Premption Notice: 10th Annual Wetland Project Broadcast
Red-legged Frog Rana aurora (Peter Pearsall/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service - CC BY-NC 2.0)
To celebrate Earth Day 2026, CHLY 101.7FM is once again participating in the annual Wetland Project, broadcasting a majority of the “slow radio” event from midnight to midnight Wednesday April 22nd. Created by Brady Marks and Mark Timmings, this year marks the project’s 10th anniversary.
Listeners will be connected with the circadian rhythm of the ṮEḴTEḴSEN marsh on Saturna Island, and the sounds of birds, frogs, insects and airplanes will take over the majority of our airwaves.
The following programs will not be preempted:
6:00AM: BBC Newshour
8:30AM: Midcoast Morning
9:00AM: Democracy Now
12:00PM: BBC Newshour
Learn more about the project below
Brady Marks is a digital media artist whose fascination with sound and concern for our relationship with technology has led her to explore media art and generative soundscape composition. As a graduate of the Interactive Arts program at Simon Fraser University, she was exposed to the World Soundscape Project, Acoustic Ecology and a communication-based framework for sound art. In 2005, she joined the Soundscape Collective at Vancouver Co-operative Radio. In the summer of 2014, Marks developed her interest in slow media embarking on a slow TV-style internet broadcast in collaboration with fellow artist Danielle Gotell.
In 2013, multidisciplinary artist Mark Timmings began to focus his attention on the wetland beside his home on Saturna Island, British Columbia. The initial impetus for the Wetland Project was to heighten his awareness of this environment. It occurred to him that the marsh was a metaphor for the primordial soup constituting the origins of life. He made connections between the activities and vocalizations of the wetland creatures and of his own.
In 2015, Brady Marks and Mark Timmings joined forces to collaborate on the Wetland Project. They realized that the rich soundscape emanating from the marsh is the original form of “background listening.” Soundscapes have the power to “key” our daily routine. Radio, television and internet streams now “bracket the day” with segmented media cycles. They have replaced the natural acoustic environments that once connected us to nature. At a time of growing environmental degradation and estrangement from nature, Marks and Timmings determined that the experience of listening to the wetland soundscape needed to be shared, now more than ever, in the form of an intervention upon the mass medias of radio and internet.
Commenting on the Wetland Project, environmental activist David Suzuki reminds us that, “In cities, we are increasingly isolated from the natural world on which we, as animals, remain utterly dependent for our health and wellbeing. Listening to nature is a necessary part of acknowledging the world around us.”
In Earth Week 2016, recording engineer Eric Lamontagne travelled to Saturna Island to help Marks and Timmings capture the sounds of the wetland. Equipment to make a field recording was set up on a fallen tree at the centre of the marsh. They collected thirty-two continuous hours of data. A twenty-four-hour segment of the recording was selected and processed into a sound loop for broadcast.
The Wetland broadcast premiered on Earth Day 2017 when Vancouver Co-operative Radio dedicated twenty-seven continuous hours of airtime to the soundscape of the Saturna Island marsh recorded in the previous year. It became the longest continuous radio transmission in Canadian history. Co-op Radio listeners embraced the ambient format which layered their experience of time with the circadian rhythm of the wetland wilderness. The broadcast went global for over a thousand more online listeners. The soundscape was superimposed on vernacular spaces—city buses, hair salons and pubs. Listener feedback was unanimous, positive and enthusiastic.
Enjoy the break!