Both as a contribution to this festival and within the wider parameters of my current project, the piece extends the sounds of a remote place to listeners in the heart of an urban sphere across the other side of the world, taking as part-provocation R. Murray Schafer and Bruce Davis's concept for a 'wilderness radio' : “the plan was to put microphones in remote locations uninhabited by humans and to broadcast whatever might be happening out there; the sounds of wind and rain, the cries of birds and animals – all the uneventful events of the natural soundscape transmitted without editing into the hearts of the cities. It seemed to us that since man has been pumping his affairs into the natural soundscape, a little natural wisdom might be a useful antidote”. (R Murray Schafer, 'Radical Radio' in 'Sound by Artists', ed. D. Lander & M. Lexier, 1990)
(It should of course be pointed out that Kapiti is in fact inhabited, albeit sparsely, as many such places are).
