The Wire Choir

Look up in an East Van lane: telephone poles, layers of wires, trolley lines, transformers. Add every radio, every car stereo, every pair of headphones and the bass leaking under a warehouse door, and you have the Wire Choir. It is how Terminal City sings to itself.

When a neighbourhood goes quiet, the Choir leans on coincidence. Somebody's car at a red light is playing the exact song. A band is rehearsing through a wall you happen to be leaning on. A radio in an upstairs apartment, a window left open, a snatch of something from a loading bay at two in the morning. You still choose what you listen to. You really did. The timing was just a little too good.

It cannot reach everywhere. Inside Stanley Park the signal fades into the trees. And whatever people make out of what they heard, a track, a night out, a wall of paint, comes back into the wires and keeps the city from falling silent. No one hears the broadcast as an announcement.