L’art radiophonique en circulation


The original adventures of the little people in the radio (starring Pirate Jenny) continue to circulate…. the new mix I made last year of my 2002 radio work The Clandestine Transmissions of Pirate Jenny is currently featured over on Le Tétraèdre, a weekly experimental radio program on Radio Panik 105.4 FM in Bruxelles. Live to air Wednesday 23, as show #17d. February 23h GMT +1, but since that was yesterday, you can also listen here.

I also recently completed an interview with Etienne Noiseau of the excellent French radio art site Syntone, read it (en français) here.

UPDATE:

Vacant City Radio was featured on CKUT Montreal’s ESL program, as part of a show on transmission which also includes interviews with ham radio ops. Aired in Montreal February 28, 2012, 23h. Listen to the podcast or download here.



Tuner, live on Kunstradio


Sunday, December 4, 2011, 23h (GMT+1)

I’ll be performing live in the studios of ORF Kunstradio, the long-running radio art program heard weekly on Ö1, the cultural channel of Austria’s national public radio. The live stream will connect from the home page here, and the show will be documented and streamable afterwards from the show page here.

It’s a brand new series of studies on radio and timekeeping, called Tuner:

A radio receiver, designed for mass production and consumption, invites a small narrative reflecting some aspect of radio’s changing cultural reference over the past century: I am the future, I am mobile, I am young, I am a connection with the world, I am a safety precaution, I am cheap, I am common, I am invisible, I am obsolete. Likewise, the graphic design of each dial represents an ideology of the radio spectrum, proposing time in frequency, and space in territory. Some dials are linear, filled with the names of cities, while other dials are perfectly round, referencing radar and precisely regulated atomic time.

Tuner is a suite of short pieces, performed live, which uses the graphical design of radio dials as music and event scores. Radios have been used as instruments and played in works such as George Brecht’s “Candle Piece for Radios” (1959), and offer a strong element of indeterminacy to brief performative moments. What will a radio reveal when used to generate the score itself?

Acting as frame and theme for this round of Tuner pieces is a sample from WWV,  a station devoted to broadcasting time signals since 1923, and Coordinated Universal Time (Greenwich Mean) since 1967. Based in Fort Collins Colorado, near the laboratories that maintain the U.S. national standards of time and frequencies, WWV currently broadcasts time according to a cesium atomic clock, or time as dictated by the regular decay of the isotope cesium-133.

This time around I have chosen to interpret the dials or tuner plates of one vacuum tube radio (1953) and two transistor radios (mid 1960s) as scores. Not accidentally, these radios are products of the post-war economy, whose design promises precision, safety, and a little technical sophistication for the domestic sphere. The pieces I will perform based on these dials are improvised studies contributing to a larger body of work on radio and timekeeping, so for this set of works I read and interpret the radio dials as referring to frequency, or, the rate of something happening.

But even against the precision of atomic time, events wander away from regularity, and musicality is hiding both in the accompanying tones and in the landscape of static which threaten to consume all sonic details at any time. How to read the radio dial? Someone is counting, someone is keeping score: something happens, and then something happens.

I won’t be using the beautiful Hallicrafters radio dial (shown above) in this set of pieces–but it’s my next project in the series. I love the shortwave radios with the names of cities and countries; I especially love the incongruence of “USSR” and “Edmonton” placed cheek to cheek on the dial. That dial is a symphony of craziness to decode, though, and I’m maybe not up for doing that one live yet. I’ve opted instead for simpler numeric dials for the first time out, but chosen ones which are still demonstrative of Cold War/atomic era wireless architecture.

This work supported by a post-doctoral fellowship from Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture Québec.



Heart as Arena: Love and radio


photo: Yannick Grandmot

I’ve had the great pleasure to be working with Dana Gingras and her dance company Animals of Distinction on a new piece called Heart as Arena.

Here’s a little teaser of what we’re up to:

How far is far away? Wireless transmission is a paradox of intimacy and distance. In “Out of the Dark: Notes on the Nobodies of Radio Art” (1992), Gregory Whitehead writes that radio involves “staging an intricate game of position, a game that unfolds among far-flung bodies, for the most part unknown to each other”. For Heart as Arena, this game of position involves bodies and radios playing on stage, bodies in the audience, signals passing through the theatre from local or distant stations as well as mobile phones and wireless systems on all bands, the built environment of the city and its electrical currents. Using a multi-channel micro-watt radio system, radio becomes a frame for a series of relationships, near and far, where visible gestures meet invisible electro-magnetic interactions;  a circuit built, played with, and played within.

We are immersed daily in a welter of signal, so tonight our interest centers on resonant bodies traversing the volatile nocturnal radio landscape in search of elusive union, tuning in to songs full of desire for love and comfort, the most mortal dreams of all. Bodies serve as antennas, and receivers become transmitters. What we find is that there is no such thing as dead air: the radio landscape is alive though connections are fragile and prone to interference, urgently vibrating with activity, temporary but resonantly human.

