Transmissions
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
Mother In The Fridge
Felix Kubin (DE 2012)
Produced by Felix Kubin (DE 2012)
30 min
What does your own mother sound like in the refrigerator? Felix Kubin tried it. And not only that. His mother also speaks from the cooking pot, the waste bin and a box. And in English, too, because the son not only does acoustic experiments, but also has to practice for a trip abroad. The mother is doing well. From the various containers she gives little lessons in English grammar by phone. An Oedipal burlesque without a script.
Producer: Felix Kubin
Produced for Vicki Bennett’s extensive “Radio Boredcast” project at AV Festival Newcastle, UK.
Recommended by Paris based sound artist Dinahbird
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
In The Dark Bristol: The Radio Limbo Creation Story
Pete Hazell (UK 2022)
Pete Hazell (UK 2022)
5 min
In The Dark Bristol - New Producers
A collage piece playing with the contrast between the idea of Godly creation and the often overbearing presence of commercial materialism.
As well as highlighting the absurdity of radio advertising and outdated children’s records, the purpose is simply to promote the radio show's identity and its sense of humour. It concludes with an example of the 7th day being intended for rest, with a reimagined old time radio drama about listening to a broken radio on a Sunday, which in itself contains subversive messages and frustration.
Pete Hazell is a music and radio producer from Bristol, founder of the cassette label Limbo Tapes and host of Radio Limbo.
Producer: Pete Hazel
Telephone / Georgia - Iceland Sound Connection
Community Radio Tbilisi (GEO 2022)
Ágústa Björnsdóttir - Martraðarmaðka (GEO 2022)
9 min
A project based on tighter audio connections between several artists living in different places (Georgia, Iceland). Being inspired by the whispering game Telephone, creating a chain of author's audio-works, which respond to each other. 9 young artists were selected from Georgia and Iceland, interested in radio art or sound art. The first artist from the chain produced a sound work that was shared with the second artist from another country. The following produced work as a response to the work and shared with the third artist from the chain etc. The artists had a week to produce the responsive content / audio gesture.
The works are part of a weekly program of Community Radio Tbilisi and Seyðisfjörður Community Radio.
Participants: Rati Eradze – Ágústa Björnsdóttir Gvantsa Jgushia – Mio Storåsen – Khriantel – Brák Jónsdóttir – Archil Tsereteli –Vilhjálmur Yngvi Hjálmarsson –Mariam Abashidze
Concept curator : Bara Gallo
Coordinator, producer: Þórunn Dís Halldórsdóttir
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
Infinity = Zero
Alyssa Moxley (US 2014)
Alyssa Moxley (US 2014)
31 min
Audio Walks for Armchair Listening Mini Series
In Jorge Luis Borges’ story The Library of Babel, the world is made up of an infinite network of hexagonal libraries containing all possible iterations of books with 410 pages and 22 characters. Books can resemble each other in all but one letter. Some volumes can be read in multiple languages with entirely different interpretations. Others have meaning only coincidentally. The librarians who inhabit this world are overwhelmed with information, most of which is nonsense. In a search for deliberate meaning, many wander through the libraries in a quest for the Crimson Hexagon, a library containing books of small format, illustrated, magical, and containing revelatory insight.
Infinity = Zero produces the conditions for radio listeners to sculpt senseless cacophonies into form through their movement as they walk the halls and navigate obscure corners of the stairwells of 37 South Wabash, Chicago. In a participative choreography beginning at The Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, listeners will take the path of those who search for the archival material of insight and meaning within books, people, objects, and architecture. Fractured and collaged narratives create ambiguous worlds where the fictional world of hexagonal libraries interacts with the environment of the Sharp building’s hallways and archival collections.
Produced and Narrated by : Alyssa Moxley
Composed for broadcast on Radius FM from The Joan Flasch Artist Book Library
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
No Birds Land
Tamsin Grainger (UK 2021)
Tamsin Grainger (UK 2021)
6 min
Audio Walks for Armchair Listening Mini Series
If a bird could write a poem maybe it would sound like this?
This is the sound poem for No Birds Land, an art and sound installation in the Trinity Tunnel on the Edinburgh cycle path network.
Before and after entering the tunnel, the air is full of birdsong; inside there is little or none. This sound-art installation recognises that no birds land or alight there (although occasionally one flies through), that it is a sort of 'No Man's Land' for birds, though humans built the sandstone structure to transport goods and each other between Granton Harbour and the rest of the city.
Written and Performed by : Tamsin Grainger
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.
Follow the series