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

e considered abject sound alternately seep or explode through the
thin heterodyne music of the radios in the array, in a dynamically
panned pattern that causes the sound to alternately move and hover
in the space.
I describe Respire as a hybrid work of radio art, in that it plays both
with conventions of radio content as well as with the radio waves
themselves. With this piece I seek not to occupy the airwaves, however
temporarily, but rather to collaborate with them, and in so doing
achieve less rather than more control. The composed sounds may, at
times, become almost obliterated by the sounds generated by the volatile
radio environment. The resulting piece transports “noise” from
the category of surplus or unwanted sound, to sound that has potential:
the potential to further pry open the radio imaginary. In Respire,
sound serves as representation, but importantly sound is also an index
of the complex, changeable, embodied relationships between devices,
bodies, radio waves and electricity. Pirate radio, in this iteration, is less
about clandestine or subversive radiation than it is about resonance,
both physical and imaginary; a realm which “resonates in our cells
and allows us to share the experience with inanimate things.” 17
Coda
The Art of Unstable Radio • 177
At a recent conference on the topic of alternate forms of exchange, 18
Greg Younging raised the question: how can something be owned
which is constantly changing? Here, he was referring to indigenous
peoples’ perspective on creativity and culture, particularly with
regard to cultural objects and customs, and proposing not ownership
but custodianship over lands, language, songs, dances, symbols, etc.
Younging’s emphasis was on an extended sense of temporality, one
that exceeds the human scale without alienating the human from it.
Creative expression, in this model, is not individualistic but is held
time-based, held in common, and stems from continuous, though
changing, relationships with culture and landscape, through language
and phenomenological experience.
Western culture, particularly under late capitalism, proposes not
only that everything can be owned, but be bought and sold as well.
The radio spectrum, a notion invented in the early twentieth century
as a way to conceptualize an electro-magnetic territory described in
frequencies (Hertz) ranging from lowest to highest, includes the more