A 20-seat luxury bus sweeps through the glowing orange streetlights of downtown Ottawa, past Parliament Hill and over the river onto the deserted winding roads of the Gatineau Hills.
Passengers are enveloped by Tim Hecker’s haunting composition of recorded sounds and hypnotic loops of everyday Ottawa sounds collected by Marla Hlady.
This is the aural driving experience of the Nite Ride.
The hour-long night tours of Ottawa-Gatineau were funded by the Canada Council of Arts and the City of Ottawa, and organized by Artengine, a non-profit organization that develops new approaches to electronic art.
The inspiration for the sound art project came from Ryan Stec, Artengine’s artistic director.
“It was serendipitous,” says Stec. “I was driving back from my parents’ cottage in northern Ontario, listening to Tim Hecker and coming over a hill at 4:30 in the morning and the light from the trees and town in the distance . . . I just thought it would be amazing to get . . . a body of work so that everyone could have one of those random moments where the music and the drive all come together.”
Hlady and Hecker created very different soundscapes on different routes through the city that moved from harmonious and peaceful to discordant and unsettling. Both make a point of leaving the urban core and plunging into the darkness of the Gatineau hills.
“There is a history of combining audio and video art with moving vehicles, but never anything quite like this,” says Stec.
Hecker’s piece is well suited to the bleak silhouettes of the trees against the rainy autumn nights, with its combination of radio static, industrial noise, guitar riffs and melodic notes.
Hlady’s version of the ride is more interactive. She combines eight different short loops of sounds she collected from around Ottawa over three days. She hung microphones out the back window of her car and also used the “social space of the bus."
Eight large, square, wooden boxes or “pseudo-instruments,” each playing a different sound loop are passed around the bus, the sounds turning on or off, louder or softer as they are moved, held or swung about.
In the final version, the sound of tires going over a bridge on a rainy day provides the baseline for a snatch of bird song, melodies from the car stereo, or the sound of wind rushing past the windows.
“It becomes melodic and mesmerizing,” says Hlady.
Hlady says the project gave her a chance to really see the city beyond the tourist attractions.
“I spent a lot of time driving around Ottawa getting lost. I essentially listened to Ottawa for three whole days,” she says. “ I feel I got to see [its] underbelly a bit.”
The bus tours, which ran the last week of October, are just the beginning. Artengine plans to release a DVD next spring and is making Hecker and Hlady’s compositions available for download on their website along with the maps of the routes so that anyone can go on a Nite Ride.