The work is conceived and choreographed by Dana Gingras, and features performers Sarah Doucet (Toronto), Shay Kuebler (Vancouver), Amber Funk Barton (Vancouver), Masaharu Imazu (Montreal/Japan) and Dana Gingras (Vancouver/Montreal). Creative collaborators include radio artist Anna Friz (Montreal/Chicago), sound and lighting artist Mikko Hynninen (Finland), dramaturge Ruth Little (England).

Now Showing: Oct 4,5,6,7,8  2011  Buy Tickets @ The Cultch, 1895 Venables Street Vancouver, BC  Box Office: 604-251-1363

As you may guess, there are lots of radios in this show, beautiful transistors from the mid-’60s to the late-’70s. A veritable landscape of radios, as well as a landscape of radio sound. I’ll post more photos once we arrive in Vancouver. For me this is a wonderful opportunity to extend the work with multi-channel radio sculpture into a theatre setting, so radios act as environment, sculpture, and scenography; while the material conditions of radiophonic communication have been physicalized in the choreography.

For those not in Vancouver, fear not! Heart as Arena will be touring to many Canadian cities in the next year, including Ottawa (National Arts Centre), Montréal (L’Agora de la danse), Edmonton, Lennoxville, Quebec City, and hopefully points beyond.

Check out some press: preview here, and review here.



“For the time being” goes to Kunstradio, and does some blowing in the wind


I am super pleased to join in the stream from cOL-mE (co-located media expedition), Bratislava, who are part of a group of artist collectives working on the Time Inventors’ Kabinet. By the time you read this, the stream will already have played my piece For the time being and moved on to other interesting works, but do tune in from September 6-11, 2011 for daily casts, including people like my good friend and collaborator Peter Courtemanche in Vancouver. The TIK art-radio is streaming an art-radio program scheduled according to wind time, that is to say, according to the behaviour of the wind rather than the rotation of the earth in relationship to the sun or the moon:

 TIK is a project, an interest into ecology and media art, a collaborative experiment with time …
taking an ecological approach to observing patterns in time and time control systems…
the creative tools we build to generate new audio and visual artworks and mediate a creative discourse on ecological time …
an ‘horloge a vent'(wind clock), an imaginary time keeping device regulated by the irregular movement of the wind …
workshops, art radio sessions, public access digital media archive, public presentations, conferences and exhibitions, a critical publication … ‘re-inventing ecological time’… 

In addition to wind time being a wonderfully irregular and changeable measurement of time, the TIK project makes some really poetic proposals, such as the possibility that people thousands of kilometres apart geographically might share the same wind time zone, or the idea that when the wind is still, time stops. 

I was really excited to discover this project, as it fits so nicely with the research I’ve undertaken since last year on radio and timekeeping. I’m interested to understand the role radio played in the atomization of time, and wonder how the same medium can be implicated in forms of micro-local time. For the time being was the first piece from what promises to be a series of works for broadcast, narrowcast, live performance, and installation.

Meanwhile, For the time being aired on a recent Kunstradio show on August 28 (but remains online, so you can still check it out). Also included: a mix of Respire for broadcast, and two pieces from the Short Horizon series. I’ll be heading over to Vienna to do a live show in December this year, so stay tuned for that too.



Heavy breathing at the Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago


I’m hanging my multi-channel radio installation Respire at the Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) in Chicago this week, with the opening reception coming up on Friday July 15, 6PM-9PM. My good friend and partner in sonic crime Eric Leonardson will be joining me to play at the opening, where we’ll each improvise with the radio world of the installation. Respire will stay up until August 7, and will continue to change as I meddle with the transmitter configurations, composition, and interference potential. ESS has kindly let me use their Audible Gallery as a project space for the duration of the show, so I can continue my research into multi-channel radio systems. Gallery hours are Saturdays and Sundays from 1-5PM, or by appointment during the week. You can email me here as well and see when I’ll be in the gallery if you want to hang out and move antennas.

Here’s a short description of the piece:

Respire is an intimate experience of radio transmission, featuring a multi-channel array of suspended radio receivers and micro-watt transmitters. Sounds of breathing and other bodily exclamations typically absent from regular radio programming seep up through the welter of signals, as the receivers play and emit their own oscillating frequencies. This milieu of harmonic interference and uneasy nighttime respirations reveals the invisible contours of the radio landscape that surrounds us. Other sounds are created from instruments that echo human breath (harmonica) or the detuned radio landscape (theremin).

UPDATE:

The space is very intimate–a little sun-dappled box 6m x 6m. For the opening I blacked out the windows and lit the radios with small LED lights, but later on during the installation, I removed the blacks and lights to return the installation to “daytime mode”. New to the array this time around were the chirps and sounds of satellites, which were remarkably insectoid. Much like the similarity between human breath and static, the satellites-as-insects or frogs are striking for the way electro-magnetic and organic phenomena can sound so similar.

Eric Leonardson took a picture during the install: that’s me on a ladder, hanging radios once more…..

This work supported by a post-doctoral fellowship from Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture Québec.



