own, commissioned for New Adventures. The woman whose story is featured in the piece has flown from Regina to be here, Sally Crooks. She and he hadn't met in person before last night at the opening reception. She pitched a story about her honeymoon to Outfront 2 years ago, and developed a creative connection with Steve.

It's a story about regret. A stranger comes to your door. He asks, "Is Mrs. Anderson at home?" It is your estranged father. You pretend you don't know him and do not invite him in to wait for your mother. You wonder for the rest of your life if you shouldn't have done otherwise. A thought like a loose tooth that you keep touching with your tongue, "What if?".

Steve incorporated material from his own experience as a failed french horn player in the sound design, a two note phrase repeated over and over, which draws the listener into a yearning, reflective space for receiving the story.

+++++

Sarah Boothroyd is a journalist whose piece is based on the story of the last working gallows in Canada and the site of the last public execution in Canada, Nicholas Street Jail in Ottawa. She initially did a piece for CBC based on the jail, but this piece is more experimental, eerie.

Sarah found the narrative part for the Outfront was a challenge, a beginning, middle and end, mixed with the sound art. She got access to the jail and brought in recorders, cables, stands and mics and also copper pipes, five pairs of shoes, including one pair of platforms, and sets of keys. She spent the night and tapped on windows, walked in all the floors (wearing all the different kinds of shoes) being both recorder and sound source, by herself, and she says, "You know, it wasn't that scary". She claims it was uncomfortable to sleep on a narrow metal cot in a cell rather than a soft bed at home.

She focused on the story of Darcy McGee, a founder of Confederation and the man who was hanged for his assassination, and thought to be wrongly convicted but would not reveal who did the deed, though he apparently knew.

Darren helped her give the jail a voice, using recorded sounds in Convolution. Dareen explains that this is a cross synthesis process where you take the source of a door sound creaking for example and then filter it through another sound, a pitched voice for example.

+++++

Robert Hoare is back from Berlin. His piece was first broadcast on May 4th on CBC but tonight we will hear an 8 channel version. It is a satire, dynamic and vertically dense and made for 8 channels. It is based on the idea that we carry myths or stories with us, things that are not always true. Something you hear on tv or in the world, you take in the story and it becomes part of your life. For him it is the myth of West Berlin. His story is about a cardboard box in his apartment containing all the material he's collected, letters, beginnings of stories, bits and pieces of scrap thoughts from this time living in Berlin. He went through it and sorted it out. It became a journey to the past, including fragments of live recordings on cassette.

A lot of these recordings are processed audio based on graffiti that he collected when he first got to Berlin. He's translated it into English.

Robert references the old tradition in Berlin that musicians wander through courtyards and people will throw money out the window for them. When he was recording one of these musicians, there was construction going on in the o the sound of an accordion player and construction workers at the same time was not created but recorded real time. A combination of the old and new of Berlin at this time.

+++++

Thelon Oeming writes for theatre and records voices to understand and study the intricacies of conversation and intonation. He lives in Parkdale, which used to be an upscale retreat back in the day, then with the Gardener the old houses became rooming houses, there was decline, and now with gentrification the circle is closing again, with new money coming back to transforming this neighbourhood and the cross section of the existing community.

Thelon stood at the globe at the 'town square' of Parkdale by the library and recorded intersecting conversations. He says it's interesting to record man-on-the-street interviews in January in minus 20 degree weather, and only the people who wanted to stop were the people who were out asking for change. Thelon wove together these voices without much manipulation in a strong narrationless documentary style. One voice is self-styled poverty preacher Kev Clarke, a personality in Parkdale. He and others talk about drugs, love, real estate, the nature of history, dignity, bumming smokes, psychiatric care, bookended by the sound of Lake Ontario, the only constant voice through the socioeconomic change of the neighbourhood.

+++++

Barry asks if Robert would consider doing a German version of the piece and how that would change it? Translation work in audio find out what is being said and say it in the other language. So the problem with translating graffiti is that it is compressed. So there are a lot of bunkers in Berlin still, and they can't rid of them. "He who builds bunkers throws bombs" is a literal translation of one of the pieces of graffiti on one of these bunkers, and Robert explains that the transliteration loses some of the weight of this phrase.

+++++

More from Deep Wireless 2007 :
« Republic of Safety | Antipodean Sounds »