Soundings (radio drama)

Soundings is a radio drama series produced from 1985 to 1989 in Ottawa by multimedia artist Jeff Green. Episodes were generally in the science fiction genre.

Overview

All the plays in the series were written, produced, directed and engineered by Green, with the exception of “Epiphanies” which was engineered by Charles Fairfield. All of the music in the series was composed and engineered by Fairfield, with the exception of songs in "Flash" and "She Dreams of Atlantis".

Seven of the eleven plays in the series are 45 minutes in length, which Green chose to allow listeners to record episodes with the prevalent cassette home recording technology of the time.^[1] The original pilot for the series, "Epiphanies", is the only one that is an hour in length. The remaining three plays "Psychotherapy", "Vigilante" and "Plague" are each 30 minutes in length, and were first broadcast as a mini-series of horror tales on CHEZ-FM called Weird Words.

Some distributed versions of “Soundings” also include a ten-minute play called “Bomb” that is not technically part of the series, but was recorded using binaural technology for a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation experimental radio program.

History

Green's first radio drama work was done while a volunteer at Carleton University's campus radio station CKCU-FM while it was still an AM carrier current and closed circuit station. In 1980 he applied for and received a Canada Council Explorations grant to produce a pilot for a series of radio drama works called “Epiphanies”. In 1982 he presented the pilot to Ottawa album-oriented rock station CHEZ-FM and they agreed to air a series of plays.

In 1989 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired several of the plays as part of their “Vanishing Point” drama series. In 1990 America's National Public Radio aired the series. Also in 1990, the play “Somebody Talking To You” was aired on London, England's LBC station, and referenced in Tim Crook's book “Radio Drama – Theory and Practice”.^[2] In 1991, several plays were aired on Australia Broadcasting Corporation's national network. Green's work is occasionally broadcast and streamed in the U.S. as part of the prominent audio theatre program, "Sound Affects: A Radio Playground," which is featured on KFAI as part of their "spoken word groove." The radio plays were featured on XM Satellite Radio's former Sonic Theater channel.

Awards

1988 — Best Radio Program of the Year, Ottawa (ACTRA) for "Xmas Is Coming To The District Of Drudge"
1989 — Best Radio Program of the Year, Ottawa (ACTRA) for "Plague"
1990 — Silver Medal (New York International Radio Festival) for the series as aired on NPR under the title "The Weird Worlds of Jeff Green"
Inductee, ASFSFA Hall of Fame for "Spaxter" (American Society for Science Fiction Audio)
Awarded a Mark Time Award for Best in Science Fiction Radio and Audio in the History of Recorded Sound^[3]

The plays

Spaxter (1986)

Spaxter is a cyberpunk comedy that stars Green as the title character, a sci-fi Raymond Chandler gumshoe fitted with a hi-tech head implant (“the meld”) conveying telepathic capabilities, who goes up against a super-villain who has styled himself as an Egyptian god, has purchased and refitted the Great Pyramid at Giza, and is using adapted meld technology to steal the creative essence from the world's great minds in order to fuel his ascendance to true deity status.

Cast

Jeff_Green: Spaxter
John Koensgen: Graft
Shelley Hartman: Louella
Rick Jones: Osiris
Catherine Anka: Mae Westar
John Tarswell: Newsbyte
Robert Bockstael: Ahkenaton