The Big Sloppy, and Where Do We Go From Here?
Posted by Barry Rueger on June 5, 2007 11:09 PM | Comments (0)

Following Deep Wireless I traded messages with Gregory Whitehead, examining some of the themes that emerged from his presentation. The following is adapted from that exchange.

Gregory,

Thank you again for a wonderful performance yesterday. The Big Sloppy rings true to me.

If the truth were known, very little at radio conferences has thrilled me in recent years.

Some of that no doubt comes from hanging out with the American crowd, who still see This American Life as cutting edge. Even Outfront, which again has been a darling in radio circles, seems often to be doing the same thing over and over.

Little by little I have been putting pieces together, trying to figure out why there is so little on the airwaves which seem to be worth the investment of my time.

After Sunday two important threads emerged.

The first of course came from Heidi's talk about Co-op Radio in the eighties. I vividly remember those days, and the people who threw caution and convention to the winds and tried whatever looked as if it might be an interesting project. The attitude really was one of "Let's push the medium as far as we possibly can."

These were also people that appreciated that they were working very specifically in radio, and that the medium had attributes and an aesthetic which would be and still is different from working in just audio.

(A point which I think is lost on many people still.)

It's astonishing that she would raise names like Patrick Ready, Hank Bull, and GX Jupitter-Larsen mere days after I had discussed these same people in my inaugural blog post. Whether you call it synchronicity or mere coincidence, it cannot be ignored.

Your comments about "branding" really did hit home. Is that the issue? That so many artists and producers are so busy marketing themselves that they lose sight of the need to keep Art at the forefront?

Thinking back to Deep Wireless, almost every person in that room has a web page, many have blogs, and at least in Toronto the bulk of people seem to have disappeared into Facebook or MySpace.

And yes, people are re-creating themselves as brands. Just as so much
radio in the US wants be the next TAL or Prairie Home Companion, many
of these people begin their work by asking how they can fit within the
narrow confines of what public radio will accept.

You described it as “branding”, but I see it as self censorship, which is one of the things that always fascinates me about the American people. While living in the U.S., especially after 9/11, it amazed me how so many people can simultaneously believe that they are afforded Freedom of Speech, while carefully moderating what they will say on a great many topics.

And increasingly self censorship in radio is wrapped in the need to present yourself in a persona that fits established conventions.

Could these young producers and artists function in an environment like
Co-op Radio of the eighties? What would happen if you told them "here
is an hour of airtime each week. There are no rules." How would they adapt if you placed them in an atmosphere where you were judged solely by your work, not by how you present yourself on the Internet and during sales pitches?

(And yes, I know that not all that was created back at Co-op radio was brilliant or even listenable, and that some of it was downright dull, but that's the point - you take chances, and trust that some of them will create beauty and insight.)

At the end of the day what I am looking for is radio that shocks, that challenges form, that demands that I sit up and listen. I want to hear people who do more than transmit cools sounds, who play with the essence of the medium, who embrace RF radiation as their instrument.

Thanks once again, and keep reminding people of all of the things that
they dare not ask themselves, but which they always appreciate after
the fact.

Yours,

Barry

Everything I know about transmitters I learned from pirates . . .
Posted by Hilary Martin on May 28, 2007 08:49 PM | Comments (2)

I did Tetsuo Kogawa's electronics workshop on Sunday and made a mini-transmitter.

In the conference room, converted into a workshop in the afternoon, about 10 people were seated around a large table arrayed with soldering irons and bits of wire and electronics thingmys that I know little about. I have built a lot of stuff in my life, and fiddley things with wires are not my specialty. But I had met Tetsuo previously at Deep Wireless and respected his work in the pirate radio scene in Japan and I'll try anything twice, and I had signed up, so I sat down.

A large projected image of Tetsuo presided over the table. There was a delay between his mouth moving on the screen and the sound coming out of the speakers (fixed during the Sunday workshop with the help of skype).

In front of me were wire cutters, a soldering iron, bits of stuff, a colourful diagram, some bits of copper, epoxy. The makings of a perfect afternoon.

