The Montreal sound artist on punk beginnings, field recordings and his second Constellation album

Transmission 423: Interview with Steve Bates

Steve Bates is a Montreal-based sound artist, musician and curator whose recordings move between noise, ambient and field recording, built from tape, analogue electronics and improvised guitar and synth work. He came up through the punk and hardcore scenes of the Canadian Prairies in the 1980s and 90s, running the label Sister Records and hosting the radio show The Dim Coast on CKUW in Winnipeg before relocating to Montreal to work as sound technician and coordinator at Hexagram, Concordia University’s media arts research institute. There he built recording and mixing studios used by artists including Burkhard Stangl, Toshimaru Nakamura and David Sylvian, an experience that pushed him toward his own improvising practice.

Title: An Infinite Antenna
Artist: Steve Bates
Release Date: 2026-09-25
Genres: Ambient, Experimental Music, Noise Rock
Label: Constellation
Description: Steve Bates interviewed on An Infinite Antenna, his new album out via Constellation Records, covering punk roots, field recording and radio static.

Bates still runs The Dim Coast as a curatorial platform, releasing artists such as Joshua Bonnetta alongside his own work. His album An Infinite Antenna, out 25 September 2026 on Constellation Records, gathers field recordings made in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austria, Greece and Saskatchewan into a record built, in his words, around the sensation of slowly scanning a radio dial, static and signal blurring into each other until neither is quite distinguishable from the other; melody keeps threatening to surface, then dissolves back into the noise before it fully arrives.

Featured: © Steve Bates

Can you talk about your earliest musical influences? What drew you toward the experimental ambient?

My family wasn’t really musically inclined and there wasn’t much music played around the house. My mother heard most music as noise although she really liked Charley Pride. My first real concert was by a British folk singer/song-writer named Roger Whittaker. My parents took my sister and I must have been around 8 or 9. I remember he was a really good whistler and told stories between songs. I was surprised by that kind of interaction and didn’t think that happened at concerts. My sister also had a hand in another live music influence when she took me to the very last concert of The Who farewell tour in Toronto. I was really a punk kid by then for a few years already by 1982, so I would have been 15. Obviously it wasn’t the very last Who concert ever but it was really billed as that so it was pretty exciting. The first punk concert I went to was Discharge at the Sildor Ballroom in Winnipeg the same year. That changed everything. Our next door neighbours growing up were from Jamaica and Mr. Wedderburn would have his friends over on the weekend for BBQ’s and they would be playing reggae for hours. I would watch out my sister’s bedroom listening to the music. Post-punk, hardcore and reggae were the only things I listened to as a teenager. I think a big part of what drew me to more experimental and improvised music was the social conditions as much as the music. I love learning about the networks, how records, cassettes, CD’s travel around and the connections people and musicians make to make it all work.

How did the Prairie punk scene of the 90s influence who you are as an artist today?

Before the 90’s (I’m old) was more an influence. I remember being struck by how it was the ‘kids’ going to shows that organized everything and thought that was amazing. They would have been maybe 3-5 years older than me but I thought that was so cool, no adults. “Big” shows (Minor Threat, G.B.H., Discharge…) would still only be maybe a couple hundred people max so being so close to the music was a huge influence. I still can’t really go to or enjoy huge crowds. Later in the 90’s punk and hardcore felt boring, repetitive and too rule based so I wasn’t going to punk shows by then. I shifted my interest to noisier stuff from Touch & Go, Amphetamine Reptile stuff like Tar, Jesus Lizard, Hammerhead, Vertigo, Cows…by the 2000’s I had immersed myself in more experimental and improvised music and radio art. I think this is a pretty common path for people who keep following music. I think the biggest thing I learned is that there is way more interesting things happening than what we see and hear in the mainstream.

How did your time at Hexagram change the way you make music?

I learned a lot about the technical aspects of recording during my time at Hexagram. I was the sound technician and there was an influx of money to fund the facilities of the research institute. So I was tasked with coordinating the design and construction of a surround mixing studio and a smaller recording studio and buying all of the field recording and film sound equipment. I learned a lot from specialists we hired to do the acoustics, wiring, equipment consultations, especially Stéphane Claude, who is also a sound artist so he was super knowledgable about weird ways of working in addition to typical approaches to mic’ing a drum kit. So production-wise, especially my mixing skills and field recording developed a lot in this period. It was also during this time I was getting my feet wet with improvising. When we first finished the recording studio, a good friend and one of my favourite guitar players, Burkhard Stangl, was in town so I invited him to do a recording session so I could figure out all the studio kinks. But he said he would only do it if I played with him, which was terrifying to play with a favourite musician. Another early session was with the amazing Toshimaru Nakamura doing his no-input mixing board. David Sylvian came in and suggested ideas for recording and used some of the sounds for a release on Mark Wastell‘s Confront label (There Is No Love, Rhodri Davies, David Sylvian, Mark Wastell). All of these things that happened during my time at Hexagram remain a big influence.

