Author/s: Will Gore + Esmee Curtis

Date of production: 2024

Language/s: English

Transmission details: 

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

 

Author/s: Pete Hazell aka Limbo Tapes

Date of production: 2024

Language/s: English

Transmission details: 

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?

 

https://limbotapes.podbean.com/

 

Author/s: Stellaria Media (Lucinda Guy and Alice Armstrong)

Date of production: 2024

Language/s: English

Transmission details:

Sound art Field Recording Workshop.

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

Author/s: Lucia Scazzocchio

Date of production: 2023

Language/s: English

Transmission details: 

The Royal Docks in London have always been a place of mixing and mingling as workers and goods came from overseas via this gateway into the city. Founder of Poetry vs Colonialism Laila Sumpton, Ansar Ahmed Ullah from the Swadhinata Trust and UCL historian Dr Anna Maguire highlight the Bengali seamen known as Lascars.

This series of Audio Postcards is produced by Lucia Scazzocchio from Social Broadcasts as part of Sea Change, commissioned by the Royal Docks Team in collaboration with University College London and curated by Invisible Dust.

Featuring the voices of Laila Sumpton, Ansar Ahmed Ullah from the Swadhinata Trust, Dr Anna Maguire and members of the Royal Wharf Community Dock ESOL learning group. The poem Jamdani Weavers, by Laila Sumpton (co-founder of Poetry Vs Colonialism and member of the London Sea Shanty Collective)

Wild Goose is performed by the London Sea Shanty Collective.

Author/s: DinahBird & Jean-Philippe Renoult

Date of production: 2018

Language/s: n/a

Transmission details: 

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