| Time |
Speaker |
Dialogue |
| 00:00:05 |
SpokenWeb Intro |
[Instrumental music begins] Oh, boy. Can you hear me? Don’t know how much projection to do here. |
| 00:00:18 |
Hannah McGregor |
What does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast. Stories about how literature sounds. |
| 00:00:35 |
Hannah McGregor |
My name is Hannah McGregor– |
| 00:00:36 |
Katherine McLeod |
–and my name is Katherine McLeod.
And each month we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history — created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. |
| 00:00:52 |
Katherine McLeod |
Now, close listeners to the SpokenWeb Podcast, you might recognize the subject of this episode — or really, the question of when was the subject of this episode mentioned in a past episode. Would be a good trivia question. |
| 00:01:07 |
Katherine McLeod |
Back in two episodes devoted to Mavis Gallant, producers Kate Moffatt, Candice Sharon, and Michelle Levy speculated on who the audio engineer was who pressed record at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in 1984 for Gallant’s reading. And their article about that recording — check the show notes — goes on to note that this recording was made by someone who clearly knew what they were doing. They came to the conclusion that it must have been Curtis Vanel. Who was Curtis Vanel?
Well, in this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, producer Garin Falman reflects on the life of Curtis Vanel. Vanel was an audio engineer at SFU and a fixture of Vancouver’s music scene in his own right. |
| 00:01:58 |
Katherine McLeod |
Featuring archival recordings of Vanel as well as an interview with SFU alumna Dr. Deanna Fong, this episode uncovers fascinating stories about Vanel and his archives.
The episode also becomes a meditation on what drives us to collect, and on the relationship between an archive and those who build it.
Here is Episode 8 of Season 6 of the SpokenWeb Podcast: Recording Without a Trace — The Forgotten Legacy of Curtis Vanel. [Theme music fades in] |
| 00:02:45 |
Garin Falman |
[Sound of record player arm clicking into place]
In 1964, a consortium of American corporations in leading industries came together and invented the eight-track audio tape format. |
| 00:02:55 |
Garin Falman |
The eight-track was the first popular format that found its way into people’s cars, and the booming American car industry in the 1960s meant that by 1967, Ford offered eight-track players in every model they had.
[Fast-forwarding record sound]
By 1978, the year that eight-track popularity peaked, loud automobiles and even louder music had already become a stereotype. |
| 00:03:21 |
Garin Falman |
Perhaps it was this unstable concoction of volume and speed that brought car and house together that spring. [Sound of car accelerating, followed by loud crash] |
| 00:03:31 |
Garin Falman |
When a vehicle careened into the Vancouver home of Kurtis Vanel, leaving a large hole in the side of his house, Vanel’s possessions were in the precarious situation of being exposed to burglars and opportunists. |
| 00:03:48 |
Garin Falman |
His cats could have easily run away, but there was only one thing on Vanel’s mind — and it may have been the same thing on the mind of the wheelman who punctured through Vanel’s sense of domestic security — music. |
| 00:04:03 |
Garin Falman |
In an interview later that year, Vanel said that he wasn’t prepared to follow the advice of his insurance company and go stay in a motel, nor was he willing to go to work because he didn’t want to leave his music equipment unattended. |
| 00:04:20 |
Garin Falman |
Granted, Vanel’s music equipment was a far cry from the eight-track that would have likely been found inside the cabin of the car that ended up crashing through his walls. |
| 00:04:31 |
Garin Falman |
By the time of the accident, Vanel had been a recording engineer for nearly two decades, both as a freelancer and with long stints at UBC and SFU. Vanel was a true audiophile, and he left an indelible mark on Vancouver’s cultural archive, producing over 1,200 recordings total. |
| 00:04:53 |
Garin Falman |
These included popular music like The Poppy Family’s hit “Where Evil Grows” and “Billy,” which was the first million-seller recorded in Vancouver. He was also involved with Bill Henderson’s band The Collectors, which would go on to become Chilliwack in 1969. On top of his popular music recordings, Vanel was responsible for recording hundreds of academic talks, arts performances, and live shows. But despite having contributed so much, the archive scarcely remembers him. |
| 00:05:22 |
Garin Falman |
On May 6th, 2017, Vanel died in his home, surrounded by piles of audio tapes, newspapers, and other material collections. The Vancouver Sun article announcing his death began by saying, “You’ve probably never heard of Curtis Vanel,” and they’re probably right. |
| 00:05:45 |
Garin Falman |
But why has the archive so easily forgotten one of its most reliable contributors? And why do those who record so often leave behind no trace of a record themselves? [Sound of faint record crackle in background] |
| 00:06:02 |
Garin Falman |
