Transmissions
The Gold Line 2026
Dinahbird (FR 2026)
Dinahbird (FR, 2026)
27 min
High-frequency trading uses complex algorithms to scan multiple markets and execute orders in microseconds, demanding the fastest, most direct links between exchanges. In 2012 traders began using microwave radio networks, relayed by antennas on tall, often unnoticed structures, to send data between the New York Stock Exchange’s data centre in Mahwah, New Jersey, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in Aurora, West Chicago, in about 4.01 milliseconds along a route insiders call the Gold Line.
Sound artists Dinah Bird and Jean-Philipe Renoult, fascinated by these antennas and the paths they forge, have been documenting the physical routes the money makes since 2016.
In 2018 they made a ‘slow’ high frequency road trip along the Gold Line that took 6 weeks. Following towers in the Allegheny mountains of rural Pennsylvania, past Amish homesteads, through the flat plains of Ohio and past the immaculately mowed lawns of Indiana, they made extensive location recordings, both next to the antennas and by tuning into their frequencies over the airwaves.
This is an invitation to the listener to reimagine the movement of money. What exactly does this sound like? We hear the static pops and dissonant hums of radio signals intercut with the wind blowing in the antenna wires and the whirring of huge ventilation systems as we drive along Interstate 80. The road trip is punctuated by interventions from experts such as sociologist Donald Mackenzie who tells us how HFT works and just who takes part in these 'speed races'.
With contributions from : Donald Mackenzie, Alex Pilosov, Night Owl and Stéphane Tyc.
All recordings and music byBird & Renoult
Produced by Dinah Bird and Jean-Philippe Renoult
A Social Broadcast for BBC Radio 3’s Between The Ears
Unland
Alina Talipova (BE, 2025)
Alina Talipova (BE, 2025)
38 min
Unland (original title: Onland) is an audio documentary about four young people
navigating the fragile ground between origin and future. Each of them balances
between memory and desire, between a pasts with dark shadows and a future that
remains uncertain. Set in a metaphorical swamp, their voices reveal what it means
to grow up between cultures, carrying histories larger than themselves. Through
field recordings, multilingual voices, silences, and soundscapes, the work explores
identity, migration, and belonging without offering simple answers. Instead, it invites
the listener into an unstable but fertile space where contradictions and connections
coexist.
The characters — Anna (Russian-Georgian, navigating diaspora life), Ignace
(Azerbeidzjani, adopted in Belgium and reconstructing his identity), and Amina
(Ossetian, moving from Russia and Turkey to Brussels) — reflect different but
connected experiences of displacement and belonging but also shaping an identity
faced with controversy. Their multilingual voices (English, Dutch, Russian) overlap
and intertwine, underscoring the impossibility of one clear narrative or translation.
The structure of Unland follows the rhythm of a day, from morning to night and back
to morning. This cyclical movement reflects how migration stories do not always
lead to resolution or progress but move in circles, pauses, and restarts. Rather than
delivering a political statement, Unland creates a sensory and emotional space
where listeners are invited to experience cultural in-betweenness. It is an exploration
of what remains unsaid in migration stories, and a way to listen to the tensions,
silences, and echoes that shape identities across generations.
Unland does not offer political slogans or simple narratives
but creates an auditory landscape of tension, dissonance, and recognition.
Produced by: Alina Talipova
Supported by Katharina Smets
Music Toon van Beek
1001 Stabs
Lina Prestwood (UK, 2025)
Lina Prestwood (UK 2025)
8 min
To be born in Gaza is to be born already bleeding.
