Edie Reaney Chunn is an emerging playwright and performer based in Halifax who loves to work collaboratively and inefficiently. She is a graduate of the University of King’s College with a combined honours degree in English and Contemporary Studies. Recent projects include serving as playwright for the New Pants Project’s August 2019 production of How the Light Lies (On You); as musical performer/composer for Steady Theatre Co.’s production of Macbeth (2019); and as co-stage director for the Halifax Summer Opera Festival’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2018). Edie is also part of Eastern Front Theatre’s RBC Emerging Playwright’s Program (2019-2020), so maybe she will write a play again.

The two pieces included in CFRC’s submission are “She Sits in Her Big Tree”, a piece that was originally used for a puppet show (and is based on the Brother’s Grimm story “The Six Swans”), and a collection of shorter poems. These poems (when read written down) are mostly about the relationship between sound and print, and finding the fun, funny, occasionally annoying space where the aural and the visible meet. I don’t know what they’re about when read out loud, and you lose the printed aspect — the best I can say is that they still approach language playfully, lightly, and with care.

I came up with the name Mother Drone and Other Ancient Spirits of Great Power after googling how to summon demons. I stumbled upon the image of a being called Caim which is depicted as a thrush and drew the album cover. Prior to this I had been working on some music built around the idea of reverb trails, as in taking source material, applying reverb and cutting away as much as possible except the reverb to create a new timbre. As experimental music can be quite cold I felt that by making the piece about the character of Mother Drone I could give it a personality rather than just showcasing whatever technical process I came up with. As such Mother Drone became the spirit of the piece, and the piece became the story of Mother Drone.

Jeremy Kerr is a musician and sound artist based in Kingston, Ontario. He got his start writing and recording music while living in the middle of nowhere as a kid with no internet and nothing better to do. He attended queens university in Kingston and obtained his Bachelor of Music degree in 2018. He continues to make music in a variety of styles and plays regularly around Kingston. He is currently playing bass in the Meringues and working on a noise-pop/drone album titled In the End Everyone Lets You Down.

Much like the main character Gwen, I too like to procrastinate. This entire piece was created in 24 hours.

The Trouble With Trees is a radio drama written and produced by storyranger for CFRC. The voice of Gwen was Emily Townshend. The voice of Eli was Michael McLaren. The music featured in this work was created by Disparition, storyranger, Our Last Night, Lindsey Stirling, Jackson Parodi, and HARBOR. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Queens University professor, Matt Rogalsky, mixes primetime CFRC airwaves into process improv, creating a live performance from archived material.

This CFRC produced show had one contributor this time around, our own Quinn Giordano (The Programming Manager provided the name for this episode). Quinn provided five pieces, in order, with explanations:

Overcast Soul

“Overcast Soul” was composed as the result of a very long stretch of grey days prior to the first holiday break of my first year at Queen’s University. An exam season spent studying through the nights and meandering off to strange corners of Youtube for interviews with my favourite Jazz musicians, composers, directors and artists, had transformed me into a nocturnal, isolated and somewhat depressed person. The sound of the piano loop that was recorded and eventually used on this track was a sound that had been stuck in my head for days as I would leave my building to find coffee and non-nutritious snack foods, serving like a representative of my languid mood and temporarily abstract routine. The loop itself was slowed down in order to correspond to a particular manner of sauntering that I had taken to on my coffee breaks. I set against the backdrop of this piano loop an entirely separate vocal collage composition, titled “Voices of Jazz” in order to practically represent the warm, incessant murmur of voices that I would hear throughout the day from passing through public spaces on campus and leaving old interview recordings running continuously while I would compile and review exam notes. As they did in those contexts, the voices on “Overcast Soul” are woven together such that the content of the spoken words are generally lost and only the pure sound of the speech itself can remain. Overall, the sound of “Overcast Soul” evokes images of damp pavement, pale grey skies, somber people and a perpetual movement forward. It is a snapshot of a formative time in my life.

Saturday February 27

“Saturday February 27” was composed by crudely cutting a lengthy recording into two-minute long blocks and layering the segments on top of each other in order to create a single fragmented impression of the evening. Emily paints, I play piano and together we talk about our lives. Rather than documenting the meeting in its entirety, this rough-cut approach captures an attitude associated with the event and the nature of Emily’s painting.