Outside the Box


Jay Needham curated an evening of radio art pieces and surround sound works on Saturday April 2, 2011  for the Outside the Box New Music Festival, a festival of sound and music at the University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale, Illinois. My good friend and collaborator Eric Leonardson was on hand to play live, and the rest of us contributed our works remotely for the surround listening experience…. the “rest of us being” Dinahbird, Ron Coulter, Zoe Irvine, Jean-Phillipe Renoult, Barry Truax, and myself.

I had hoped to come down and play in person, but I was in the middle of moving down to Chicago and couldn’t bend my head around anything other than boxes, so I sent along the remix of Pirate Jenny which just played in Estonia at Radiaator last month. Jay had a nice setup to play the radio pieces back through a muster of radios, and I’m super pleased to have Pirate Jenny in circulation again. I really think it’s time that she came out of hibernation and started up some new trouble. What have those little people in the radio been doing for the past few years anyway??? Stay tuned….



SPIN in Toronto


photo by Jeremy Mimnagh

I’m performing in the first full run of Evalyn Parry’s SPIN, a show about bicycles, early feminism, consumerism, and collisions in traffic and of heart. Written and performed by Evalyn Parry, with Brad Hart on the bicycle, and me on a variety of instruments, from accordion to mbirra to bike lights. Thanks to contact mics, the table is all mic-ed up too, and I play that with a leatherman tool. I’m especially pleased to play one of Iner Souster‘s junkstruments, which we have dubbed the Time Machine.

Show runs until March 27, 2011, at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto, Wed-Sun nights at 8PM. Reserve tickets!

“Through a series of songs played live on a vintage bicycle, SPIN recounts a theatrical cycle of stories about bikes, women and liberation. Inspired by the incredible true tale of Annie Londonderry, the first woman to ride around the world on a bicycle in 1894, SPIN blends theatre, music and technology in a unique tribute to the bicycle as muse, musical instrument and agent of social change.”

Here’s a shot of the Time Machine:



Radiaator


I have a piece in the listening room at the first ever Radiaator Festival in Tallinn, Estonia March 17-18, 2011. I’ve sent them a remix of Pirate Jenny, called “The Clandestine Transmissions of Pirate Jenny: Are you one of us?”

Some great live performers will be making noise and radio, including Felix Kubin, Sarah Washington and Knut Aufermann, Paul Devens, Neboisa Milikic, Eesti Elekter, LokaalRaadio, and EleOnora.

If you’re near Tallinn, you can listen on 107.2 FM, or head down to EKKM, the Estonian Museum of Contemporary Art.



Going out west with a suitcase full of tapes…


photo: Gavin Young, Calgary Herald

I’m currently in ice cold Calgary with the rest of the 300 Tapes gang for the double premiere of 300 Tapes at Alberta Theatre Projects’ playRites Festival. We run from Feb 17-March 6, 2011. In case you’re wondering, there really are 300 tapes in this show. My sound design is predictably all on tape too… and I brought some nice Califone decks to play them back on (thank you Florida public school board).

Here’s what it’s all about:

“Imagine recording your memories on 300 analog tapes. Record. Rewind. Play. Listen. Stop. This intimate mash-up of fact and fiction explores how our memories and identity are shaped (and warped) by time, our own ideas of ourselves and the eyes and ears of others. Featuring a ground-breaking sound design and the curious choreography of our everyday twitches, this bold experiment in storytelling playfully provokes questions about authenticity.”

Developed in residency at The Theatre Centre, Toronto, and co-produced by Public Recordings, with The Theatre Centre and Alberta Theatre Projects.



Extremity Cassette at the AGYU


image by Bette Burgoyne

Peter Coutemanche (Absolute Value of Noise) and I made a little generative piece for Art’s Birthday back in 2009. We’ve redone the mix to play during Art’s Birthday 2011 and beyond as part of the Art Gallery of York University‘s ongoing “Audio Out” exhibition: which basically means infiltrating the hallway near the gallery with sounds to soothe (or aurally poke) the passing student.

Here’s the project description:

Extremity Cassette is a generative audio piece that imagines samples on a near-endless stretch of audio tape. Wound through a complex, multi-head cassette machine, the samples overlap with themselves, repeat, vanish and reappear. The magnetic nature of the machine itself picks up noises from the ether and mixes them with free reed and heterodyne sounds.

Inspired by the short story The White Death by Stanislaw Lem, where a planet made entirely of inorganic material is the crystalline host to fabulous machines, Extremity Cassette imagines a prehistoric mechanism that loops and churns out a never ending, ever changing musical score. Until one day the organic world is introduced … then rust interferes with the workings of the cassette … the sounds become progressively more erratic, and eventually stop.

Originally composed for Art’s Birthday, 17 January 2009, Extremity Cassette will play at the AGYU for Art’s Birthday 2011 from 5 January – 20 March 2011.

Peter Courtemanche (Absolute Value of Noise): VLF Antenna and Receiver
Anna Friz: Theremin, Harmonica, Kazoo, Melodica