Before you take your first step, a blade is pressed gently, precisely, against your soul, the first of 1001 stabs
Fadi Almeghari was killed on Tuesday 26th May 2026 by Israeli forces. He was 25, the main breadwinner of his community and the primary carer for several children orphaned by IOF attacks. His writing and photography were internationally celebrated for their emotionally nuanced and evocative portrayal of life under occupation and more recently, genocide. His work can be seen on his Instagram page @fadimghari and his dependents can be supported at gofund.me
Produced by Lina Prestwood
Written in August 2025 by F. (Gaza)
Read by F. and Lyana Mansour (USA)
With thanks to Fatima Zahra Gahzli (Turkey)
XMTR Radio Hour #43: The Power of Radio with Tom Roe
Social Broadcasts (UK 2026)
Produced by Social Broadcasts (UK 2026)
60 min / Episode 43 of 43
This XMTR Radio Hour is a radio journey through 20th Century American Radio with radio pirate and sound art enthusiast Tom Roe. He co-founded 87X and free103point9 and the home for sound and radio art in Hudson Valley, New York State - Wave Farm. Tom is a radio artist, DJ and writer. He produces the weekly Donald Drumpf Theatre show and a regular all things radio and sound-art newsletter ’Turn on The News’. This is a personal history tour through the power of airwaves from comedy sketches to phone ins and everything in between.
Tracklist:
Spike Jones and His City Slickers, "The Sound Effects Man"
Orson Welles being interviewed the morning after his "War of the Worlds" broadcast in another great acting role.
Bill Cosby, "Chicken Heart" excerpt.
WFBR baseball radio call Bill O'Donnell, June 22, 1979.
WPLP excerpt of talk radio host Bob Lassiter.
Excerpt of interview by Tom Roe did with pirate radio operator Loni Kobres in 1997 shortly after the Federal Communications Commission came with a SWAT team and helicopters and a battering ram to shut down his radio station in Tampa, Florida.
The Donner Party, "Sickness." sung by Tom Roe
Scanner, "Turning the Dial" from "Warhol's Diary."
XMTR Radio Hour Produced by Lucia Scazzocchio
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Diana Deutsch's Phantom Words
Gabrielė Griciūtė and Andrius Mack Allosci (LT 2025)
Gabrielė Griciūtė and Andrius Mack Allosci (LT, 2025)
7 min
Diana Deutsch's Phantom Words is the 3rd track of Allosci's debut album Alloscillating, which was released on the 14th of April 2026.
Allosci is a Vilnius/Berlin-based experimental electronic music duo that is heavily rooted in found sound. Their compositions usually have a conceptual field recording foundation, however, for this track the duo worked with material found in a brilliant book they discovered in a charity shop in the UK. The book is called Musical Illusions and Phantom Words by Prof. Diana Deutsch. It is full of all sorts of different auditory phenomena, illusions and detailed explanations of how the human brain works. How human perception can sometimes be quite easily manipulated and tricked. With the author's permission, Allosci took Diana Deutsch's explanation of one of the illusions she invented (Phantom Words) and made a composition interpreting it. The illusion works by having two offset word fragments looping hard panned in a wide stereo field. Even though the fragments are nonsensical, after a while, the human brain starts trying to interpret them into words in all sorts of different languages and accents. Interestingly, sometimes people tend to hear words that are meaningful to them. The music of the track plays with prosody and explores human perception, by sometimes playing fragments of distant human voice recordings and manipulated ambiences, presented in an experimental electronic music context.
Field recordings, music, mix and master by Andrius Mack and Gabrielė Griciūtė
"Phantom Words" auditory illusion invented and explained by Prof. Diana Deutsch
Audio excerpt from Musical Illusions and Phantom Words (Prof. Diana Deutsch)
Listen to the whole album
SOIL: Rewilding the Underground | Part 1: The Story of Soil
Jess Hamilton (AU 2025)
Jess Hamilton (AU 2025)
40 min,
SOIL: Rewilding the Underground is a narrative audio documentary that gives a voice to the hidden life beneath our feet. It follows First Nations custodians, farmers, scientists and communities as they connect with the underground to turn degraded dirt back into living soils, in order to safeguard our climate, health, food security and biodiversity.
