Live listen:Broad Domain
Canada’s first transnational radio program was produced by the Canadian National Railway (CNR) in 1927. It was a broadcast of the national anthem performed with bells on the carillon of the parliament’s Peace Tower, for railway passengers and listeners at home. In Phonographic Memory: A History of Sound Recording in the Field, Mitchell Akiyama notes that
“this moment represented the intersection of an array of technological means of ordering, bridging, and demarcating space—means that were implicitly and rhetorically oriented towards building and sustaining the nation.”1
Like rail, radio holds the power to contain a large expanse of space, allowing for a nation to effectively reassert the solidity of its domain. To this day, a central component of the CBC’s mandate is to provide programming that
“contributes to a shared national consciousness and identity.”2
Our moment of national fragility offers the possibility for fragmentation that could result in new, more intentional modes of social organization. The experimental audio works in this program combine elements of soundscape with narrative to explore an array of relationships to the land that lie beyond a nationalist paradigm; relationships that are, at turns, fraught, ecstatic, embodied and abstract.
In the late seventies, Hildegard Westerkamp hosted and produced a program on Vancouver Co-operative Radio called “Soundwalking”, where she brought listeners to various locations around Vancouver in order to explore them sonically. Around that time, Westerkamp was working with composer R. Murray Schafer at Simon Fraser’s World Soundscape Project, an international research project that germinated the modern study of acoustic ecology. Their goal was
“find solutions for an ecologically balanced soundscape where the relationship between the human community and its sonic environment is in harmony.”3
Among their propositions was the idea that rural soundscapes were high fidelity or hi-fi; they had a higher signal-to-noise ratio than urban environments, meaning that a sound was more legible against the backdrop of the total soundscape.
In 1974, Westerkamp wrote a seminal essay on soundwalking, which suggested that the practice could help attune our ears to help extend our relationship with nature beyond the merely visual. Kits Beach Soundwalk is a composition that begins with a 1989 field recording of Kitsilano Beach, which is colloquially referred to as ‘Kits Beach’ or ‘Khatsahlano’, after a Squamish chief. Westerkamp eschews the conventions of field recording as empirical practice, opting instead to design an artificial soundscape that might compel the listener to better recognize and protect the hi-fi environment.
In Kits Beach, Westerkamp dampens the influence of the unwanted aspects of the cityscape through her recording technique and in studio—a fact that she makes transparent in voiceover. Instead, she focuses on the acoustic realm of barnacles and their dreamlike associations, from the chatter of women in a community of weavers and the ‘twinkling’ sound of bullets, to a composition by avant-garde composer Iannis Xenakis. For Westerkamp, the premodern soundscape is a vehicle for psychic healing, and its survival is inextricable from our own.
Body of Water is premised on the deceptively simple task of examining what makes swimming so pleasurable. Veronica Simmonds and Katie MacKay sought out all the lakes of Halifax—a city that’s more commonly associated with the ocean—and asked subjects to describe the feeling of swimming in a lake. The result is a phenomenological approach to the subject of swimming that generates an embodied response for the listener.
The plurality of narrative voices offer multiple entry points to conjure a physical memory of being in water. As one narrator plunges into the water, we too are quite literally immersed in the sound design, into a torrent of bubbles, only to emerge further away in the sound field. The sonic environment is tightly calibrated in order to appear as naturalistic as possible.
The act of simulating as seemingly mundane an experience as swimming brings its ritualistic quality to the fore. Swimming can generate a meditative effect that’s similar to walking or running, but water isn’t our dominant environment. We don’t go to water to get somewhere, we just go to water. The recognition of this phenomenon makes water appear almost mystical, as it might if it were more scarce. The narrator recalls the feeling of “infinite fingers” sliding through her hair, while contemplating what it is that shapes the substance into its various forms. Body of Water begins with a plunge into a lake—into this entity we understand as distinct from ourselves—and ends in a far murkier space.
Phoebe Wang’s in search of the miraculous (bas jan ader) takes Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader’s mysterious death at sea as a metaphor for the life of the artist. Bas Jan Ader set sail from Cape Cod on the 9th of July 1975, with the intention of sailing across the Atlantic ocean to Ireland in a 12-foot boat, alone. This was to be the first in a three-part part performance, and he estimated that it should take roughly 2.5 months. Nine months later, Spanish fishermen found the boat floating almost vertically in the water.