Tetsuo started teaching the workshop from Japan. But he turned off his skype mic while he was demonstrating how to construct the transmitter because he needed both hands to work, and was going very fast, so we were lucky that Steven Kelly was there to step in and save us from a group soldering disaster.

I do not really understand how it works, but you solder a bunch of things to a copper plate, transistors and resistors and such and then plug it into a 9 volt battery and magically tune it in to a radio frequency that you have to find on the band by twisting the top of the green component until the radio goes silent (!), and then if you plug it in to a sound source like an mp3 player, it will play the sound on the radio.

And it worked!

And then I broke it in my excitement.

During the closing reception, we used our transmitters to create a bit of lovely cacophony in the conference hall (though I admit I was fiddling with mine up until the last minute), with the assistance of Steven Kelly and Eleanor Stacey, two great sound artists from Halifax.

A grand time was had by all.

The Past and the Future
Posted by Barry Rueger on May 27, 2007 09:39 AM | Comments (0)

It is now Sunday Morning, and Kunstradio's Heidi Grundmann is beginning a talk entitled Radio Art in a Period of Change. In thinking back over Saturday's activities - both within the conference, and beyond - I am struck by the sense that this is the central question of the week.

In the morning yesterday Robin Ravlich showcased works being presented on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. That discussion necessarily referenced the loss of The Listening Room at ABC, and the overall sense that broadcasters are devoting less time and resources to what Heidi just referred to as "Art media."

In the afternoon a panel looking at Soundscape again seemed to be looking back as much as forward. As noted by Hillary the references were to "the usual suspects: R. Murray Schaeffer, Hildegard Westerkamp, Barry Truax and the World Soundscape Project."

And again this morning Heidi's talk is offering a history of Kunstradio, with the requisite references to Canadians like Dan Lander, Hank Bull and others who led the radio art movement. Once again we're reminded of ground breaking events like Radio Rethink: Art, Sound and Transmission, which took place in Banff in 1992.

I have been working in radio, more specifically community radio, for nearly three decades. What has always excited me has been the sense of possibility that radio can present, the relative ease with which producers and artists could try new ideas, create new worlds and experiences, and the explore the world around them.

In those earliest days, back at Vancouver Co-op Radio in the eighties, there seemed to be no boundaries to form or content, and it was apparent that the work being done by Patrick Ready, Hank Bull, Howard Broomfield, Victoria Fenner, GX Jupitter-Larssen and others was just the beginning.

More important though was the influence that their work had beyond the rarified Art Media community.

You cannot measure the ways that Radio Art changes all broadcasting, nor can you really guess what happens when unsuspecting members of the public listen to these works.

Radio is the most democratic and accessible of electronic media. It is inexpensive to produce and distribute, and virtually every home, office, and automobile has a receiver. The possibility is that Radio Art can reach and influence people who would never visit a gallery.

In an age when electronic media is all pervasive, and more importantly where commercialized media envelops us from every direction, Radio Art can challenge the accepted forms and conventions in a way that no other medium can do. It can make people listen more closely, and can challenge the media forms and conventions which surround us.

It is though a time of change. Two decades of globalization have left public broadcasters with less budget and with a redefined mandate which measures success in terms of listener numbers rather than excellence. When Public Broadcasting tries to operate in the same way as commercial media it is the artistic work and the experimental work that suffers.

Even though non-commercial community radio still affords a home for Radio Art, it is the Public broadcasters who have offered the resources, budgets, and technical expertise to create much of the work that now can been seen as influential and iconic.

(Heidi just began talking about newsounds gallery, and the the work done by Victoria Fenner, and later GX Juppiter Larssen. That's the time when I was just young and enthusiastic volunteer, and was having my eyes and ears opened in ways that I never imagined. I am astonished to think of those days at Co-op Radio as being of such historical interest.... to me, at the time, the work that Hank and Patrick, and Hildi, and GX were doing was just the way that radio was supposed to be)

"Co-op Radio was for us an empty vessel that we could fill with life"

(Heidi is now discussing the influence of General Idea on the work of Hank Bull, and again places Radio Art within that larger context of the art of the time.)

