Transmissions
Radio Ballad: On The Edge (1963)
Ewan McColl, Peggy Seeger, Charles Parker (1963)
Ewan McColl, Peggy Seeger, Charles Parker (UK 1963)
59 min
This new revolutionary format - radio ballad (BBC) conceived by folk musicians Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, and the brilliant radio documentary maker Charles Parker in 1958, combining sound: songs, instrumental music, sound effects, and, most importantly, the recorded voices of those who are the subjects of the documentary. This had never been done before, and still sounds incredibly fresh today.
This Radio Ballad explores the lives of teenagers in the 1960’s with voices of young people from all over the UK. If you’ve seen C’mon C’mon where Joaquin Phoenix plays Johnny a radio journalist touring the US to talk to teens, this piece sounds even more ahead of its time.
Producer: Charles Parker
Music: Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger
Listen to more Radio Ballads
Edgeland
Hayley Suviste (UK 2021)
Hayley Suviste (UK 2020)
24 min
As Manchester’s streets and skyline are warped by the ever-accelerating process of urban renewal, the city’s edgelands and green spaces are at risk of being swallowed by waves of property development. Not only does this raise questions about the ecology of the city, as carbon sinks are flattened and wildlife is displaced, but it speaks to broader trends pushing urban residents away from shared space, community and local identity.
This project shines a light on these spaces and the activists, academics, and local people who have taken up the daunting fight against corporate interests in the city in the name of biodiversity, urban ecology and community wellbeing. As we are faced with crises of both environment and mental health, the role of public green spaces has become ever more crucial in the eyes of those who enjoy, nurture, and maintain them
Hayley Suviste is a sound artist and composer based in Manchester (UK). She works with field recordings, archival material, electronic hardware, and live instrumentation to create long-form compositions, sonic installations, and multimedia art projects. Inspired by folk traditions and oral histories, Hayley is interested in the role of sound and voice in constructing and reproducing cultural identities and socio-historical narratives and how new compositional technologies can engage communities with overlooked stories about their environments.
Produced by Hayley Suviste
Commsioned by HCMF
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.