Danger in Paradise 

(1987 – 1994)

Related projects: Body Map, Foutre en l’air, Gridpubliclock, HeadHole
Identification, Language is the Flower.

Danger in Paradise aired weekly on CKUT 90.3 FM, Montréal, Wednesdays 10:00 to midnight.

A version of the following summary was published in the Selected Survey of Radio Art in Canada 1967-1992. Edited and compiled by Dan Lander as part of the Radio Rethink project.

This radio program began on November 17, 1987. It was neither spoken word nor music. Through its seven years, techniques and approaches continually changed, both in theory and practice.

Danger in Paradise included live interventions by Bruire (Michel F. Côté and Martin Tétreault), Caboose of Fear, Claude Lamothe, les Pois z’ont Rouges, Yximalloo, Festival of the Swamps, Lisle Ellis/John Heward/Lloyd Garber, Sue Ann Harkey and Sylvain Côté, and Roughage.

In 1990 several special live to air programs were devised utilizing the telephones. Invitations to participate were sent out in the form of post cards and one appeared in the Montréal Mirror classified section. This program, aired in November of 1990, was entitled Describe Yourself and was concerned with defining the radiophonic through descriptions that callers gave of themselves. Counting Meaning was a two-hour program for numbers only and included an (ac)count of Erik Satie’s Vexations. Deliberate Inhaling was a program scored for tones, test records, elastics, awkward breathes, whistles, and you.

In 1991 several special live to air programs were devised utilizing the telephones. They were Answer me (November) which constructed a “normal” mode of conversation via telephone answering machine recordings; What is it? (September), where the caller’s descriptions of objects (can I touch it?) proved that seeing did not necessarily imply an ability to name it; Dangerous Spelling (February), a work simultaneously (mis)spelling words and casting spells; and Body Map, with Julia Loktev, in which a reclining body was transposed onto a map of Montréal. People phoned in to discover on which part of the body they resided, setting up a starting point for the unexpected. They were asked to make a noise with it, how they moved around the body, if they had any out-of-body experiences …

REVIEW
Doug Harkness,VOX July 1991 (Calgary)
– excerpt from the article “Sound Art Culture in Canada”:
“Christof Migone, host of the great radio-collage show Danger in Paradise on CKUT-FM, is further evidence that Montréal has hip experimental music to burn. Migone’s tape compilation/compositions show that he’s pretty handy with the tape slicer, has a keen ear for the ironic sound-bite, and that probably nobody in Canada is more hooked into the cassette network.”