*So how did this idea come to life? How did you take a concept as enormous as the impact of electricity on music and then break it down into eight parts?
*The genesis of the project was that Paolo and I were frustrated with the way music is programmed at CBC. While the bulk of the music heard on Radio 2 is classically based, even the jazz and popular music shows on Radio 1 and Radio 2 tend to be quite precious and things tend to be ghetto-ized on the schedule. In particular, we were frustrated that the vast richness of electronic music - which has a fantastically energetic scene in Toronto and elsewhere in Canada - was entirely ignored. But we also just thought that the way WE listened to music - in one great eclectic shuffle that reflects more than just some CD-shop tribalism - was one that should be embraced by the CBC. So we set about to create a show that would slip electronic music into the CBC listener diet in a way that even cranky listeners wouldn't be able to resist. What if we presented electronic music not as a genre unto itself but as part of a continuum of various traditions in music for the past 100 years or so? Naturally, that put Pete Namlook up next to Stravinsky and Brian Eno adjacent to Satie, with John Cage watching and giggling over the whole mess.
*We did a couple of little pilot disc shows here at my place and began to see that if we were going to talk about THIS moment in musical history, we'd have to talk about THAT moment as well. When we began to ask ourselves - well, really, what is electronic music anyway – we realized that rather than being a function of instruments or genres, it was a function of tendencies born before the arrival of electricity that came to fruition with the arrival of that over-arching technology. So, things like being louder, being more ubiquitous, being part of the general sonic landscape, being repeatable, etc., were all things that people had tried to accomplish before the Columbian Exposition that simply exploded after electricity became a fact of life.
**You asked every person you interviewed the same question: "What is the biggest impact of electricity on music?" In addition to what we're featuring on our site, what are some of the more memorable answers? And how would you answer this question yourself?***
**Before we even started the series - in fact, right where I left off in the last paragraph - once Paolo and I realized that it was electricity that informed all of these areas of development in the world of music, from recording to composing to distribution, we came up with a version of that question and did a little test at the bars in my neighbourhood in Toronto. We walked into a bunch of them with our Minidisc and mic and asked musicians and barflies alike, "What is the relationship between electricity and music." We got one or two decent answers but mostly we encountered a kind of incomprehension. One guy even said that there wasn't one. He said this while musicians were setting up mics and amps in the corner and while the CD player spun tunes.***
**At that point, we realized that for many people, the relationship is so transparent that they can believe that most of the music they hear isn't in some way mediated by electricity. That made us think about all the different ways we wanted to explore how it WAS mediated - which is where the eight episodes were born. It also made us modify the question to assume the relationship and get people to think from that starting point. Of all the answers to that question, I think my favourite two to compare were that original barfly who said there was no relationship and Alpha Blondy - the reggae star from Cote d'Ivoire - who simply said something like "It was a revolution".***
**As for my own answer: basically, what I said at the end of the last episode - that the transmission of sound through space and into the part of our brain that registers music is an electrical process mediated through our nervous system. All music is electric, in that sense. McLuhan used to talk about our technology as an externalization of our own bio-destiny and i think this is a perfect example.***
**Describe how you integrated the content of the programs (thoughts, facts, and opinions about the impact of electricity on music) into the style and tone in which they were produced, as this seems to be at the core of the series' manifestation. Can you give a few specific examples?***
**Well, for one thing, we were really trying to avoid the standard radio-doc form. We felt that would simply add to the ghetto-ization problem we were seeking to address in the first place. We also had no intention of claiming to be exhaustive or comprehensive or academic. We wanted to present the story of this relationship between electricity and music with the kind of visceral enthusiasm we felt ourselves for each of the various epochs we were including. We had some ideas that we wanted to take a more "collage" kind of approach.***
**That's where Chris Brookes really came in. He was a bit legendary already (enough so that someone had pointed out his house to me a year earlier on a trip to St. John's, Newfoundland) and had a kind of "outsider" relationship with the CBC. Chris Boyce, the head of programme development at CBC, understood what we were going for (and by this time, Paolo had really taken over the grunt-work of thinking about the show) and figured Chris Brookes was the right kind of person to help us realize the rather sketchy vision we had. We had many long, philosophical, abstract, transcontinental conference calls (by this time Paolo had moved to Vancouver) in which things began to take shape and Chris had lots of experience with audio art and maverick radio-making that was inspiring for us. Then, Chris Boyce sent Paolo and me to St. John's for four days and all that stuff that had been so abstract for us over the phone became really concrete. Everything gelled. It was such a creative time. We were thinking about all of the textures each subsequent technology brought to music - all of the incremental revolutions both creative and industrial - and then just playing with how those textures manifested and morphed over time. We realized that the best way to tell the story of the impact of electricity on music was by creating a sonic world where people could sort of get their hands (ears?) dirty with all of the implications of each technology.