In Part 1: The Story of Soil, we follow the movement of organisms below ground as they interact to build the foundations for life. We hear how this ecosystem - and the way we have treated it - has driven the movement of human populations over millennia: from mass migrations, colonial expansion, displacement during the Dust Bowl era, and even systems of slavery.
Written/Created by: Freya Mulvey & Jess Hamilton
Produced by: Jess Hamilton
Sound design: Adam Connelly
Theme music: 'Daisies' by Cooee
Portland Dreams
Susanne Lambert (DE, 2025)
Susanne Lambert (DE, 2025)
4 min
Suzi Lamb first visited Portland in the early 2000’s, as part of a DIY west coast tour with a band from her, (at the time) home of Brighton UK.
When she saw the option to work with a piece of Portland audio for this latest Cities and Memory project, something resonated, connecting me to the idea of distance between then and now in my own life, and that of her bandmates. That sense of how things move forward, inevitably, but that an aspect can also remain, that can be conjured up, and reconnected with, like a talisman or a map.
Sonically, she was drawn to create a piece consisting of several distinct movements, utilising a broad range of sounds, and a narrative that draws in the listener. She welcomed in happenstance, and several aspects came about by what my former A’level art teacher would refer to as ‘a happy accident’, including some of the vocal work between Suzi and collaborator Nicky Rushton - these were nice surprises, and Ishe kept them in the final piece.
Elsewhere, she used small sections of the original recording, sometimes rhythmically, others atmospherically, and at others to inform melodic phrasing.
She called the work ‘Portland dreams’ in reference to the original audio, and in the way that a dream is a kind of memory, but can also be a vision for the future. Portland, or rather, the symbolism of Portland, can still be that place full of possibilities and freedoms she experienced for the first time back then, despite all the many changes in the world and herself since.
Produced and composed by Suzi Lamb
Main voice and voice recording Nicky Rushon.
XMTR Radio Hour #42: Tom’s House With Jacob Dwyer
Social Broadcasts (UK 2026)
Produced by Social Broadcasts (UK 2026)
67 min / Episode 42 of 42
This XMTR Radio Hour features Tom’s House an audio drama created by British born - Amsterdam based artist Jacob Dwyer. After a short interview with Jacob, we enter Tom’s House with the meanderings of someone who’s returned home for the first time in 15 years. Walking up Haddon Drive he spots the house of an old friend, Tom. The front door is open, so he goes inside. Wandering around the empty Tudor cottage - making cups of tea, rearranging CD collections and zoning in on the minutiae of domestic space - he ruminates on ideas of emotional intimacy, friendship and grief.
XMTR Radio Hour Produced by Lucia Scazzocchio
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The Limbotopia Workshop presents... The Widow
Pete Hazell (UK 2026)
Pete Hazell (UK 2026)
3mins
This was made as a promotional micro-drama for the album "Walk With The Militia" by Damos Room (Limbo Tapes 2026).
Inspired by the artist's world-building lore about a Horse Militia, and the title of the last track "Widows" I made this for their show on Radio Al Hara in celebration of the release.
It features the cloned voices of David McCallum, Georgia Ellis, William Conrad and Dick Bentley. In the debate about voice cloning technologies, I offer this in memory and admiration of those actors no longer with us, and the era of audio that they starred in.
Produced by Pete Hazell
Five and Twenty to Eleven
Pete Hazell (UK 2026)
Pete Hazell (UK 2026)
3 min
Inspired by a serendipitous late night listen, this was made for a recent In The Dark event in Bristol. The event was subtitled: The Sleepwalker's Guide To The City, featuring audio work by Dinah Mullen and Michelle MacMahon.
Late one night on the run up to the event, Pete stumbled across a BBC production of "Rope"By Patrick Hamilton, in which Rupert Cadell (played by Alan Rickman) delivers a melancholy monologue that focuses on the city at night.
It was just the kind of thing he was looking for and this resulting piece opened the second half of the event, held at The Wardrobe Theatre.