But if Public Broadcasters are no longer willing or able to enthusiastically embrace Radio Art, and if community broadcasters continue to suffer from an ongoing lack of resources, where is the Radio Art?

There has never been a problem with embracing new technology, and galleries like the Western front were using faxes and modems and videotext and satellites long before such things became commonplace.

Although these technologies can allow artists in diverse locations to connect and collaborate, they lack one thing that radio has to offer - universality.

Radio Art has to a degree moved from being accessible by all, something which could be discovered by any person with a radio, to a largely gallery based medium seen and experienced by the few. (I include much of the web based presentation under that umbrella. Although in theory web based audio is accessible to all, in practice an radio art web site is one of millions upon millions of other sites. A radio station playing Radio Art is one of perhaps thirty or forty choices in any city and consequently has a much great chance of reaching a large audience.)

In thinking about this time, and spurred by Heidi's talk, it strikes me that the Golden Age of Radio Art was that time which immediately preceded the rise of video and cable television, and certainly the Internet.

The value of Radio as an artistic form was its relative accessibility and low cost. When you could begin to produce and distribute video without needing large budgets and expensive technical facilities it seemed that Radio Art was no longer the newest and exciting form. Video meant that the tyranny of the picture was able to overtake audio.

Now of course we have the Internet, but it is once again a visual media, and once again audio takes a back seat to pictures. The question on my mind, and I think on the minds of most people here this weekend, is where Radio Art can find a home as we move forward into an interactive, Web 2.0, 500 channels of cable television Universe.

How can we create an environment in which Radio Art can be encouraged, supported, funded and distributed, in which this medium can thrive, and not just survive.

Radio Hears the Soundscape: A New Usual Suspect, Bill Fontana
Posted by Hilary Martin on May 26, 2007 03:38 PM | Comments (0)

The first audience question after a panel discussion on soundscape, without fail, is: What is a soundscape? The panel discussion The Radio Hears the Soundscape did not buck the trend.

CEC offers some history.
click here

Heide's response is that there is no definition.

Hans says that there is a semantic network which can be helpful, but the movement makes sure that the terms keep changing. The soundscapers are always on the move, they redefine all the time. The definition is not key, the permanent process of retreiving and changing is key. It's a catalyst rather than a fixed point. Even in Germany there are twelve different translations of that word, so it is an open spectrum.

Robin says that soundcape refers to what is, attending to and active manipulation of the sounds in the environment that is not just a recreation of the environment but something aesthetically pleasing. She is interested in soundscape that is not acoustic ecology but completely artificial constructed soundscapes. Maybe they refer to worlds, just not *this* world.

Panels on soundscape also always mention the usual suspects: R. Murray Schaeffer (who cannot make the panel today); Hildegard Westerkamp, Barry Truax and the World Soundscape Project.

Heide mentions a usual suspect I haven't met yet (mea culpa): Bill Fontana.
click here

Particularly interesting to me are Heide's stories about the sculptures, installations unannounced in public space. People walk in a public space and there are frogs in a marsh where there were supposed to be stone public squares and monuments. There were storms where the sky was blue. People liked it. They would have picnics in these soundscapes. There were no protests, unlike in Gratz where people rebelled against the installations. (I can't recall the last protest against a sound installation in Canada, but please let me know. I'm sure it has happened.)

Heide says that technically it was difficult to make it happen. Wires through manhole covers and into buildings and a temporary station in a museum - it all sounded very confusing. Having worked in technical theatre I'm glad it wasn't my watch.

But during that fortnight inside the museum had a connection to the radio station and through a stereo line mix and anyone could listen to it 24 hours a day, and slowly the cultural channels started picking up the signal and these birds and frogs eventually infiltrated the pop stations, more and more frequently, in between programs completely unannounced. The last five minutes of the project were broadcast by these stations. so there was an accepting of the interruption of the normative flow. A feeling that there was a taking on of nature in that way.

His project with the microphones in nature was a surveillance installation.

Robin mentions a project called Figures in the Soundscape that she's recently worked on. We listen to some of it. She relates it to Acoustical Views, a project with (again) Bill Fontana and ABC. Bill wired the city of Sydney. They received complaints, as in Gratz, because the kids couldn't sleep at night because they were in their beds listening to sounds transmitted from the harbour.