***
**For example, the episode about magnetic tape emphasized the revolution of repeatability and malleability. The fact of being able to create a sound and immediately hear it repeated or be able to slow it down, speed it up, reverse it, etc., radically altered the possibilities open to musicians, composers, and producers. It changed the way people created and consumed music. It created a new language of sound. So in that episode we used those devices and textures throughout - not just as illustrations of something just discussed but as part of the palette of sounds in the show.***
**Likewise, episode five - the ambient episode - talked about Satie's idea of furniture music, music that would exist to fill in the inevitable gaps in normal social interaction. To illustrate really how profound an idea that was, Chris Brookes created this extraordinary segment where he compiled the various ums, ahs, and other pause-fillers in the speech of our interview subjects and made a little looped composition out of them mixed with Satie's "Trois Gymnopedies" and Eno's "Music for Airports 1/1." While the three of us were together at Chris' house in St. John's we spent a lot of time discussing how long to hold the silence before that little motif kicked in. It was thrilling to think "how long do we dare let dead air exist in the show before the folks in Master Control start to freak out and check the machines and deploy the standby audio signal?" We pushed that and pushed it to what we all thought was an excitingly long time so you really felt that "uncomfortable silence." Even the opening to every show employed these textures. Voicemail has become so ubiquitous and yet it really is invisible as a technology. Nonetheless, it shapes so many of our social interactions. So we thought we'd foreground it in the mix by having me deliver my introductions to each episode as a voicemail that gradually morphs into a regular radio voice. It kind of reveals the nature of the form of speech dictated by the technology.***
**The Wire's website mentions that each episode was remixed by a DJ or remix producer. Is this material then produced back into the episodes or does it stand alone? (is there any way to hear the remixes?)***
**This was a concept that Paolo and I discussed long before The Wire was The Wire, back when we just wanted to do a show that put electronic music in a broader context. As it turned out, the kind of audio content generated by The Wire made for a much more interesting challenge for the remixers. They had music, interviews, scripted material, and sound FX to choose from. Each remix shows up at the end of its corresponding episode, functioning as a kind of curated audio recap of each show. For rights reasons we couldn't make them available individually but they are there as part of each show. The funny thing is, I was speaking at a conference at McMaster University in Hamilton and one of the students told me during the Q&A that the remixes were usually floating around the Web about an hour after each broadcast. We considered that the ultimate endorsement.***
**How did you divide the work between yourself, Chris, and Paolo? Can you talk about the collaboration process?***
**The original conception was mine and Paolo's that was borne out of our mutual concerns, enthusiasms and dissatisfactions. The early conference calls with Chris provided shape, direction, and inspiration. We all had suggestions about segments, music, and potential interview subjects. From that point, Paolo really drove the process of organizing the interview schedule and liaising with CBC. Once we had the raw material, we all had a listen to it and talked about ways we could use it. A few set-piece ideas emerged that Paolo and Chris worked on solo at either end of the country. But, like I mentioned, things really gelled when we all got together in St. John's. Based on the work Paolo and Chris had already done and the conversations we'd already had, we settled on a kind of architecture for each show and I wrote scripts around those structures with occasional editorial input from Paolo and Chris.***
**You should have seen us - it was hilarious. We all had our PowerBooks and iBooks set up in different parts of the second floor of Chris' house within spitting distance of each other but we were so excited that we had wirelessly networked our drives. Nerd-o-rama. From that point, the whole process was this beautiful little production factory - writing, recording, editing, eating, drinking, Paolo and I scrolling through our iPods for "eureka" tracks to use in a particular segment. I've never felt so fully collaborative in a production setting - it really was magic. The only thing that remained was getting the raw files to the remixers and doing the final packaging on the episodes once the remixes came back - which Paolo handled like some amazing machine, all on a G3 iBook!***
**As a musician yourself, working on the series must have been an especially personal experience. Is there a particular episode that you favor, and why?***
**As a music FAN, one extraordinary moment was interviewing Les Paul in a double-ender between Mawa, NJ, and Toronto. He was telling me the story of when he was first introduced to the tape machine. He says: "So Jowi, Bing Crosby comes over and goes to the trunk of his car -- and I'm figuring he's got a big hunk of cheese in there but in fact it's the first tape recorder," and all I can think is "Oh my god, LES PAUL just used BING CROSBY's name and MY name in the same sentence!"***
**As a musician, there are two standout moments for me: Paolo did this brilliant mix for the opening sequence of episode six using New Order's "Blue Monday" and Pink Floyd's "Welcome to the Machine" punctuated by Misstress Barbara talking right on beat to end the phrase "... and-never-letting-them-go!" I listened to it over and over - giggling insanely every time. The other is the aforementioned construction that Chris did for the ambient episode with the ums and ahs and the Satie and Eno. It is so thoroughly satisfying as a musical composition in its own right and I think really epitomized what it was we were trying to do with the series.***
Actually, we're all musicians of one sort or another. I had this electro-acoustic duo called Catastrophe Theory, Paolo does a little Ableton Live-ing but he's also a composer and player for a taiko drum ensemble, and Chris was part of the recent Guinness World Record accordion gathering in St. John's. I really think the musician parts of each of our brains played a big part in the construction, sound, and feel of The Wire.