Dan Lander

Zoo collects four works for radio and loudspeaker that Dan Lander made between 1988 and 1992, presented in chronological order. Lander calls what he does writing in sound rather than music: recordings gathered from real situations, edited with attention to how meaning travels through sound and listening. The first three were built in his home studio with a razor blade and analog 1/4" tape.

Talking to a Loudspeaker (1988-90), commissioned by New American Radio and premiered on NPR in two parts, takes radio apart in ten sections: Ontario legislators addressing a “Mister Speaker” who never answers, weather reports reduced to an incantation of numbers, the news split into left and right channels, a call-in show where no listener gets through, and dead air. The closing Here Comes Everybody is by Gregory Whitehead, performed by telephone with Lander and a live audience on Radio Free Banff in 1989. Destroy: Information Only (1991) takes its title from a stamp of the Workers’ Compensation Board: Lander visited friends and family who knew him at the time of his 1976 back surgery, and their memories, made over coffee, popcorn and a car ride, rarely match his own. Failed Suicide comes from an evening when six people met at his apartment, each with a microphone and tape recorder. City Zoo / Zoo City (1992), recorded at the Metro Toronto Zoo and edited digitally at The Banff Centre, sets animal sounds against machines, a promotional video and shoppers in the gift store.

Born in Oshawa, Ontario, in 1953, Lander studied performance, video and sound at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. He was one of the editors of the anthology Sound by Artists (1990) and produced the radio art programme The Problem with Language on CKLN Toronto from 1987 to 1991. The booklet essay is by Christof Migone.

CD in jewel case, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 9526, 1995.