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

Follow the series

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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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Earth Day 2023 - Voices for Nature

Agathe Dijoud (FR 2024)

5 min

In this audio piece, Agathe Dijoud joins a march in London on Earth Day 2023, and capture sounds from speeches, music and personal thoughts throughout the day. Nature can take many forms, and has the belief that marches are one form of nature resisting the climate crisis, through a human lens.

Produced by Agathe Dijoud

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Blue Heart + XMTR

Produced by Stellaria Media (UK 2024)

Stellaria Media · Blue Heart at XMTR

30 min

Recordings made in the 'Voices of Water' workshop at the XMTR festival, mixed with archive material from the Blue Heart project.

Residents of the area talk about their experiences of flooding, drought and water management, historians explain how things have changed over the centuries, and engineers look to the future and how systems can be managed to build resilience in the face of climate change.

Featuring the voices of:
Anna Hastings, Blue Heart Project Manager, East Sussex County Council
Evan Jones, Ecologist
Andy Durling, Eastbourne Eco Action Network
Lousie Elms, Eastbourne Allotments and Garden Society
Sally Lee, Grow Eastbourne
Oliver Sterno, Plastic Free Eastbourne
Kate Baker, Agile Rabbit
Andy Payne, Southdown Angling Association
Chantal Feyn, Eastbourne and District Model Yacht Club
Fiona Durling, Pevensey Forest Garden
Robert Slater, Pevensey Court House and Museum
Katherine Buckland, Heritage Engagement Officer, Eastbourne District Council
Brian Bailey, allotment holder
Neil Raymond, The Star Inn, Old Town
Louise Elms, Eastbourne Allotments and Garden Society
Ruth Kenwood, Gather Community Garden
John Hayward, Pevensey Parish Councillor
Dave Roberts, Gather Community Garden
Peter Birchalll, Pete the Pond
Clare Whistler, Artist, Water Week
Adrian Butcher, Treebourne
Caroline Kimber, Gather Community Garden
Chris Sweetapple, Exeter University

Producer: Stellaria Media

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Radio Limbo LIVE in St. Leonards...

Pete Hazell (UK 2024)

60min

Behold the first-ever Radio Limbo live show, recorded at XMTR festival in St. Leonard's-on-Sea. Host Limbo Pete guides the audience through selected gems from the Limbo archive. But as the show reaches the control room of Outpost 83, The Operator becomes intrigued by Pete's curious connections between the town’s history and Limbo lore. Could the seaside town’s saintly namesake hold a deeper, unsettling connection to Old Leonard’s disappearance?

Produced by Pete Hazell

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