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

202 • islands of resistance
How I came to work with this medium is somewhat serendipitous. At
the Newfoundland Sound Symposium in 1991, I had become intrigued
enough with radio to participate in a sonic joy ride with such legendary
audio folk as Christof Migone, 1 Dan Lander and Claude Schryer.
They may deny the accusation, but I clearly remember driving aimlessly
around St. John’s with a battery-powered transmitter and microphone.
We wailed and hooted across the open airwaves, living up to
the glorified image of pirates, or perhaps of out-of-control teenagers.
As an action, it may have had only a small impact on the few listeners
who had accidentally found us while tuning their radio dial. But for
me it opened a realm of performance possibility that still feels new
and exciting.
One of my first radio compositions involved the strategic placement
of radio receivers, their manipulation by live performers (who also
sang), and a musical soundtrack broadcasting from a personal transmitter.
Until that point, most of my performance work had been dedicated
to solo and choral pieces. I had always, however, felt limited by
the concert hall and longed for a device that would allow my music to
become more immersive and participatory. The inherent freedom of
low-watt radio made it the perfect tool for the job. I still have not seen
or heard of anyone else using radio in this particular way, although
the boom box orchestra of Phil Kline in New York has been named in
comparison, but those works use tape decks that cannot be completely
synchronized.
In this era where high technology is unequivocally praised, radio
serves as a refreshingly easy and inexpensive alternative. When my
colleagues in electroacoustics were using state-of-the-art eight-channel
diffusion systems, I prided myself on using a “poor person’s” version
with moveable humans and portable radios. In all of these works,
a soundtrack is broadcast through my personal transmitter to any
number of portable radios, strategically placed for live performers
to interact with. My colleagues have been developing increasingly
sophisticated methods to move sound around a room through complex
speaker pans and arrays. I was lucky enough to skip that step and
go straight to having live performers move the speakers around the
room. This device has served to spread live sound around a large or
complex acoustic space, filling it with a powerful auditory presence,
and yet with no real loudness in any one place. The radio receivers
can also act as sonic placeholders to mark a terrain for performers,