What role has running a label played in your development as an artist?

Back in the 90’s I did my first label, Sister Records, which ended up being a complete financial disaster that took me about 8 years to come out from under. But I learned how to make records and CD’s and met some nice people so it wasn’t a total waste. Almost all the bands broke up upon the release of their records so I was swamped with unsold records and CDs. The Dim Coast was the name of my radio show at CKUW in Winnipeg where I was the program director when it went FM after many years as a closed circuit station at the University of Winnipeg. The first release on The Dim Coast is still one of my favourites, Montréal Phonographe. Douglas Moffat imagined the city of Montréal as if the island was an enormous turntable. He constructed a “stylus” using a contact mic on a piece of wood and plotted various locations around the island as if they were points on the grooves of the record and then went and recorded all of these places to make the record. Amazing! Things kind of followed from there and now the label is also a kind of ‘curatorial platform’ now. With jake moore, we released a few other things including a recent 4 CD project by Joshua Bonnetta, called The Pines, which is another conceptually rich project and Josh is an amazing artist and filmmaker. We did that with Shelter Press and it sold out in a week.

What inspired you to use the movement of a radio dial as the album’s structural framework?

The scanning radio dial is partly just an all-around way I describe the sound of my music, for the most part, not an actual method to make An Infinite Antenna. It’s literal as well as descriptive where melody and static all get blurred. Smeared electronics. The radio has been an early influence back to when my father bought me a shortwave radio when I was a little kid. I became obsessed with the static and in between sounds as much as the talking and music. Digital radios suck for this as they just jump between stations and miss all the noise in between.

Can you tell me about the concept behind the album?

An Infinite Antenna doesn’t have a concept. Often my releases are the partial outcomes of art projects so there is often some kind of framing concept. But with the releases I have done with Constellation they tend to be more open and fluid and less conceptually driven. I’m grateful for this as it provides a flexibility to try things out that I might not otherwise. Concept-heavy releases are more like The Accursed Sound which was a project where I imagined copper representing the sound of Hell, specifically a cymbal and connecting it to the topographic form of open pit copper mines and vinyl records.

How did recordings from Bosnia, Austria, Greece, and Saskatchewan end up shaping the tracks?

Field recording is a pretty consistent thing when I travel. But I’m working through difficult questions around this at the moment, along with other people involved in acoustic ecology. “Mountain scene” begins with recordings made out the window of a car I was traveling in with some friends. We were going into the mountains and it was just an impulsive thing to do. I was with friends working on an art project in Bosnia called Radio Elsewheres that involves a lot of recording sounds and stories about things that move. The recordings in Greece are more abstract and in the form of textures on the record. Those are part of another art project I did working with local musicians in abandoned marble quarries on the island of Tinos. The recording in Austria begins the track, “Decades of river widths” and was done late one night wandering around the forest near Stopfenreuth along the Danube with a cassette. Those recordings are part of a PhD I’m working on currently. On An Infinite Antenna these field recordings all directed the music and sound they are part of.

What’s the story behind the Sarajevo cover photo?

I was just walking around Sarajevo while working on Radio Elsewheres. I was looking for something that might invoke an ‘antenna’ of some kind, or something that was ‘sensing’. The forms on the cover are just air vents from an underground parking garage but I thought they kind of looked or felt like listening devices. Weird ears.

How does your PhD research on film soundtracks feed into your recording practice?

The biggest influence is thinking about film soundtracks and acoustic ecology. More specifically I am interested in machine listening in acoustic ecology practice as a kind of non-listening (machines don’t ‘listen’ the way we do). I’m using the 1907 novella, The Willows, by Algernon Blackwood as a framing device about ‘listening in the field’ and protocol around machine listening and acoustic ecology. With the film soundtrack, I’m proposing one way to listen within acoustic ecology is as if it was a horror soundtrack and in many ways it is.

What are you looking forward to next?

I just finished doing the sound for a Tanya Lukin Linklater piece involving field recording, nature and women talking about the weather from an Indigenous perspective and about to do the sound for a filmmaker friend, Miriam Sampaio, and her multi-channel film installation. I have some shows in Austria and Greece this Fall I’m excited for. I have to finish the second full-length by the Black Seas Ensemble (Sound Beyond Sound) that we recorded already a couple years ago. It features a ton of amazing musicians and will be nice to get out. I miss playing in a group context so that is another reason to get the Black Seas thing done so we can get out to do some shows. Or maybe start a new band!

Photos courtesy of © Steve Bates

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others