Transmissions
XMTR Festival 26: Sauna Sounds
Hayley Clarke (UK, 2026)
Hayley Clarke (UK, 2026)
33 min
On the edge of Hastings Pier - a stone’s throw from the beach - you’ll find the Sound Sauna; a tranquil listening space where we turn the heat up to eleven. Here we invite you can take a breath, and engage in deep listening in community, before heading for a cold plunge.
Produced by Hayley Clarke
Commissioned by XMTR Audio Arts Festival 2026
XMTR Festival 26: All Washed Up
Sarah Frosh and Pete Hazell (UK 2026)
Sarah Frosh & Pete Hazell (UK, 2026)
24 min
A site specific sound walk that can also be listened to on your sofa.
Washed ashore after an unearthly storm, you awaken on the beach with no memory of how you arrived there!? Step into a parallel town where ley lines, dark magic and strange seaside folklore await. You’ll be moving through an uncanny version of St Leonards where familiar streets become portals into the surreal. Guided by Sirens, broadcasts, music, and mysterious sonic signals, you’ll be led to question a thing or two...
Produced by Sarah Frosh and Pete Hazell aka Limbo Tapes
Comissioned for XMTR Audio Arts Festival 2026
XMTR Festival 26: Stand At The Shoreline And Listen
Katharina Smets and Katherina Lindekens (BE, 2026)
Katharina Smets & Katherina Lindekens (BE, 2026)
30 min
Stand at the shoreline and listen' is a soundwalk inviting you to do just that: to look at the sea and explore its myriad meanings. This meditative trio for listener, headphones and St Leonards-on-Sea is inspired by Virgina Woolf’s 'The Waves'. In her rhapsodic novel, Woolf punctuates the words of six narrators with detailed descriptions of the sea, moving from sunrise to sunset. Similarly, Katharina Smets and Katherina Lindekens create a polyphonic experiential landscape, interlacing field recordings with musings on the sea by coast-dwellers from the four corners of the earth. This soundwalk is designed to be experienced together, but with space — for your own thoughts, for your own experiences of the sea in this shared moment. In the end, we are all looking at the same body of water, but with our own eyes, ears and bodies.
Produced by Katharina Smets and Katherina Lindekens
Commissioned by XMTR Audio Arts Festival 2026
XMTR Festival 26: Sweet Talk
Mri Berlin (DE, 2026)
Miri Berlin (DE, 2026)
9 min
A moment in a local kitchen, recorded and produced as part of the XMTR Festival residency. The cakes were actually made for the women selling their vintage items in the back garden, to enjoy with a cup of tea or coffee during their breaks. But somehow visitors and friends also found their way into the kitchen, and the cakes were so popular that they were soon gone. "Sweet Talk" is a collage of these small encounters in the kitchen. The cakes take centre stage, drawing everyone’s attention and becoming the focus of the conversations.
Produced by Miri Berlin
Commissioned by XMTR Audio Arts Festival 2026
XMTR Festival 26: Sunrise Field Recording Silent Disco
Miri Berlin (DE, 2026)
Miri Berlin (DE, 2026)
22 min
During her three-week residency in St. Leonards-on-Sea, Miri stayed in the upper part of town, with a beautiful view of the sea. Whenever she walked downhill, she would usually walk through St. Leonards Garden. It was such a peaceful place, no matter what time of day she passed through. This audio piece brings together a small selection of raw field recordings she made during these walks, down to the beach and back, passing through the garden along the way. It also includes melodic fragments, some of which were drawn directly from the field recordings and further shaped into musical textures.
Produced by Miri Berlin
Commissioned by XMTR Audio Arts Festival 2026
XMTR Festival 26: The Pier Sings
Katharina Smets and Katherina Lindekens (BE, 2026)
Tony Birch (UK, 2026)
15 min
Celebrating the amazing momentary space created under the pier twice a day, The Pier Sings captures the sound of the waves and resonance of the structure at high tide and plays it back binaurally in the same position at low tide.