Obviously I have to learn more about this guy.

Many Thanks are Due
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Darren Copeland - Artistic Director and Nadene Thériault-Copeland - Managing Director. Live from Radio Without Boundaries.

Antipodean Sounds
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Saturday Morning began with a 9 AM (!) presentation by Robyn Ravlich, Executive Producer of the Music Unit, ABC Radio National in Australia. The ABC of course was home to "The Listening Room, an influential but now cancelled radio program that showcased some of the finest radio producers in Australia and the world.

Robyn presented selections from a number of works that have been presented by the ABC in the last few years.

You can also find the archived Listening Room web page here, with links to a number of works.

Rather than try to describe each work Robyn presented today, we've posted audio excerpts from her talk so that you can hear them yourself.

1. Excerpt from Echoes of Eternity - Robyn Ravlich 1:51 Click here to listen
2. Excerpt from The Raft of The Medusa - Robyn Ravlich 3:09 Click here to listen
3. Excerpt from On the Raft, All at Sea - Robyn Ravlich 2:59 Click here to listen
4. Excerpt from Listening Room sting :54 Click here to listen
5. Excerpt from Play Radio alive or Dead - Russell Stapleton 2:45 Click here to listen
6. Excerpt from The Sound of Forgetting - Robert Iolini 2:59 Click here to listen
7. Excerpt from In The Mist of an Arcane Pop - Damien Castaldi 2:20 Click here to listen
8. Excerpt from Shower Songs - Tom Fitzgerald 3:36 Click here to listen
9. Excerpt from The Ears Outside my Listening Room - Colin Black 4:04 Click here to listen

Trains, Gallows, Grafitti and Parkdale: Panel Discussion on Deep Wireless Outfront Commissioned Works
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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.

+++++

Republic of Safety
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There is a tradition among Transom bloggers that they report not just on the actual event, but on what they do after the show.

Friday night at Radio Without Boundaries led us from the Student Centre at Ryerson University, to The Beer Bistro on King Street for moules et frites, and then finally to a small Queen West bar for the closing set by the Republic of Safety. It was all in all remarkable and fun, and reminded me of the conformity of our day to day lives.

The evening's show at RWB actually echoed the themes of safety and danger.

"Remember the feeling of your Mom pushing you on the swings when you were four years old?"

We are sitting in a darkened room, really the only way to hear radio, the same way that you heard it as a child, with the radio hidden under your covers, turned down low.

A single spotlight lit a small transistor radio at centre stage.

A voice, from the radio, yet disembodied as it travels throughout the room, welcomes us, and draws us into that place where the sound overtakes the senses and wraps you in its embrace.

The message from tonight's guide, Richard Lee, was simple: take risks, push the boundaries, listen hard.

The evening opened with a new work by CBC radio's Steve Wadhams.

Trains Crossing uses one of the most archetypical of sounds to tell the story of an elderly woman who broods on "what might have been if, as a child, she had told the truth that Saturday night when a man came to the door and asked her a simple question."

The sounds of trains, the sounds of a woman's voice, all spatialized by NAISA Artistic director Darren Copeland gave the audience a reminder of the immersive experience that radio can be at its best. And yes the sense of "what might have been" was a powerful one.

Following Steve's work was Through a Door by Sarah Boothroyd. Through a Door presents Boothroyd's exploration of Ottawa's Nicholas Street jail, one of Canada's oldest public buildings, and the site of Canada's last public execution.

Boothroyd's work again draws on sounds that are familiar, the sounds of prison doors and prison walls, but uses those sounds as the raw materials for an atmospheric and evocative exploration of that environment.

Within that fantastic but familiar soundscape voices emerge that tell the story of Thomas D'Arcy McGee, a Canadian journalist, poet, and politician who was assassinated in 1868.

The second half of the evening drew on another archetypical radio experience, with a live radio drama performance titled It Is To Laugh: Transistorized Feedback.

