ISSN: 0845-4450 Issue 31
When I was young, I half-believed that the voices emanating from the radio were the voices of the little people who lived inside. Turn on the radio, the little people begin to talk, change the station and they change their voices. I imagined the radio people waited inside while the receiver was off, ever ready to perform at the click of the dial. This dictatorial relationship is no worker’s paradise, so inevitably there would be dissent. What if one such person, sick and tired of our listening whims, decided to take action? From 2000 to 2004, various incarnations of The Clandestine Transmissions of Pirate Jenny evolved from this fiction. My main character was Pirate Jenny: a radio mutineer cut off from her kind by the incessant downsizing that plagued many industries in the latter half of the 20th century and left alone inside her radio. What if she attempted to communicate with other radios, dreaming of a secret relay network linking clock radio to car radio to walkman, while we, the Ears, were inattentive, absent or asleep? Pirate Jenny manifested in pirate radio infiltrations, in a campus/community radio “takeover”, in a pre-recorded mix for public radio, and in live performances.
Who are the people in the radio? is a new project set in the same world of the radio people 55 years in the past; when there were still many little people inside each radio, and when radio was listened to by rapt Ears gathered communally around the radio cabinet. Who are the people in the radio? is a self-contained installation consisting of a Koronette 1971 radio console (powered by vacuum tubes) where the doors to the various auxiliary features (turntable, record shelf, lit rotating bar) are kept closed and outfitted with peepholes, allowing Ears a rare peak at the constructed world of the little people inside. The little radio people manifest in 2- and 3-dimensional puppet form, animated by simple circuits or by the existing mechanisms inside the cabinet such as the turntable. The sound is a looped 18-minute radio piece broadcast by a low-watt FM transmitter and played by the original receiver in the cabinet. As the newscast steadily disintegrates, we overhear the voices of the little radio people in a growing ontological crisis.
Transcription of radio art into text is well nigh impossible, and I have rendered this piece into something more of a formal radio play than it really is in my attempt to make it readable. To make amends I should explain that this piece began with two radio samples. Both came from a fruitful night of shortwave surfing in Vancouver last winter. I was trawling for interesting sounds between stations, for some tonal oddity or rhythmic tic, and in the process was swept by a favourite spot at 15000 kHz. This is one of the cesium clock frequencies—a radio signal that only broadcasts the incessant ticking of atomic time. Approaching the top of the minute, a woman’s voice announces as though from a distant outpost: “At the tone, x hours x minutes, coordinated universal time.” Part way through her announcement, a foregrounded man’s voice breaks in with the same information, in a formal nasal voice from another era of broadcasting. A long tone follows, and the ticking picks up again. Sometimes at the top of the hour there are weather reports and transmission locations named: Fort Collins, Colorado, or Hawaii. This particular evening, I picked up the cesium clock with sudden clarity, and better yet, we were fast approaching the zero hour, or midnight Greenwhich Mean Time. After successfully recording five crucial minutes, the signal began to fade, and I returned to the low end of the AM dial. Here I tuned back and forth and caught a sliver of an Oldies station, playing Frank Sinatra’s 1950 hit, “Million Dollar Baby”.
Some months later I visited the CBC radio archives in Toronto and found the newscast that framed the script.