Requiem for Radio: Full Quiet Flutter (RFR: FQF)

Requiem for Radio: Full Quiet Flutter (RFR: FQF) is a 60-minute live performance for human bodies, electrons, and radio waves. Architecture, technology, history, and the human body come together in this near-supernatural conjuring of the spirits of the demolished Radio Canada International (RCI) shortwave towers. Structured with thirteen movements for the thirteen radio towers, the performance follows the format of a traditional requiem, but for the RCI shortwave site that was once located near the border of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia from where it transmitted shortwave radio around the world from 1944 to 2012.

The performers on stage interact with an elaborate set of invented and modified electronic instruments that use sensors, custom circuits, and wireless technology to play the ghosts of the radio towers with radio waves. 

The largest of these invented instruments, taking up most of the stage, is a scale model of the RCI site, in which each of the thirteen towers is equipped with sensors, that when touched, trigger haunting droning sounds that were recorded with contact microphones placed on the actual RCI tower before the site was demolished. The thirteen tower recordings are filtered to create the thirteen notes of a chromatic scale, thus allowing the performers to play it like a larger-than-life keyboard, simply by touching it with their skin.

This performance also involves a theremin sending control voltage to trigger ghostly images of the towers and the sounds they once made, a bowed instrument played with the bone of a cow that lived beneath the RCI towers, a saxophone, a choir, shortwave radios, and transmissions sent from five separate sites on different parts of the planet to be mixed in real-time in the theatre.

While technological in nature, this performance remains one about connection – between people, places, and the unseen forces that bind us all.