Transmissions
Field Recordings: The Sound of 2022
Eleanor McDowall (UK 2022)
Eleanor McDowall (UK 2022)
57 min
A slow weave of some of the past year’s Field Recordings, from a clock repair shop in January to snow falling in December. As 2022 comes to a close, what do we remember? Let these sounds lull you into the new year away from the noise.
Clock repair shop, London, UK on Saturday 22nd January 2022 at 11am – by Andrew Strangeway
Trumpeter Swans, Sauvie Island Wildlife Area Portland, Oregon, USA on 28th January 2022 – by Jason Hovatter
Transmission Tower, Portland, Oregon, USA on 8th February 2022 – by Jason Hovatter
The bells at St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, Kyiv, Ukraine on Sunday 13th February 2022 at 4.43pm – by Barny Smith
Ironbark Gorge, Victoria, Australia in the early morning on Sunday 20th February 2022 – by Anouk and Camilla Hannan
Woodpeckers by the water, Buckinghamshire, England, in March 2022 – by Paul Ridout
Night train, Vedia, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina in April 2022 – by Joaquín Conde
In the gloaming, Eskdalemuir, Scotland on 19th April 2022 – by Geoff McQueen
Creaky trees at Rannoch Moor, Scottish Highlands, Scotland on 23rd April 2022 – by Steve Urquhart
Stream in a forest glade, Ambleside, Cumbria, UK in April 2022 – by Geoff Marsh
Rain on the sea, Camber Sands, East Sussex, UK on 23rd May 2022 – by Sam Clements and Louise Owen
Parsley frogs at night, Lérouville, Lorraine, France on 5th June 2022 – by Colin Hunter
Lake swim at sunrise, the morning after midsummer, Groß Köris, Germany in June 2022 – by Eleanor McDowall
Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn, NY, USA in June 2022 – by James T. Green
Bells on sheep, east of Rome around 7pm on 26th June – by Cosmin Sandu
Pondweed bubbles, Raglan Castle moat, Wales, UK in the afternoon on 16th July 2022 – by Paul Ridout
Sitting in the dark, by the fan, reading and writing emails, London, UK on 19th July 2022 – by Siddharth Khajuria
8pm, rural village garden, Suffolk, UK on 19th July 2022 – by Melissa Harrison
Takapou Bay, South Island, New Zealand in August 2022 – by Martin Zaltz Austwick
Katydids in the moonlight, Bearsville, New York, USA on 20th August 2022 – by Joe Dobkin
Cow chorus in the middle of the road, near Te Kao, New Zealand on 30th August 2022 – by Helen Zaltzman
Thunderstorm through skylight, London, UK at 11.20pm on 5th September 2022 – by Eleanor McDowall
Muffled Bells, Cuddington, Buckinghamshire, UK on 19th September 2022 – by Paul Ridout
Binaural bells, St Pauls Cathedral, London, UK on 19th September 2022 – by Joe Harvey-Whyte
Enough is Enough National Day of Action, Outside Kings Cross Station, London, UK on 1st October 2022
Dusk chorus, Ewingar, New South Wales, Australia on 16th October 2022 – by Jaye Kranz
Heavy rain, North West London, UK in October 2022 – by Alex Micu
Winter Bees, Flitwick, Bedfordshire, UK in November 2022 – by Julian Higgs
Westminster Bridge, London, UK on 5th November 2022
Woman, life, freedom, Iran solidarity protest in Trafalgar Square, London, UK on 26th November 2022
Inside the bell tower, All Hallows, Twickenham on the morning of 16th November 2022 – by Alan Hall
Koliada singers rehearsing for the Christmas season, Le Plateau-Mont-Royal, Montreal, Québec, Canada on 30th November 2022 – by Mira Burt-Wintonick
Bells (church and cow) in the hills of Flüeli-Ranft, Switzerland in the evening of 6th December 2022 – by Charlie Shackleton
Crackling fire and chimes, London, UK on 9th December 2022 – by Eleanor McDowall
Snow falling on the canal, London, UK, near midnight on Sunday 11th December 2022 – by Eleanor McDowall
Produced by Eleanor McDowall
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La Cafetera
Labrador Basin (US 2021)
Produced by Labrador Basin (US 2021)
13 min, Episode 7 of 9
From somewhere you know, transmitted to you. Listen in, don’t tell anyone. As fantasy intoxicates reality, observation becomes drowned understanding.
