Tonic Immobility

Eloïse Bertil (UK 2024)

7 min

A short experimental audio piece inspired by wildlife documentaries and romcoms. It weaves together facts about frogs and nature soundscapes with personal voice messages, drawing a parallel between the two, and blurring the line between reality and fiction.

Produced by Eloïse Bertil

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Departures / Arrivals - Every Floor Has A Different Color

Umi Hsu (US 2024)

9 min

Departures / Arrivals is a bilingual experimental audio memoir that follows my search for where memory is held within a diasporic time/space. After having immigrated to the United States as a pre-teen 33 years ago, I return to sites significant to my life in Taiwan: the apartment building I grew up in, walks I took with family, the school I attended, and more. Each track on the album is an audio meditation on memory surrounding a specific place and relationship with unscripted dialogs. Each composition presents a diasporic architecture, where a particular time/space is stretched and compressed at once. It’s an invitation to listen in and between the cracks of sound, language, and memory.

Composition, performance, recording, and mixing by: Umi Hsu

Listen to the series

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Ian

Nathan Gibson (UK 2023)

9 min

A bomb disposal expert by trade, Ian Jones MBE spent over 35 years on the frontline of historical events, disarming bombs and incendiary devices in the most challenging of circumstances. His experiences reveal to us a hidden side of war and the lives of the people literally trying to defuse conflict. But these days, you’re more likely to find him tending his allotment.

Produced by Nathan Gibson

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XMTR Radio Hour Ep32: Sono Electro and XMTR Festival Unpacked

Produced by Social Broadcasts (UK 2024)

60 min / Episode 32 of 32

This XMTR (Transmitter) Radio Hour is a retrospective conversation about the inception and outcomes of sound art and sonic storytelling festivals Sono Electro and XMTR Audio Arts Festival that took place in St Leonards on Sea in September. James Wilkie from Sono Electro and Lucia Scazzocchio from XMTR talk to Isobel Anderson - host of Girls Twiddling Knobs, about how the worked together on the festival(s), the learnings from behind the scenes and their ambitions for the future - could St Leonards on Sea become a sonic destination? This is a candid conversation about collaboration, curation and working with and within an established creative community,  with clips and and extracts from artists and performances featured at the festival. 

You can access full audio works from the tracklist at xmtr.fm/festival. 

Tracklist: 
Anam Cara - Ear to the Ground - Dan 'you are tuning in to the Lido graveyard'
Limbo Tapes - Radio Limbo Live at XMTR Festival
Blanc Sceol - Orbit Meditation 
Stellaria Media (Lucida Guy and Alice Armstrong) Blue Heart
Ben Philipps - Home Sounds
Ben Chennett -  A Choir for Hastings and St Leonards
Marcia Farquar - The Lido 
Jem Finer - Pinball Machine 
Phil Smith - Zwischenzeit
Will Gore + Esme Curtis - Invisible Cities, Argia
Ed Baxter + Anthony Moore - Life Sentence
Jem Finer - Pinball Machine 
Blanc Sceol - Orbit Meditation 

XMTR Radio Hour Produced by Lucia Scazzocchio

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The Negro of The Abyss

Maleek Dapaah (UK 2024)

16 min

Set in the heart of Victorian London, The Negro of the Abyss reimagines the infamous Jack the Ripper murders from the perspective of Jane Doe, a forgotten black woman whose story unveils the harrowing truths of racial and social injustice.

Written/Directed by Nifty Noel.
Produced by Maleek Dapaah

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The Lido Cafe

Produced by Charlotte Petts (UK 2024)

Milk Bottle Productions · Stories from the Lido Cafe

32 min

Charlotte has been intrigued by this place ever since she and her dog took refuge there from the wintery Worthing seafront to have a steaming hot pot of tea and a tunnocks tea cake. With its metal grills over the windows and a heavy door to strain open, it almost always looks closed, except for a little neon red 'Open' sign glowing in the gloom. Inside, there were mainly older people, sitting alone. It's part of an old lido complex, with a bandstand built in the 1920's jutting out into the sea, almost like a mini pier.