Produced by Tony Birch
Commissioned by XMTR Audio Arts Festival 2026
XMTR Festival 26: Manhunt in St Leonards: Station
M Cristina Marras and Gianfranco Bitti (IT 2026)
M. Cristina Marras + Gianfranco Bitti (IT, 2026)
8 min
Manhunt at St Leonards-on-Sea is a 7-episode location-based audio drama unlocked via QR codes at historically significant sites across St Leonards-on-Sea. Listeners follow physical traces embedded in the neighbourhood (objects planted in thrift shops, "lost" posters) while characters based on real people observed and documented in the town drift through the plot, blurring fiction and reality until St Leonards itself starts to feel like a film set.
A woman hunts down a con man who stole valuable secrets. They're former lovers. She tracks him using Moscow rules — the private signal system from their relationship, now repurposed as tradecraft.
As part of their XMTR Festival Residency, Cristina and Gianfranco explored St Leonards, weaving in their personal experiences with a big dose of fantasy.
Produced by M.Cristina Marras and Gianfranco Bitto
Commissionned for XMTR Audio Arts Festival 2026
XMTR Festival 26: St Leonard’s Bathing Pool Remembered
Mri Berlin (DE, 2026)
Mary Hooper (UK, 2026)
16 min
This audio work has been created with the voices of people who have memories of swimming and working at the former Bathing Pool in St. Leonards. The pool was built in 1933 as an Olympic training pool for the Empire Games, one of only 3 in the UK, and as a public resource to encourage health and fitness. The pool passed into private hands in 1960 and was turned into a holiday camp, but it became financially unviable by the 1980’s. The pool was demolished in1989 and is now a much contested site between local people who would like to keep the open space as community resource and a series of Developers, who plan to build up to 146 dwellings.
This collection of memories spanning 60 years of the Bathing Pool’s life is a remarkable example of how buildings can generate a Genius Loci of people and place. Memories, history and identity are anchored in these places, showing how important it is to create and preserve public spaces where everyone can congregate in an egalitarian space, building memories that last a life time and beyond, marking changes in culture, life style and community over generations.
Thank you to the people whose voices have contributed many precious, funny and moving memories that bring the Bathing Pool back to life: Cath Cooper, Andrew Weight, Doug Edworthy, Rob Edworthy, Sally Smith, Janette Morley, John Purfield, Jessica Beaghen, John Stout, and Polly Sharkey.
Produced by Mary Hooper
This audio story was developed with in collaboration with Lucia Scazzocchio Social Broadcasts and XMTR. Many thanks to Artists Now Company who provided bursary support to seed fund this project.
Commissioned by XMTR Audio Arts Festival 2026
XMTR Festival 26: 30 Words For Mud
Lucy Dearlove (UK, 2026)
Lucy Dearlove (UK, 2026)
28 min
In the old Sussex dialect there are many words for mud, now long out of use. What would it mean to bring them back to life?
Produced by Lucy Dearlove
Originally performed at the 2026 XMTR festival Audio Cabaret in St Leonards on Sea.
XMTR Festival 26: Fading Transmissions from a Republic of Ruins
Blake Pfeil (US 2026)
Blake Pfeil (US 2026)
33 min
“Fading Transmissions from a Republic of Ruins” is an experimental live docu-audio performance and visual exhibition that explores abandoned spaces as sites of memory, disappearance, and lingering transmissions. The piece combines live storytelling, archival tape, and ambient field recordings, manipulated in order to create the feeling of the audience becoming a rogue radio transmission that drifts into America’s historical underbelly. Developed under the banner of the U.K. Press Gazette Future of Media Award nominee Blake Pfeil's acclaimed multimedia travelog “All-American Ruins,” this particular experience journeys into the abandoned Sumner School in Topeka, Kansas — one of the segregated schools central to the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. Drifting in and out of dreamlike sonic reconstructions of personal reflection and grandiose Americana mythology about migration and race, the piece explores what it means for a place historically significant to exist simultaneously as landmark, ruin, and unresolved cultural strife.
Produced by Blake Pfeil