Transmissions
Tape Letters: A Cassette Tape Love Story
Modus Arts (UK 2021)
Modus Arts (UK 2021)
15min Episode 3 of 6
Tape Letters shines a light on the practice of recording and sending messages on cassette tapes by Pakistani migrants who settled in the UK between 1960 and 1980. In this six-part documentary we listen to first-hand accounts of these migration stories through original recordings, interviews with their Britain-born families and commentary by Tape Letters founder and director Wajid Yaseen.
This episode features a special story of a soon-to-be-married couple, who got to know each other more deeply and fell in love entirely through sending cassette tapes to each other between Pakistan and the UK for over 5 years. Telephones were usually expensive and not private, which is why cassettes were their chosen method of communication. We also discuss the retention and loss of cassette tapes, and therefore stories, over the years as people either held onto tapes for sentimental or evidential reasons or threw them away as they simply looked to do some spring cleaning.
Presented by Wajid Yassen (Modus Arts)
Production and Sound Design Oliver Sanders
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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
Birds Eye View: Ep1 Making Herstory
Story Projects (AUS 2020)
Produced by Story Projects (AUS 2020)
38 min / Episode 1 of 10
BIRDS EYE VIEW is the culmination of a two-year audio storytelling project run by StoryProjects in the Darwin Correctional Centre. One of a number of public health initiatives designed to minimise alcohol-related harm, the project involved workshops and mentoring in field recording, interviewing, editing, vocal techniques, body percussion, scripting and slam poetry.
Framed by three questions - Who are we really? How did we get here? and Where to next? - project participants documented their memories, reflections and the everyday routines of prison life.
Episode 1: Travel into the Darwin Correctional Centre where you’ll meet Rocket, who has spent most of her adult life in prison, along with a bunch of birds.
Executive production: Johanna Bell
Production: Cinnamon Nippard, Leah Sanderson and Johanna Bell
Mixing: Hamish Robertson
BIRDS EYE VIEW was co-created with women in the Darwin Correctional Centre. Over two years, more than 70 women engaged in the project, with more than 30 regularly involved.
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The Broomway
Tamsin Howard (UK 2022)
Tamsin Howard (UK 2022)
7 min
An immersive audio drama based on an inquest which occurred after two men drowned on the infamous path at Matlin Sands in Essex.
This short drama cleverly combines two narratives, one describing a tragic event through an inquest and the other takes us to the heart of the tragedy, humanising it beyond a local news story.
Recorded and produced by Tamsin Howard
Everyone Else - Pandora
Eva Kresiak (UK 2018)
Eva Krysiak (UK 2018)
22 min Episode 23 of 47
Pandora is an episode of Everyone Else, an audio-visual oral history project telling the stories of strangers. Each episode is dedicated to one speaker, their words edited to ambient sound design and music.
In this episode, a man recalls the summer of 1965 when he decided to track down and write to an iconic flapper and actress of the 1920s, after reading her article in a magazine.
A surprising love story that shifts from fantasy to reality from this award winning podcast, proving that everyone has a story if they are just listened to in the right way.
Produced by Eva Krysiak
The Assassination of Alex Odeh
Kerning Cultures (US/UK 2022)
Alex Atack / Kerning Cultures (UK / US 2022)
43 min
Alex Odeh was well known in the Arab community in Santa Ana, California. He was often on TV or writing into newspapers, talking about discrimination against Arabs in the US or about his beloved homeland, Palestine. But on the morning of October 11th 1985, he stepped through his office door and a pipe bomb exploded. He died hours later. From the beginning, the FBI had strong leads and a list of suspects. But decades later, Alex Odeh’s murder is still unsolved.
From the Kerning Cultures Network based the Middle East, that also happens to be
emale-led, featuring Arabic and English podcasts
Produced by Alex Atack
Edited by Dana Ballout.
Sound design by Mohamad Khreizat
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Climate Frequencies: Ep 4: Veins of the Planet
Femi Oriogun-Williams (UK 2021)
Femi Oriogun-Williams / Reduced Listening (UK 2021)
30min
Musician and artist Natalie Sharp enters the veins of the planet: its rivers, waterways and oceans. Artist Carolina Caycedo discusses the effects that large dams have on ecosystems across the globe; whilst legal expert Erin O’Donnell talks about the fight to grant rivers the same rights as humans; and poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs asks us to consider what it might mean to become an apprentice to a marine mammal.
Presented by Natalie Sharp
Produced and sound designed by Femi Oriogun-Williams, exec produced by Alannah Chance
A Reduced Listening Production for Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art