The tablecloths are chequered, you can get breakfast for a fiver and despite sitting separately, everyone seemed to know each other. One lady leaned over and chatted to her about her dog. It was just... friendly. She wanted to spend more time there, see what is was like in the warmer months and spend more time with the people that go there and the people that run it. And so she did. And she took her recorder with her.

Produced and presented by Charlotte Petts

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Invisible Cities

Will Gore + Esme Curtis (UK 2024)

14 min

A sonic interpretation of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities created for an immersive installation at the XMTR Audio Festival 2024.

Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is an architectural exploration of the complex relationships between memory, place, subjectivity and desire. Told through accounts of 55 fictitious cities, Will stands in as our tour guide, inviting us to look out of ‘sound windows’ that look out onto some of Calvino’s fantastical spaces.  

In Ersilla, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the mesh of strings becomes too much and the inhabitants can no longer walk through the streets, they leave to set up a new city. All that remains is a labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain; spider-webs of intricate relationships seeking a form.

“These are fantastical, beguiling places, where things are never as they seem. There's Hypatia, a city of beautiful blue lagoons but where "crabs were biting the eyes of the suicides, stones tied around their necks"; Laudomia, the city of the unborn, whose inhabitants have constructed a parallel city for those yet to come; Octavia, the spider-web city, whose residents live suspended over an abyss, supported by a net they know won't last long; and Argia, a city with earth instead  of air.”

Written, Produced by Will Gore
Assistant Producer/Voices Esme Curtis

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We Are Not Alone

Produced by Oliver Sanders (UK 2024)

27 min

In 1980, Prestonwood Mall in Dallas contacted the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) with a unique request. It was the opening weekend of The Empire Strikes Back, and the mall’s marketing team wanted an additional attraction. Sensing an opportunity, John P Timmerman, the owner of a family air-conditioning business in Ohio and a dedicated volunteer at CUFOS, packed his car with an eye-catching collection of UFO photographs and embarked on a cross-country journey for the weekend.What began as a simple photography exhibit turned into a 12year research expedition across the malls of America.

In front of plexiglass panels, between the skylights and shiny floors, Timmerman interviewed curious shoppers with stories to tell. What he captured on his small tape recorder was the “raw material of ufology” - candid, first-hand accounts of strange lights, silver discs, and close encounters. Between 1980 and 1992, Timmerman recorded 1,179 witness reports across 120 tapes that cover every aspect of the UFO phenomena.

The collection is considered one of the largest ever put together by a single investigator.John P Timmerman spent years travelling far from his quiet family life in the Midwest searching for insights into our place in the universe. What he found, among the hum of escalators and muzak, was connection - or ‘contact’ - with thousands of ordinary people, all searching for the same thing.

Produced, Edited & Sound Designed by Oliver Sanders
Archive Digitisation & Co-Production by James Timmerman
Executive Producer: Lucia Scazzocchio

Special thanks to Dr Mark Rodeghier, Dr Michael Swords, Dr Michael West, The Center For UFO Studies, The Timmerman Family, Dominic De Vere, Francesca Thakorlal, Ben Plumb, Hannah Kemp-Welch

A Social Broadcasts production for BBCRadio 4 and BBC Illuminated Podcast

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Times Square–42nd Street–Port Authority Bus Terminal

Produced by Tom Sayers (US 2024)

1 min

A sound poem from the depths of the vast space under 42nd Street in New York City.

Produced and sound designed by Tom Sayers

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Kaizen

Carlo Patrão (PT 2024)

5 min

改 善 Kaizen is a radiophonic sound collage of North American "tech speak" and "corporate jargon" that overuses the Japanese term Kaizen, meaning continuous improvement, as a form of control and shield against listening, responsibility, and reparation.

Produced/Collage/Music by: Carlo Patrão

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