Andrea Langlois et al - Islands of Resistance - Pirate Radio in Canada

The Art of Unstable Radio • 175
agents of reverie. We sought to rethink radio as capable of manifesting
a common space for unfolding human hopes and aspirations.
The composition of the piece relied on radiophonic sources such as
live sampled radio, pre-composed samples of syndicated American
talk radio, 12 and prayers that we asked friends and acquaintances to
record on my telephone voicemail box. We deliberately left our definition
of prayer wide open to interpretation by the people who donated
prayers for us to use, so we received prayers from monotheists, polytheists,
agnostics and atheists. For ourselves, we conceived of prayer as
the articulation of desires, wishes or aspirations, with or without a religious
context. In performance, we enhanced the radiophonic character
of the piece by employing a low-watt FM transmitter to narrowcast
the sound to multiple radio receivers spread throughout the audience,
as well as using the standard sound system in the venue. Our circuit
of transmission remained small, with the radios spread out among the
audience (on or under chairs, in people’s laps or on ledges), and range
of broadcast occurring almost entirely within our line of sight inside
the venue. Additionally, we created sound through feedback circuits
within the circuit, both between the microphones and the speakers,
and by sampling our signal from a radio receiver back into the narrowcast,
which was then re-sampled and retransmitted. Digital video
projection, acoustic instruments, such as accordion and violin, and
electronics (samplers, live effects processing, etc.) completed a circuit
of analogue and digital, wired and wireless practice.
As we continued to develop the Prayer Machine while on tour, we
began to think more deeply about the relationship between FM radio
and prayer as forms of wireless transmission. Both express something
of the very mortal desire for profound communication across distance
and time, while also representing the failure to realize total knowledge
of or union with the Other. 13 We used prayers in many languages,
particularly as we continued collecting prayers after each show while
on tour across Europe, so many of the prayers were incomprehensible
to some audience members. The emotional quality and even fragility
of the prayers was echoed by the fragility of the radio transmission,
which was prone to interference and strange bursts of static as
we played in big cities where the radio dial was already completely
full of licensed stations. What was left, then, of these prayers? Their
power seemed located in the accumulation of many small, incidental