The Vancouver Sun report on Vanel’s death describes him as a hoarder, with a house jammed with stuff. A friend of Vanel’s described newspapers stacked up to the ceiling, piles of rare magazines, and boxes of reel-to-reel tapes — much of which had never been heard by anyone but Vanel. |
| 00:06:21 |
Garin Falman |
The vivid descriptions of his domestic clutter made me think of the historical fascination the media has had with perceived hoarders. I couldn’t help but compare the report to the news stories about the death of the Collyer brothers — two affluent Harlemites who died in 1947, surrounded by similar material collections. |
| 00:06:43 |
Garin Falman |
Stories at the time described their house as junk-packed, and sensationally described towers of unusual materials, an incredibly dirty mass of debris, and old newspapers. |
| 00:06:56 |
Garin Falman |
When the Collyer brothers passed, large crowds gathered and tried to take whatever the police were removing. Similarly, some of Vanel’s materials were snatched up by others. The Vancouver Sun writes that a homeless man claims he salvaged some boxes of books and magazines from the dumpster. But this sensational characterization of the “hoarder,” whose home contained an assortment of both treasure and trash — and who is written as if he suffocated under it in an act of tragic irony — reinstates a legacy of misunderstanding about the unstable relationship between hoarding — or rather, collecting — as a mental illness, and the more acceptable acts of collecting as archiving. |
| 00:07:44 |
Garin Falman |
There is a sense in the Vancouver Sun article that Vanel’s collections were an act of hoarding because they were not publicly accessible, and it was likely impossible for Vanel himself to have appreciated them all. |
| 00:07:59 |
Garin Falman |
But this isn’t at all who Vanel was. Far from a distant inheritor of what used to be known as Collyer Brothers Syndrome, Vanel was no recluse. After his retirement, he kept up connections with old friends and was still eager to make new ones. Starting around 2010, during her PhD at Simon Fraser University, Dr. Deanna Fong was introduced to Vanel through her research into the relevance of sound recording to different facets of contemporary poetry. |
| 00:08:31 |
Garin Falman |
She worked predominantly with the audio archive of poet-painter Roy Kiyooka, but found that in trying to understand the social context of Kiyooka’s recordings, she needed to talk to someone who knew them well. This led her to Vanel. |
| 00:08:45 |
Garin Falman |
Dr. Fong would regularly hang out with Vanel while wandering around Burnaby Mall. |
| 00:08:54 |
Deanna Fong |
We’d just walk around and, like, sit in the food court and then just, like, trundle around Burnaby Mall talking about tapes — like, sitting on a bench and then walking around more and more. We walked around the mall, and each time he would bring me, you know, a little box full of treasures that he thought I might be interested in. |
| 00:09:13 |
Garin Falman |
The portrait Dr. Fong paints is of someone social and interested in sharing material items with his community. |
| 00:09:21 |
Deanna Fong |
One thing that really stands out in my mind as something that he gave to me was — there’s a cartoon that somebody drew of him that I think maybe appeared in The Georgia Straight, where he’s, like, dressed as a knight. But he’s, like, a recording knight, because instead of a lance, he’s got, like, a boom mic — which I thought was really cool. |
| 00:09:43 |
Garin Falman |
Of course, none of this is to say that Vanel wasn’t a bit eccentric. A story that he liked to tell was that he lived on nothing but baked beans for ten years in order to afford a Crown home tape recorder. |
| Time |
Speaker |
Dialogue |
| 00:09:55 |
Garin Falman |
When asked how many times a week he actually ate baked beans, Vanel replied: |
| 00:10:02 |
[Audio Recording] Kurtis Vanel |
[Cuts to audio recording] Let’s just say it’s very musical. |
| 00:10:04 |
Garin Falman |
Then, of course, his own name is a bit of a complicated matter. Much of what you might find in the archives related to Curtis Vanel won’t be under that name. He was born Douglas Geisman on May 6th, 1936, but at some point, he changed his name to Curtis Vanel for esoteric reasons relating to numerology. |
| 00:10:29 |
Garin Falman |
His professional name for his day job at SFU remained Doug Geisman, but freelance work increasingly began to credit him as Curtis Vanel. It’s ironic that for someone who was so obsessed with cataloguing and collecting, he made it incredibly difficult for archivists to track down his own body of work. |
| 00:10:50 |
Garin Falman |
In an interview from 1978 with SFU’s then–Information Officer Dennis Roberts, Vanel explained that his passion for collecting went well beyond music. |
| 00:11:01 |
[Audio Recording] Kurtis Vanel |
[Unclear audio]
My interests are very broad. I’m interested in, uh… antique cultural paintings, Pictins, typing books, and almost clinical education centre—like… like Nancy books. I like limited editions, but I also like reading any kind of technical… technical books, scientific books, historical books, and many other things. |
