Bay Day

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This article was published 31/01/2017 (3180 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Very rarely does the opportunity arise to participate in a music evewnt from the comfort of your own home, but composer and musician Ben Shemie is offering those in the Winnipeg area the opportunity to do just that.

His piece, Music for Two Radios, will make its world première as part of the Winnipeg New Music Festival Thursday night at 10:30 p.m. sharp, following the festival’s Ghosts of the Hudson’s Bay Building.

As its name suggests, Shemie composed a pair of 15-minute pieces that will be aired, and are meant to be listened to, on two community radio stations at exactly the same time. CKUW at 95.9 FM and UMFM at 101.5 FM will broadcast the tracks anyone in the greater Winnipeg area will be able to hear, so long as they have two FM radios handy.

The Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art will host the formal listening party, where multiple radios will be set up — and guests are encouraged to bring their own, battery-operated FM radios — but Shemie’s hope is that people all over the city will take the initiative to listen in their own space, too.

“It’s a community thing and it’s free, anybody can do it,” says Shemie, who is most known for his work as a member of Montreal-based rock band Suuns.

“Obviously you have to get two radios, and I know that’s a medium that’s not quite as popular as it used to be — FM radio that is — but to make that little bit of effort to get two old radios or clock radios or car radios and just do it… and the fact that it is only happening in Winnipeg and can only be experienced in Winnipeg I think is what really makes it special.”

Shemie performed a similar composition in Montreal a few years back, and though he was nervous about the piece working out as it had in his mind — purely due to the immense amount of organization required and all the variables in play — he says it was one of the “happiest performance experiences” of his life.

“Since then I’ve been wanting to do it more and more, and just looking for opportunities or festivals or organizations that would be into a project like that, because it is kind of a lot of organizing for a piece of music that really isn’t that long,” he says. “This came up with Winnipeg and I’m really happy with how everyone’s… the radio stations are really cool and really keen.”

The concept was partially inspired by new music composer René Lussier and his use of combining elements of both French and English.

Shemie melded that bilingualism with his own idea of using two radios as a way of almost combining two worlds.

“Have you ever been in your car and you’re listening to the radio and you’re at the red light and someone comes up in their car and they’re listening to the same radio station, and you hear the same thing? It’s like that feeling,” Shemie says.

“Now wouldn’t that be cool if that guy in the car next to you was on a different radio station playing the same song, but at a different place in the song, so there’s kind of like this echo? That’s kind of where it started, and then I thought wouldn’t it be cool if they were actually synchronized? Two different voices but speaking to each other.”

The music itself is mostly instrumental and leans toward electronic in terms of production, and Shemie notes the piece has many subtle ties to Winnipeg.

“I sample a lot of stuff from community radio in Winnipeg. I tried not to make it super-obvious because I felt like I wanted to write a piece that could be played somewhere else without it necessarily being localized to one place… but a lot of the sampling, especially the voices; all the sampling of the voices is taken from some kind of source in Winnipeg,” he says.

Shemie is quick to note that the music itself is not really meant to be the focus of night, but rather the experience of listening to the composition through two radios at the same time.

“Because the medium of the radio and combining the two radios is so compelling in and of itself, the music, in a weird way, is less important than the medium, or at least equal to,” he says.

“I tried to keep that in mind while composing it, that I’m not trying to go too intellectual or too serious in the composition because I understand that it’s an experience more than it is a piece of music. It’s not a piece of music that I’d want to release for you to listen to at home, it’s all about being played in this allotted time and then it vanishes again, and that’s really what it’s all about.”

erin.lebar@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @NireRabel