Portland Maine's Dan Bernard was joined by Toronto performers Mark Ellis, Stacey Depass, and Stephen Latigan. A lively performance, and one which explored and a parodied both classic radio drama conventions, and contemporary media practices, all performed to a multi-layered sonic composed by Michael Townsend, and spatialized by Darren Copeland.

Thinking back to last night, the evening offered audience members a starting point, a group of settings and sounds that were familiar, that allowed a toehold.

And that is the power of archetypes, in radio, or literature, or art. It is the known and the comfortable, and is the place where one begins an exploration of a theme.

But it is now Saturday morning, and Robin Ravlich is speaking, so it is time to leave safety behind.

Jessica's First Ping: Hockey Sticks, Cinquante and the Geek Weekend
Posted by Hilary Martin on May 25, 2007 04:28 PM | Comments (0)

So, went to the ping on Tuesday. I brought my friend Jessica to the show. She had never been to an electronic music event before.

This is what the information looks like in the ping list email:

05.22.07 . The PiNG Presents RADiO iN AMBiENCE -
A special presentation for DEEP WIRELESS in collaboration with
NEW ADVENTURES IN SOUND ART featuring GEEK WEEKEND with
ROBERT HOARE (Berlin Germany) & STEVEN SAUVÉ (Hamilton ON)
+ STEPHEN KELLY and ELEANOR KING (Halifax NS)
@ the UNDERGROUND downstairs @ the DRAKE HOTEL
1150 Queen St. W @ Beaconsfield . W of Ossington . E of Dufferin
TUESDAY MAY 22ND . 8PM . PWYC (5$ suggested)

For the 5th year in a row, RADiO iN AMBiENCE transmits live at the PiNG. Tune in as Toronto/Berlin sound artist Robert Hoare and Hamilton synthguy Steven Sauvé bring their Geek Weekend project back to the PiNG stage. Also along for this year's spin on the radio dial are PiNG newcomers, the Halifax duo Stephen Kelly and Eleanor King. Join us as our Deep Wireless guests coax the radio ether into an outer-worldly electro ambient chill.

Missed the first part of the show, but Jamie Todd (naisa board member and ambient ping co-organizer) graciously provided these pics.

Steve Kelly and Eleanor King are a Halifax duo who do great weird things with objects and diy electronics. They hosted a workshop at InterAccess last week on how to create a contact mic out of the innards of one of those singing greeting cards, for example.

So take that and make it into a full blown performance and you get, well, what looks like a hockey stick assisting in the creation of electronic music.

I wish I had made it in time for the first set, because the folks I talked to when I *did* arrive seemed sad for me.

More about what they do here:
http://www.thejustbarelys.ca
http://ckdu.dal.ca/~barelymusic/art.html

+++++

Jessica and I got a couple of beers - a Guinness for me; a Cinquante for her (i.e., a 50, the champagne of Queen West according to the bartender) – and headed to the seating in the lower level of the bar to take it all in.

Robert Hoare and Steven Sauvé were onstage. Steven (on the left) is based in Hamilton. Robert (on the right) is an expat Ontarian in Berlin. He discovered that he could make the kind of music that he was interested in making and get paid to do it, so he stayed in Germany. Sounds sensible to me. They get together every now and then as the project Geek Weekend when Robert comes back to Canada.

Robert Hoare : http://www.robhoare.de
Steven Sauvé: http://www.karmafarm.ca

I loved their dynamic as they played. They were incorporating a live web radio stream plus whatever sound files they brought with them, and layered in synth (Steven) and saxophone (Robert). Steven lived up to the Geek moniker, even though it was a Weeknight, at times laughing and jumping back from his laptop with this huge grin on his face, surprised by the zeros and ones he was conjuring. Robert was reserved in comparison but wore bemused smile for most of the event.

Jessica and I had a discussion about how to best describe his smile and that was the word we agreed on: bemused. It was like listening to friends swapping inside jokes.

My friend leaned over and whispered, “I want to know what they are thinking! What are they looking at when they're looking at their computer screens?” I remember being at Mutek one year and (apart from Tujiko Noriko’s set) looking at these performers and thinking the same thing. “They look like they are just up there checking their email. They can’t be. Are they?” Jessica had never seen a Max patch.

