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

quite restrictive of individual citizens’ self-expression. Singing in public
is generally associated with either madness or political propaganda.
In this case, the public disturbance was fuelled by no other cause than
a love of music.
The choral-radio work continued to evolve in my mind, and the
next piece was decidedly in relationship with the concert hall. Taking
Steps, was performed during the Radio Days festival in Montréal in
1995. The piece’s principle element was a radio documentary on hate
mobs that attack marginalized individuals, and has a very menacing
tone. The sounds are of echo-filled subways and erratic footsteps.
While the audience was seated in a concert hall, listening to the two
speakers in the front of the room, the soundtrack was simultaneously
broadcast to a room one floor above. On a very precise musical cue, a
choir (wearing heavy workboots) began to stomp in a rhythmic pattern,
directly above the back row of the audience just below. With each
musical phrase, the stompers encroached slowly toward the front of
the audience, making a threatening level of noise overhead. Perfectly
in sync with the soundtrack, but on a different floor of the building,
their presence was truly ominous and disturbing as if in a real mob
situation, steadily and inevitably encroaching.
Paradio, the last in this series, represented the encapsulation of the
concept of large-scale choral works and was performed along Banff
Avenue in 1996. It was produced while I was in a performance residency
called Private Investigators, and thirty or more of the residents
at The Banff Centre proudly took part in this twenty-minute piece
with easy vocal lines over another recorded soundtrack. Like its predecessors,
it created a very marked effect on a non-artist public with
very low technical requirement.
Games and Treasure Hunts
The Power of Small • 207
Revisiting the idea of radio-enhanced soundwalk, my compositions
have recently evolved into treasure hunts, where the public is given
extra motivation to listen. Commissioned by Sound Travels in 2003,
the Singing Maze was a sonic treasure hunt that took place on Toronto’s
Centre Island. It is a whimsical fairy tale in which riddles are offered
at various sites around the island. The story of a girl who metamorphosed
into a bird unfolds, as the riddles point to fantastical sights
and sounds of birds, musicians playing and singing. Using low-watt