Transmissions
New Friend Chapter 4 - 1000 Miles
Bitsy Knox (CA, 2026)
Bitsy Knox (CA, 2026)
56 min
New Friend is a 5-part limited series audio documentary that delves into the fascinating story behind photographs taken by the groundbreaking lesbian artist and filmmaker Barbara Hammer in August 1973, on Hornby Island, Ja-Dai-Aich, British Columbia.
It's a story of art, archives, single motherhood, long-distance love affairs and liberation across 1000 miles.
Chapter 4 - 1000 Miles:
It’s the Summer of 1973. Barbara Hammer has had a busy summer, zigzagging across California on her motorcycle, camping and visiting ex-lovers, lesbian conferences and festivals. Along the way, she meets Terry Anderson, a feverishly intelligent single mother of two, an academic with an artistic mind.
Together, they embark on a 1000-mile adventure that will lead them to Hornby Island Ja-Dai-Aich along with two 19-year olds, Martha Ross and Rosemary Allenbach. On Hornby, Barbara Hammer takes three rolls of film, documenting a brief moment in all of its charged artistic and romantic energy.
In this chapter of New Friend, we delve into the torrid mystery of Barbara and Terry's long-distance love affair across dozens and dozens of letters, and culminating in an unforgettable, calamitous road trip.
Listener discretion: This chapter of New Friend contains references to addiction.
Hosted by Bitsy Knox.
Production, research, script and sound design by Bitsy Knox.
Mixing and mastering by Robert Steenkamer.
New Friend was originally aired on Cashmere Radio Berlin and 96.5 CHFR Hornby Island Community Radio. Cover image courtesy of The Estate of Barbara Hammer. New Friend is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. Thank you to: The Estate of Barbara Hammer Hornby Island Community Archives Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Cashmere Radio, Berlin 96.5 CHFR Hornby Island Community Radio KOW, Berlin Company Gallery, New York City Hornby Arts Centre Florrie Burke Louky Keijsers Koning Martha Ross Derek Anderson Rebecca Dunne Emma Walter Emily Harrison All beings, human and more-than-human, of Hornby Island, Ja-Dai-Aich, and its surrounding waters—where I am a part-time, uninvited guest on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral land of the K'omoks First Nation, the Eitsen, Pentlach, Sasitla and Sahtloot peoples.
Festival Selects: Good Clean Fun
Hayley Clarke (UK, 2026)
Hayley Clarke (UK 2025)
5 min
In the past few years I have become fascinated with sauna culture, and its ability to bring people together. It allows people to connect with new people in a space that can often feel quite intimidating. You may encounter people from different walks of life, and speak to people you might not normally interact with. Yet somehow, you’re all on a level playing field inside this sweat lodge.
A couple of years ago, when I was on a self-imposed writing retreat in Worthing, I booked into a local sauna down the road in Shoreham. This is where I met Dan Lawson - Ultra Marathon Runner, Aufguss Master and one of the co-founders of Nomadic Sauna. This is his story to tell, and it’s all good clean fun.
Produced by Hayley Clarke
Festival Selects: Do You Really Have To Go? (excerpt)
Nicola Mecca (IT 2026)
Nicola Mecca (IT, 2026)
10 min
"do you really have to go?" is a long-form drone composition derived from the closing twenty-two seconds of the last known Nick Drake demo. Room tone, tape hiss, breath and the resonance of the guitar body are radically stretched, layered and processed until the original recording is no longer identifiable by ear.
These sonic remnants are treated as the last known traces of a final departure, and extended into a long-form goodbye drone.
This submission is a ten-minute excerpt from the complete twenty-two-minute work.
Produced and composed by Nicola Mecca (Keplero)
Festival Selects: Our Bodies
Martina Pouchlá (CZ, 2025)
Martina Pouchlá (CZ 2025)
6 min
A photograph of a nude woman raises the question: Are our bodies truly our own?
Produced by Martina Pouchlá.
Music: "Ana" provided by mobygratis.
Produced for Small Audio Art.