Phoebe calls in search of the miraculous an “artist manifesto of sorts”—the “of sorts” part perhaps gesturing to the fact that manifestos tend to be declarative; a collection of intentional statements, while Phoebe’s manifesto captures intention in the process of being formed. Through a fragmented collection of scenes and textures, intimate conversations, art critiques, skype calls, wafts of breath and near-imperceptible hum, we hear Phoebe grapple with the mythical weight of Bas Jan Ader’s death on her life and work.
We never hear the sound of the ocean directly. Instead, we hear it through a collection of references: a swim meet, or a traditional Irish song about the sea. The rhythm of the piece itself is akin to catching fleeting glimpses of detritus beneath buffeting waves that bury them. The limitless expanse of the ocean is managed through human attempts to enclose it as a swimming pool, or to memorialize it in song.
Lazaro’s Dream is an audio walk that’s inspired by the novel In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje’s fictional account of the lives of the immigrants who helped build the city of Toronto in the 1930s, but whose contributions were never formally acknowledged. The book focuses on the construction of the Prince Edward Viaduct commonly known as the Bloor Viaduct—an arch bridge with a five-lane roadway that connects Bloor Street to the west with Danforth Avenue to the east. It begins with a John Berger quote that reads
“Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.”
With Lazaro’s Dream Angela Shackel (Accounts and Records) draws Ondaatje’s work back into the cityscape, as a sonic anti-monument that imbues the physical space of the Bloor Street Viaduct with the traces of its builders. The densely layered work blurs the boundary between excerpts of the book narrated by Ondaatje himself, sonic renderings of archival material, elements of the contemporary cityscape, and the directives of a dispassionate guide.
The conceit of a dreamscape presents a departure from the conventional form of an audio walk, which is more often concerned with the practicalities of orienting a visitor to a space and its contents. The porosity of space and time in Lazaro’s Dream is disorienting. One can imagine standing at the railing of the viaduct during rush hour, and struggling to associate all the sounds with their sources. But it’s a disorientation that holds the potential for a new mode of traversing the city that’s overlaid with speculative imaginings on how it came to be.
In her album F(l)ight, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson weaves together narratives depicting the complexities of Indigenous experience with poetry that’s sung and spoken over musical arrangements from an array of collaborators. There’s a polyvocality running through the 11 “story-songs” that comprise the album, where subjectivity seems to pervade all forms, from the Dish with One Spoon Treaty to a deer who’s become addicted to road salt.
I am Graffiti is the album’s final track. It begins with a soft fuzz that’s reminiscent of flowing water—a small waterfall, or rapids maybe. The lyrics take the form of a sarcastic letter to the nation state that seems at odds with the sincere tone of the reading and the instrumentation underneath:
i am writing to tell you
that yes, indeed,
we have noticed
you have a new big pink eraser
we are well aware
you are trying to use it.
I am Graffiti stands in sharp contrast to the richly-symbolic, meandering quality of previous tracks. The lines are abrupt and the language is direct. Leanne indicts
“bleeding-heart liberals and communists”
for their inaction, gesturing toward the inadequacy of the reconciliation process in addressing the harm done. She repeats the phrase
“I am graffiti”
throughout, and it becomes a symbol of resilience; the mere existence of Indigenous people in the present serving as an indelible and persistent reminder of colonial legacy that has shaped the land. Graffiti demands that we understand the urgency of this tragedy, even though it’s been stretched over a century. It’s a call to set aside our good intentions and act.
Notes
1 Akiyama, Mitchell, “Phonographic Memory: A History of Sound Recording in the Field.” McGill Library and Collections, 2015, p. 236 http://digitool.library.mcgill.ca/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=130454&local_base=GEN01-MCG02
2 Broadcasting Act (1991) SC. c. 11 (Can) https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/B-9.01/page-1.html#h-4
3 Barry Truax, Hildegard Westerkamp, Adam P. Woog, Helmut Kallmann, “World Soundscape Project.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 7 Feb 2006, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/world-soundscape-project
Aliya Pabani is a Toronto-based artist and podcaster. Most recently, she was host/producer of CANADALAND’s arts and culture podcast The Imposter, which was featured as one of the best podcasts of 2017 by CBC’s Podcast Playlist. Ben Cannon of the AV Club called it "one of the finest, most compulsively listenable shows in the world of podcasts today." Aliya's art practice deploys methods from design ethnography, tactical media and comedy to examine the ideological frameworks underpinning public systems and infrastructure. She performed with Public Recordings in CAPITALIST DUETS, and her work Corrections with Onyeka Igwe was exhibited as part of the 2018 Images Festival.