The mysterious Labrador Basin combines field recording archive montage and poetry and with each episode we learn a little more about this allusive artist.
Producer: Labrador Basin
Listen to the series (In Spanish an English)
Submitted to XMTR
Las Voces Del Bosuwe Madidi
Iga Vandenhove (FR 2021)
Iga Vandenhove (FR 2022)
24 min
Emerse yourself in the Madid National Park in Bolivia where the sounds of the forest blend with the rounds of the rangers. Between howler monkeys, drones, vocal frogs, motorised canoes, burning, imitation caimans and birds, human, plant and animal worlds merge. The sound piece is an artistic exploration of an inhabited nature where it is more than a simple landscape, it becomes a subject. The forest rangers are the mediators.
Produced by Diane Barbé
Winner of the Phonurgia Nova Field Recording Prize 2022
On a Green Hill
Diane Barbé (DE 2021)
Diane Barbé (DE 2021)
8 min
An exploration of a multi-species environment, an informal and fallow animal refuge in the Black Forest, built by an old peasant who asks nothing of the animals that haunt him. This piece pays homage to this liminal space, shifting listening perspectives and slowly entering the intimacy of these animals that surround us, with the smells of warm fur and fresh hay.
Produced by Diane Barbé
Winner of the Phonurgia Nova Pierre Schaeffer Discovery Prize
XMTR Radio Hour Ep20 : Sounds Of The Underline
Social Broadcasts (UK 2022)
Produced by Social Broadcasts (UK 2022)
60 min / Episode 20 of 20
An hour dedicated to a single project recorded and produced by Lucia Scazzocchio in collaboration with the Tower Hamlets Regeneration team.
Docklands and the Isle of Dogs has changed dramatically since being established as a busy industrial hub centred around the docks to an industrial wasteland in the 1980's and then an ambitious redevelopment with the arrival of Canary Wharf.
The DLR and the infrastructure around this overground railway line has been key to the development of the area.
Talking to local people who live and work on the Isle of Dogs across four generations we will hear about the unique history of the island, how things have changed and how the DLR Underline could be used in the future.
Commissioned by the London Borough of Tower Hamlets as part of the ‘DLR Underline Activation’ project, this audio series recorded from Sept 21-May 22 aims to celebrate the area’s heritage to collectively reimagine the future of the Underline as a public active space.
Recorded and Edited by Lucia Scazzocchio
Recording support Dhevia Sharma
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The Gold Line
DinahBird & Jean-Philippe Renoult (FR 2018)
DinahBird & Jean-Philippe Renoult (FR 2018)
17 min
In 2016 DinahBird & Jean-Philippe Renoult began Antenna Gods, a composite art project on the use of radio waves by high frequency traders. In June 2018 they undertook a journey between the New York stock exchange, now a data centre in Mahwah, New Jersey, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in Aurora, West Chicago. The time it takes for data to be transmitted from one centre to the other via a network of microwave repeaters is 4.01 milliseconds, faster than the blink of an eye. These microwave repeaters are placed on towers that follow a geodesic path between the two exchanges. The actual route of the towers takes you over the Allegheny mountains of rural Pennsylvania and past many an Amish homestead, through the flat plains of Ohio, and in front of the immaculately mowed lawns and the blue ‘Make America great again’ flags of Indiana.
Some of the towers are a requisition from the AT&T long lines network and can be found at the end of long dusty roads where the presence of new comers is instantly noticed. Some are new and specially commissioned for the purpose. They are unremarkable, just another shape in amongst the spikey cell phone antennas that litter the interstate. DinahBird & Jean-Philippe Renoult’s ‘slow’ high frequency round-trip along what Chicago traders nick-name the Gold Line, took twenty-four days. Along the way we documented these outposts and their surroundings using image and sound. They learned about the past and present uses of these transmission towers that are both a material memorial to radio history, and a physical reminder of passing time.
