Tony McAulay is an English-born multimedia artist who emigrated to America (Seattle, to be exact) in 1970 and now resides is Canada, where he divides his time among video art, sound-pieces, photography painting, and a live radio show called "Turbulence." On that show he interviews artists - particularly artists who work with sound - and plays their recordings along with his own. "I've been interested for some time in the connection between visual art and sound," McAulay says from his home base of London, Ontario. "I like what Joseph Beuys once said, that far him, 'a cough is sculpture.' And I've often thought that radio is much more visual, in a way than television."

The Turbulence program has led to installations in several Canadian galleries of sound-pieces that have aired, accompanied by photographic murals dealing with what he calls "intonation glut." One of those murals included a roll-call of famous and obscure collaborative teams which McAulay later updated and expanded for his recording on this album.

In addition, McAulay edited a magazine called TKO, one issue of which was devoted exclusively to his interest is collaborative art. An ad for the magazine, featuring a detail from the photo mural of the list of collaborative teams, makes up the graphic that accompanies his sound-piece here. In tact, TKO itself was a collaboration between McAulay and co publisher Sam Krizan, and grew out of a two-hour live radio show they once did on Turbulence.

"It's just something I was interested is at the time, the idea of people in partnerships," McAulay says. "There are many groups that have worked together, but I just wanted to focus so pairs. I've been interested is things like the Gilbert and George situation," Not referring to the famous team of performance artists, "how work can develop that way, sometimes coming out at the conflicts or complications of collaboration - that even that can be a positive sort of input" Over the last tour summers, McAulay has produced video versions of the Turbulence program, and recently began work on a group of paintings, his first in six years. "I've gone right back to how I started off, in a way," he says in reference to his training as a painter in England in the 1960s. "But the new paintings are about media and receiving information, particularly through television - so it's all linked together in the end."