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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Brothers

Giacomo Bagni (IT 2024)

Giacomo Bagni · Brothers

13 min

Giacomo and his father have had a fragmented relationship for years. Then, all of a sudden, a new character appears, replacing Giacomo as a son. Based on the author’s biographical story, Brothers is a trip in his inner world while he tries to understand what happened and make peace with it. A fresh take on autofiction, the piece is constructed by using a mixture of first person narration and re-constructed dialogues from the past, with the author inhabiting and voicing all the characters as a way to materialize his inner discussions and trying to make sense of them.

Written, Produced by Giacomo Bagni
Music by ST.ELVIO

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Beautiful Writing

Stella Sims (UK 2024)

stellastar80 · Beautiful Writing

7 min

Calligraphy is a ancient craft where art, language and words intersect. But in a world of screens, phones and computer-generated fonts, what does calligraphy do for us? Take a journey into the magical world of A to Z as calligraphers explore this question and reveal the joy of letter art and handwriting.

Produced by Stella Sims

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The Stone Men of Newcastle

Daniel Hinds (UK 2022)

Daniel Hinds Poetry · The Stone Men Of Newcastle

14 min

The Stone Men of Newcastle is a sequence of poems told through the eyes of The Commuter, the speaker and poet-figure, as he encounters the statues of Newcastle as part of his daily life working in the city. The sequence takes in Sir Antony Gormley’s vandalised Clasp sculpture, the St George and the Dragon war memorial at Eldon Square, another monument for the First World War, The Response 1914, and the Mercutio statue in Newcastle’s Theatre Royal. The Stone Men of Newcastle concludes with a consideration of the future figures we will immortalise in bronze and stone. The sequence enters into the current debate, typified by the Rhodes Must Fall movement and the toppling of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol, on how we engage with art and history in the form of statues. The statues sometimes co-exist uneasily with their setting: they are surrounded by the distractions of modern life, represent a past impossible to compete with or at odds with our values, and are vulnerable to defacement. Yet, they can also be sources of inspiration, beauty, and connection to the past, sites of contemplation as well as conflict.

Writer Daniel Hinds
Cast: Dan Pyre and Stacey Ghent
Lead Audio Production Partner: Naked Productions
Partners: BBC New Creatives, Tyneside Cinema, Arts Council England, BBC Arts.

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