Recorded and produced by DinahBird & Jean-Philippe Renoult
Composed for broadcast on Radius FM
Radius is an experimental radio broadcast platform established in 2010 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Radius produces, exhibits, and distributes work by radio and transmission artists from around the world. Listen via wavefarm
XMTR Radio Hour Ep19 : Cities and Memory
Social Broadcasts (UK 2022)
Produced by Social Broadcasts / Cities and Memory (UK 2022)
60 min / Episode 19 of 19
An hour dedicated to Cites and Memory, one of the world’s largest sound projects, with more than 1,000 artists contributing to our goal of remixing the world, one sound at a time.
Every location on the Cities and Memory sound map features 2 sounds, the original field recording of that place and a reimagined sound that presents that place and time as somewhere else, somewhere new. There are over 5,000 sounds featured on this sound map, spread over more than 100 countries and territories. We’ll visit a selection and keeping with the concept you will hear the original field recording of a place followed by a re-imagined piece.
Featuring:
1. Duet for breaking waves and the horizon by Cities and Memory (Caloura in the Azores)
2. Lockdown thunderstorm in Oxford by Cities and Memory (Oxford)
3. Chongqing Docks by Andy McDade (Chaotianmen Dock, Chongqing, South West China recorded by Ian MacArthur)
4. The loneliness of the late-night station by Cities and Memory (Berlin at Bellevue station recorded by Cristina Iscenco)
5. It’s not a wave it’s a river by Cristina Marras (Carlo Scarpa, Antivole Italy)
6.The Stadio Pier Luigi Penzo in Venice by de Velden (Venice, Italy)
7. Echoes by Bill Stevens (Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, New York, USA)
8 A recording of a story 'Alfons and the Magic Christmas Tree featured on HCJB’s DX Party Line hosted by Clayton Howard. Recorded by Paul Rawdon, courtesy of the Shortwave Radio Archive for the Shortwave Transmissions project, documenting and reimagining the sounds of shortwave radio.
9 War on Hugs by Kid KinAn hour dedicated to Cites and Memory, one of the world’s largest sound projects, with more than 1,000 artists contributing to our goal of remixing the world, one sound at a time.
Cities and Memory is always open to submissions from field recordists, sound artists, musicians or anyone with an interest in exploring sound worldwide.
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XMTR Radio Hour Ep18 : The Devil Museum by Jacob Dwyer
Social Broadcasts (UK 2022)
Produced by Social Broadcasts / Jacob Dwyer (UK 2022)
60 min / Episode 18 of 18
The Devil Museum is a one man radio play, the audio diary of a man photographing all three-thousand of the museum’s devil sculptures. (And yes the museum exists, we looked it up)
For a number of reasons, however, the project cannot be completed. As the diary tracks these failings, the piece moves subtly into less tangible subjects such as boredom, isolation and loneliness.
Produced by Jacob Dywer on residency at Rupert (Lithuania) and contains original compositions by Kareem Lotfy.
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Changing Tracks: Abbey Wood
Lucia Scazzocchio (UK 2019)
Lucia Scazzocchio (UK 2019)
18 min
Here comes the Elizabeth Line, finally. This won’t mean much to anyone outside London, but for many Londoners this has been a long time coming and for some places this means big changes as they join the London Transport map.
Originally commissioned by London Transport Museum to explore the life, community and sense of place around 2 areas soon to be drastically changed by the arrival of Cross Rail or the Elizabeth Line. This is a moment in time captured through voices of people who live and work in Thamesmead and Abbey Wood in South East London around what will soon become a destination station: Abbey Wood.
Recorded and produced by: Lucia Scazzocchio at Social Broadcasts
These Places Should Only Ever Be Imagined
Isobel Anderson (UK 2015)
Isobel Anderson (UK 2015)
15 min
The document of a week spent walking on the Isle of Harris, one of Scotland's Outer Hebrides islands. Through field recordings, an oral walking journal, photographs and objects, the piece interrogates realities of remote locations amid their idealised associations of nature and wilderness. This work examines relationships of ruin and survival, the remote and the fetishised, body and decay, an has existed as a fixed audio piece, an installation and a live performance.
These Places... asks if solely imagining places of wilderness is preferential to inserting our human presence. Places of the remote and wild live and breathe just as our bodies do, but perhaps some places are better left to the mind?
These Places Should Only Ever Be Imagined was performed at Sound Thought Festival in CCA Glasgow in 2016.