After the show I asked Robert if he would show Jessica how it all worked, which he graciously did, explaining the details of the web radio feed and what the program was doing in microtime (which I cannot reproduce here, except to say it was a great explanation, and then an old friend showed up and the conversation was interrupted, which happens when you are visiting from Berlin). I’ll do a post later on Max, with Darren’s help, but it looks something like algorithms and coin flips drawn up in a nice flow chart. It’s often hard to connect the music to the program, but that’s what people like Hoare and Sauvé are good at. Lucky me.

+++++

Jessica had a great question about listening to improvised, collaborative music, which is “How do you tell if it is successful or not? Are there bits that you consider good and bits you consider disappointing?” I guess there were parts that engaged her and parts where she was waiting for the next thing. Not surprising for a first electronic music experience.

With any show, because there are shifts (pace, texture, kinds of sound) I always leave room for the buffer zone when musicians move from one theme or section to the next, the difference between when they’re finding something and when they’re actually in it, and then moving to the next. I thought Sauvé and Hoare moved us through some pretty varied sonic spaces.

So I told her I just take it all as it comes and then take it all together at the end. Obviously there is more to it than this, and other people would give her a different answer. I’m going to ask people more about how they listen this weekend.

+++++

It Is to Laugh (and perhaps have a pint or two and sing a song)
Posted by Hilary Martin on May 23, 2007 09:55 AM | Comments (0)

Deep Wireless is turning out to prove my genre connection theory. Met up with Dan Bernard and Michael Townsend on Saturday at the Greyhound Station and took them for a few pints at Molly Blooms, well deserved after 12 hours of travel.

Trying to find an open bar on campus during Victoria Day Weekend was impossible, and as we hunted, we discussed the differences between Americans and Canadians (which is thematic to their upcoming performance, It Is To Laugh), including parking practices in Manhattan and Toronto, and a comparative study of The Mercer Report and The Daily Show.

They had never heard of ‘Talking to Americans’. I told them that the recordings they did during their trip to Toronto, interviewing people in American airports about the possibility that Bin Laden is hiding in Canada, seemed by turns to resemble the familiar Mercer shtick.

By the end of the night I had volunteered to do an Alanis Morisette cover tune during their performance on Friday or Saturday. Dan is doing something devilish with the lyrics to ‘Ironic’. I suspect there will be some sort of karaoke theme to the evening. He said some of the best collaborators you meet by chance.

Michael has set up a blog for ‘It is to laugh’ at http://itistolaugh.blogspot.com/.

Thanks Bob, and Hank, and Patrick, and Howard
Posted by Barry Rueger on May 22, 2007 09:52 PM | Comments (0)

This weekend I will attend the Radio Without Boundaries conference, arguably the apex of the Deep Wireless Festival. In a strange way it will be like returning home after a long trip.

Back in 2003 I was part of the group that created Transmissions sans Frontières, the first Radio Without Boundaries conference. TSF followed on the heels of the first Third Coast Festival in Chicago in 2001. Like Third Coast the focus was on radio, but with a strong streak of experimental and boundary pushing work that (during Third Coast's first year) went well beyond the National Public Radio influenced works heard in Chicago.

What we discovered was a community of producers and listeners who craved works like those presented. People who saw in radio possibilities that went far beyond what they were hearing on commercial radio, the CBC, and NPR. People who either already knew of visionaries like R. Murray Schafer, Peter Leonhard Braun, and Willem de Ritter, or new listeners who just knew that radio was something more than what they were hearing.

We pleased some people, we challenged and confused a couple, and we sent everyone home with new ears and new attitudes. We brought together CBC types, NPR types, pirate radio types, artists, critics, and fans, mixed them all up, and watched the sparks fly.

That conference in many ways paid homage to some of the people who shaped my radiophonic sensibilities - Hank Bull and Patrick Ready, whose weekly HP Radio Show was one that was never to be missed, and to the late Howard Broomfield, who approached sound with a reverence and exuberance that has remained unmatched.