| 00:11:32 |
Garin Falman |
However, he emphasized that he saw himself as a creator as much as a collector — having recorded a vast body of music, but also having made his own ivory carvings, razors out of spare parts, tone oscillators, and many other artistic creations. Music recording was his first and most passionate obsession, something he began experimenting with in 1959. |
| 00:11:58 |
[Audio Recording] Kurtis Vanel |
Singers who were performing at a place on Broadway called The Question Mark, and I started going down to The Question Mark and recording whoever was there. And most people were on the—too pleased to be recorded. They, I think, felt flattered by the interest. And so, I collected a rather large quantity of tapes of local performers. So I went there almost every week and recorded everything that was going on. So every week I came home with three hours more tape. |
| 00:12:24 |
Garin Falman |
He didn’t record them for any particular reason. |
| 00:12:28 |
[Audio Recording] Kurtis Vanel |
I enjoyed the music. That’s why — that’s why I do recording: because I enjoy it. |
| 00:12:33 |
Garin Falman |
This led to bands and musicians asking him to produce more professional sessions with them, and eventually he found himself regularly recording local music. His first professional recording was a record of British ballads by Paul Gwynn Phillips for the Folkways label in 1961. |
| 00:12:52 |
Garin Falman |
Since then, Vanel worked with bands such as The Collectors — who later became the band Chilliwack — The Poppy Family, Terry Black, and Mock Duck. He also helped record an album of player piano music for Doyle H. Lane, who used to operate a player piano museum at Dunbar and Venables. |
| 00:13:13 |
Garin Falman |
Vanel claimed that he wasn’t much of a musician himself, but he was quite sought after as a recording engineer. His early live recordings from the ’60s got him involved with Vancouver’s underground poetry and art scene, and eventually connected him with Bill Bissett and his band The Mandan Massacre, who he recorded for the compilation Past Eroticism, credited as Douglas Geisman and featuring Jerry Walker on piano. Here’s a clip from the track “Valley Dancers.” |
| 00:13:44 |
Audio clip from the track “Valley Dancers” |
[Ambient experimental poetry soundscape] Rest in the deeper places. Between the legs, under the head, inside the rock colours, the morning sparrow song. Our fingers become our palms, crossing the summons exchanged, passed on to bright day. |
| 00:14:24 |
Garin Falman |
Simon Hutton, an archivist for Bill Bissett at York University, said that Bissett met Doug Geisman circa the summer or fall of 1965. He would visit Doug every couple of weeks, and Doug would set up microphones and record whatever new material Bill had come up with since the previous meeting or recording. |
| 00:14:42 |
Garin Falman |
Doug lived close to the campus, and Bill seemed to recall that these recordings may have happened just before Doug began working closely with the university. |
| 00:14:50 |
Garin Falman |
The university that Bissett refers to is SFU, where Vanel began working in 1967 — although in ’65, he would have been at the University of British Columbia, where he started out as a tape cleaner. He worked at UBC while building up his reputation as a freelance audio engineer for local artists, always keeping himself rooted in the community around him. |
| 00:15:17 |
Garin Falman |
And he does not cite himself as the keeper of a lot of these records and the keeper of a lot of these community activities. The relationship between community and collection seems to have been central to how Vanel saw his role, and Dr. Fong has been particularly interested in this relationship. She notes that part of the difficulty in finding figures like Vanel in the archives they helped create is the tendency for these figures to view themselves as outside the archive. |
| 00:15:46 |
Deanna Fong |
Well, it’s like that from set theory — that, like, the set cannot contain itself, right? So the archives cannot… the archive cannot contain the archivist. They have to somehow be, like, outside of it. And in that sense, it’s not necessarily represented within it, except through these traces of, like, you know, handwriting or, you know, sometimes introductory remarks. Dr. Fong notes that at SFU, almost all of the audio tapes from Vanel’s tenure were recorded by him, but his involvement is not always obvious. And we know this because if you look — there are many of them reported on reel-to-reel in his handwriting, then digitized — transferred to tape — also in his handwriting, and then of course later brought into the digital world. But this is something I’m really fascinated by — it’s just, like, looking at people’s handwriting on the audio sets and that sort of thing, and just being able to tell something about an audio recording by its signature. So Curtis’s signature is all over that collection. |
| 00:16:55 |
Garin Falman |
Whether Vanel saw himself as an archivist is hard to tell, but his collections were a deliberate creation. |
| 00:17:01 |
Deanna Fong |