Black in Daylight

“Black in Daylight” features a minimalistic drumbeat buried beneath a thick orchestral rendering made from excerpts of the music of Luciano Berio and various other composers that I admire. The music represents a personal and philosophical struggle to grasp at happiness and truth, a concept that can be heard discussed in the background vocal track featuring Dr. Cornel West. Mimicking the form of Charles Ives’ “The Unanswered Question”, where a lone trumpet repeatedly poses a question or “serious matter” to a serene, natural backdrop of gorgeous strings and woodwinds, “Black in Daylight” poses its own question, except in this case it contends with a fiercer, more complex setting of individualistic musical elements competing loudly for supremacy. Here, as with Ives’ “The Unanswered Question”, we find no clear answers, just deeper tensions and frustration as the question posed is drowned out by alternate attractions.

Requiem No. 1 and No. 2

“Requiem No. 1” and “Requiem No. 2” were composed as a reflection on the idea of dying and leaving one’s body. I had been overcome by a memory from high school of a classmate who tragically died before graduation, his funeral, which incidentally had been held on my birthday, and then the funerals of several of my relatives. I began to imagine what death might feel like in comparison with the act of falling asleep or entering a state of deep meditation and was then compelled to reflect on my own inevitable death and what music I would choose to be played at the funeral that would follow. These compositions feature a synthesis of many pieces and brief moments of music that I had chosen in response to that morbid, nagging question.

Belle Island, The Small Grand Man and Breath: Radio(waves) in Motion

Journeys Between Personal Meditations and Public Mystery

1. Belle Island by Nelly Matorina: I recently read about Jodi Rose’s piece Nida Radio Wave Bridge, which collected radio waves from the shoreline at Nida Art Colony in Lithuania. I wanted to replicate a similar idea in Belle Island in Kingston, Canada, which has a manmade beach that the city began to create in 1988, before finding aboriginal human remains and conducting an official excavation to respectfully collect, date, and relocate the remains to another area of the island. I like the idea of AM radio, amplitude modulation, as a magnification of histories in an area, so I collected AM radio waves using a “TV radio lantern” in the shape of a bunny that I found in a thrift store on Montreal st. (Kingston,On). Although I couldn’t discern any words, the static changed greatly as I moved through the area.

   The piece contains samples of The Gateless Gate – View of the Greenland sea north of Siglufjrur.

2. The Small Grand Man by Kristiana Clemens: Originally titled “Ambrose” the piece was produced for a theatre production of the same name. Ambrose Small was a prominent Ontarian and self-made millionaire who owned multiple theaters including The Grand Opera House in Toronto, The Grand Theatre in London (Ontario) and the Grand Opera House in Kingston. On December 1^st, 1919 Small sold every one of his theatrical properties. On December 2^nd, 1919 he disappeared. It was rumoured that his wife and her lover killed him and cremated his body in one of his own theatre furnaces. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle almost took on the case. The recording was created within the walls of the Grand Theatre in Kingston, 96 years after its former owner went missing.
3. Breath By Adam Binhammer: I created this piece with inspiration taken from long swims in the lake up at my cottage. Sometimes in the water for an hour, the repetition, vocalized thoughts, splashing, and radio are all supposed to represent the rhythmic nature of swimming for that extended period of time, and the overpowering voice of the water. The mind’s inner turmoil of constant thoughts, music, and stresses that plague me throughout the day are subdued by the sound of the water, only rising momentarily between breaths, and then being calmed immediately by the knowledge that the waves I am making as I swim will echo to the far shores of the lake.

spaces to act or not

by: Nelly Matorina

I recently discovered Caroline Nevejan’s work on presence. In the piece 8 spaces to act or not, she divides presence into three parameters: now/not-now, here/not-here, you/not-you. I was taken by the option of now/here/not-you, the immediacy and intensity of being in ‘now’ and ‘here’ surrounded by not-you. This piece contains field recordings from places where I felt surrounded by “not-you” most and wanted to act (make a sound), and then versions of just those sounds without a place. It ends with a sacred moment, I witnessed a wedding in a church in a small town in Lithuania which was open to the public despite being a private ceremony. The wedding was only 8 people, and the song I walked in during was entrancing and futuristic.

The piece contains readings from 8 spaces to act or not by Caroline Nevejan (http://www.being-here.net/page/745/8-spaces-to-act-or-not), and samples from Paras’ Memon’s A Story from their Self-titled EP, and M Mucci’s Days Blur Together. how

Across the lake from downtown Kingston Ontario is Wolfe Island, the largest of The Thousand Islands. This episode of radia immerses oneself with a path away from the mainland, through a combination of soundscapes on the move and spoken word segments of tranquility from Henry David Thoreau’s, Walden. Hop on your bike and ride the Islander III through this experimental soundscape.

“All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it.” – Thoreau

This week’s Radia episode is brought to us by CFRC Kingston (Ontario, Canada) based artists Ben Labenski, Jonny Klynkramer, and Brendon Wilson. These guys make life a little breezier.