- "Bad Transistor" was composed and recorded in the days after I participated in a workshop on the John Cage work Radio Music at the Western Front in Vancouver, on September 6 2012 (which was actually the day of Cage's 100th centenary), led by Christopher Williams and Robin Hayward. I found a Newtronic Titan PAP-1900 transistor radio in a jumble store in Gibson's, B.C., and discovered at the workshop that it appeared to have a shaky transistor in its circuit board, which seemed to make certain AM frequencies stutter and jolt in an interesting way. I built this audio poem by recording several five-minute improvisations on the radio, using only the two rheostats (volume and tuning) to alter the output. Most of what was on the AM band at that time was -- as someone pointed out at the workshop -- talk, so the piece started to have something to do with indecipherable snippets of human voice and flickers of noise. I took one improvisation I liked and copied it onto two stereo tracks; I cut and re-spliced the track at a non-symmetrical point (that is, not half-way along) to create a kind of looped counterpoint on the left and right channels. The bits of silence are part of the improvisation, when I turned the volume all the way down; they weren't added later. Over the next few days, I wrote a short poem, recorded it, and then treated it with an "everything is broken" patch in Audacity. I then looped it into the radio improvisation twice, once near the beginning, and once near the end. the whole piece is about 5 3/4 minutes long, just under the six-minute mark dictated by Cage's "Radio Music" score, although the audio poem here is, in the end, a very un-Cagean piece: too much intention.