Like, the collection was so large that he knew that something needed to be done with it. And I think it might have been a source of great trepidation that it existed. And I think that’s just, like, some of the great worry of those of us who produce art and literature and music and that sort of thing — it leaves a pretty big material trail at a certain point, and it’s hard to know what to do with it. And I think, like, in a way, it requires having a pretty large network of care surrounding you to ensure that those materials are going to find a home — and would be treated with the kind of care that their producers always hoped for. |
| 00:17:42 |
Garin Falman |
Whatever anxieties Vanel had about his collection, I think anyone working in archiving or collecting can certainly understand the existential weight of being unable to go through it all. I know it well. |
| 00:17:56 |
Garin Falman |
I’ve spent my whole life collecting one thing or another, and I find there always comes a point in any collection where it becomes too big for one person to fully appreciate. |
| 00:18:09 |
Garin Falman |
That moment usually comes with some anxiety — at least for me. Thoughts of being discovered like the Collyer brothers, as a corpse surrounded by old television sets, unused video game consoles, and barely opened books as investigators shake their heads at another classic case of hoarding — have occupied my mind on many occasions. Like Vanel, I try to justify my obsession with collecting by turning it toward more acceptable ends. |
| 00:18:40 |
Garin Falman |
SpokenWeb is collecting as an act of archiving. My own SFU master’s project on the preservation of the early Internet looks at collecting as an act of social empowerment. My home collection of old technology is collection as an act of preservation — or so I tell myself. In truth, there is always an element of absurdity in the act of collecting, no matter the framework. |
| 00:19:09 |
Garin Falman |
I will never be able to appreciate the entirety of my collections, but I find comfort in the fact that Vanel recognized this too. [Brief ambient noise or tape hiss] |
| 00:19:21 |
Garin Falman |
After his passing, much of the material found in Vanel’s home was discarded. |
| 00:19:28 |
Deanna Fong |
From what I know — from what I gather — I think a lot of it was thrown away. |
| 00:19:32 |
Garin Falman |
It’s hard to know how Vanel would have felt about this. Despite his conversations with Dr. Fong being ostensibly for her research, they never recorded any of their conversations. |
| 00:19:44 |
Garin Falman |
What is left from their meetings is the material collection of gifts that Vanel passed on to her — and her memories. |
| 00:19:53 |
Deanna Fong |
He wrote me a list that said — I don’t think he wrote it for me, but I think he had written it down and passed it along to me — “Things that I would like to do every day and the amount of time that I would like to devote to doing them.”
And there were things like playing music, reading books, conversations with friends… I can’t remember what else was on the list, but it was just a very sort of ideal schedule, I guess. Like the most ideal schedule as an artist and a recordist and community figure. I’m pretty sure listening to tapes was also on there — for many, many hours a day. Like, I’m pretty sure it added up to more than 24 hours a day. |
| 00:20:37 |
Garin Falman |
When I heard this, I couldn’t help but laugh. I never met Vanel, but I think in this way at least, we would have understood one another. Vanel’s list acknowledges the impossibility of the collector to fully comprehend their own collection — but maybe it also acknowledges how unsatisfying that would be.
If Vanel somehow filled his days by listening to tapes, he would never be able to create them. |
| 00:21:03 |
Garin Falman |
If we view Vanel — like the Collyer brothers from 70 years earlier — as a hoarder who died surrounded by unread books and unlistened-to tapes, the result of an unsound mind that compulsively collects, then what we find is indeed a tragedy.
But I think Vanel would agree that the real tragedy would have been if he had managed to listen to every tape and read every book — and instead died feeling that there was nothing else left to catalogue, nothing else left worth listening to. Collections are forever incomplete. |
| 00:21:41 |
Garin Falman |
But as we do our best to add the legacies of people like Curtis Vanel to the archive, they do get a little bit better. [Sound of record player clicking off] |
| 00:22:04 |
Katherine McLeod |
You’ve been listening to The SpokenWeb Podcast — a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. This month’s episode was produced by Garin Falman. |
| 00:22:24 |
Katherine McLeod |
The SpokenWeb Podcast team includes supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer TJ McPherson, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co-hosts Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod.
To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. |
| 00:22:47 |
Katherine McLeod |
If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on social media. Plus, check social media for info about our listening parties and more.
For now, thanks for listening. |