Life being what it is, I haven't really been able to attend Radio Without Boundaries since that first year, even though I've had the pleasure of managing the New Adventures web site for many years. In some strange fashion I have lived vicariously though the pictures and biographies and listings that I posted there.

This year I was asked to be part of the team liveblogging the last week of Deep Wireless. I consider that quite an honour.

I have always seen myself as more of an observer of art than a participant - and yes, I should change that - so I take this as a challenge to immerse myself in the works and people, and to reflect to the Transom audience the essence of Radio Without Boundaries.

I am thrilled.

A month or so back I was thinking about my love affair with radio, and was able to trace it back even further, to one radio program, and one DJ. I wrote about him on my own blog, and since than have found out that although he has traveled half way around the world, and has had at least a couple of careers, he's still making radio.

So as I head into this week I dedicate it to Bob Gourlay, and the hours that I spent listening to his show, the Crystal Sound Barrier.

Addition 05/24: Nadene reminds me that not only did I attend in 2004, I also provided technical services. It all seems so long ago..... although I do have some vivid memories of Gregory Whitehead promising me a beer.

New Adventures & Me
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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.

Deep Wireless & CBC radio's Outfront
Posted by Nadene Theriault-Copeland on May 21, 2007 01:25 AM | Comments (0)

New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) and CBC Radio's Outfront, for the fifth year in a row, has produced the Deep Wireless commissioning and residency program. This residency program allows both experimental sound artists and radio producers outside of the experimental realm to approach the form of personal narrative from a perspective that combines words and sounds in a fresh and innovative fashion. Four Canadian artists - Sarah Boothroyd, Steve Wadhams, Thelon Oeming and Robert Hoare - were selected from a Canada-wide call for submissions to produce a work for both CBC's Outfront radio broadcast and for presentation during Deep Wireless 2007 festival of radio and transmission art.

Harmon e Phraisyar @ Deep Wireless
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Harmon e Phraisyar is a radio comedy series created by UK artist Jim Whelton and aired weekly on Resonance-FM in the UK. For the month of May, Jim is in Toronto as the artist-in-residence creating a new show each week aired each Thursday afternoon in May on CKLN's Art on Air show between 2 and 3 pm. Jim creates his shows quite literally by Adapting Trash and Stealing from Life.

It's a lesson in Studio Production on a Shoestring Budget. Jim writes a script reflecting the community around him, records unusual sounds from that community in which the story resides and lines up as many volunteers as possible to read the script.

After everything's recorded he pulls out his magic mixing wand and pulls together a 1/2 hour episode in 2-3 days.

Have a listen on CKLN each Thurdsday in May between 2 and 3pm. Have a listen Download file

Deep Wireless on CD (4th edition)
Posted by Nadene Theriault-Copeland on May 20, 2007 04:33 PM | Comments (0)

The Deep Wireless radio art compilation was first created as part of the 2004 Deep Wireless festival with the intention of fostering both the creation of radio art through the annual call for submissions and awareness for radio art by disseminating it to the general public via radio broadcasts.

For full info click here

DEEP WIRELESS 2007
Posted by admin on May 17, 2007 03:36 PM | Comments (0)

NEW ADVENTURES IN SOUND ART presents

6th annual DEEP WIRELESS festival of Radio & Transmission Art
May 1 - 31, 2007

A month-long celebration of radio and transmission art including broadcasts, installations, performances, workshops and the RADIO WITHOUT BOUNDARIES CONFERENCE featuring international radio art luminaries Gregory Whitehead (USA), Heidi Grundmann (Austria), R. Murray Schafer (Can), Andra McCartney (Can), Robyn Ravlich (Australia), Hans Ulrich Werner (Germany), Harmon e Phraisyar (aka Jim Whelton, UK). Performances include Toronto's Grip Radio, Portland Maine's It Is to Laugh, Eleanor King, Stephen Kelly and Richard Lee as well as a rare presentation of Stockhausen's Kontakte in its original 4-channel version and Francis Dhomont's Figures de la Nuit / Faces of the Night in multi-channel splendor. To read a review of the Deep Wireless installations and a preview of the festival in the Toronto Star click here