Posted by: Justin Grotelueschen on May 31, 2008 10:23 AM | Comments (0)

Chris is perhaps Canada's most famous independent producer (by default, as he likes to say, as Canada's only real independent producer), and his bio is often embellished with his geographical relation to St. Johns, Newfoundland, the same area that received Marconi's first trans-Atlantic radio transmission in 1901. Fishing dominates the local economy and is the focal point of many of Chris' pieces, and he shared some of his life with us this morning.

Fascinated by narrative and where pieces go over time, Chris talked about the power of humans as a storytelling species ("it's our greatest strength"), and the duty of stories to imagine the future as fiction and recreate the past as art. Using stories to create a sense of place -- to "get a listener in the tent", as Outfront producer Steve Wadhams says -- Chris talked about the challenges of localizing his pieces, with more jargon, slang, and informal speech, and pulling that into a broader national conversation.

So here's the question of the morning: while sounds can be and are recorded, cataloged, broadcast and archived, do radio transmissions live forever? Or do they go up, out, only to be lost in the ether and stuck in the minds of those lucky enough to catch it? Chris relayed Marconi's thoughts, who said radio transmissions never really go away ... they hang around (more specifically, the transmissions about the Titanic sinking are trapped under the water, eventually to rise again). Your thoughts?

Chris undoubtedly saved some theoretical nuggets for the workshop that he's conducting this afternoon, for those lucky enough to get there. And we're trying to get by this morning without coffee, and I'm still without food, so I apologize if descriptions of the here and the now are too coarse. It's the conference way of life, but we'll try to not keep any of the good stuff from these pages.

More from Deep Wireless 2008 :
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