Festival Selects: FIELDS
Ariana Martinez (US 2023)
Ariana Martinez (US, 2023)
7 min
The technician seats me in front of a luminous hollow, as if a wide, wide bowl had been turned on its side, its open mouth spilling soft, white light. From this perspective, it’s as if my entire world is the luminous field—swaths of fresh snow, or sun-bleached prairie, or silver sand. In the field, a faint, black cross is joined by tiny, glowing apparitions. Points (each no bigger than a lentil, with a golden center and soft edges) flicker in and out, weave through my field, ask me to chase them. I log each one with a frantic press of my thumb. Thumb to controller, controller to computer, computer to technician. Me, in the field. The computer has generated data from my time in the field: what I caught and what I missed, a ratio of light to shadow. I return to the field every few months to trace its contours, to check that I’m not losing ground. FIELDS is a transmission from the edges of what can be seen and a document of an artist's changing sensory world.
Produced by Ariana Martinez
FIELDS was produced by Ariana Martinez for terrestrial broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Short Cuts with editorial support from Falling Tree Productions.
Found footage comes from publicly available educational instructional videos for ophthalmology technicians performing a visual field test.
Original music created with visual field testing output data graphics as interpreted by PIXELSYNTH (a web-based electronic instrument created by Olivia Jack).
Jarman's Garden
Sherre DeLys (AU, 2000)
Sherre DeLys (AU, 2020)
15 min
Throughout a long illness towards the end of his life, filmmaker Derek Jarman put extraordinary passion into creating his unique garden at the edge of the sea in the shingle desert of Dungeness, Kent.
Years later, Sherre DeLys made this audio portrait of the garden - at the time, still tended by Derek’s partner Keith Collins. Keith stayed, he said, because he was held by the silence.
Mirroring Jarman’s own improvisatory process of assembling flotsam and jetsam from this rugged landscape to create the garden, the radio piece weaves manipulated recordings of wind playing on its sculptures created from old tools, chimes fashioned from rusted metal post-war debris and other features of the place, with Keith’s reflections, and music by Chris Abrahams to create an impressionistic rendering of a garden that Jarman described as haunted by paradise.
Produced by: Sherre DeLys
Festival Selects: All-American Ruins: Sober
Blake Pfeil (US 2023)
Blake Pfeil (US 2023)
15 min
A multimedia travelogue where Blake Pfeil recounts experiences exploring abandoned spaces across the United States and reimagines them through multimodal storytelling.
The cornerstone piece of the project is abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast, an award-winning audio series which guides listeners through immersive sonic fantasies, recreating experiences exploring abandoned spaces across the United States and around the world. Along the way, the show asks critical questions about American history and culture, community, capitalism and economics, the environment, and mental health while encouraging folks to activate their imaginations as a tool for healing.
The show was recently featured as an Official Select at On Air Fest in Los Angeles, California. The finale for season two is the most personal journal yet. In the episode, which takes place at an abandoned brewery in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Blake reflects on his journey to sobriety, and how his spiritual connection to abandoned places pulled him through the darkest time in his life
Produced by Blake Pfeil
Music by Indigo Days, Lotus, Joseph Beg, Lama House, and Brett Gregory
Featuring Isabel Wilder, Nik Magill
Festival Selects: All Under One Magnetosphere
Hannah Kemp-Welch + Oliver Sanders (UK 2025)
Hannah Kelp-Welch & Oliver Sanders (UK 2025)
28 min
Electromagnetic waves fill the universe, radiating from solar storms and bursts of lightning, but also from our electronic devices and infrastructures. Using simple, DIY tools, a community of audio enthusiasts translates these waves into sound, uncovering hidden sonic worlds.
Five dedicated ‘natural radio’ enthusiasts venture beyond the electromagnetic pollution of the city, tuning into the Earth’s natural static to reveal a rich, textured soundscape rarely heard.
Stephen McGreevy, a cult figure within this practice, shares stories of his recordings during the geomagnetic storm of 1989. Hannah Kemp-Welch travels to northern Norway in search of the electromagnetic waves of the aurora borealis, struggling to escape the omnipresent hum of the mains power grid. Alyssa Moxley captures the crackles of shooting stars in southern France; Matt Parker ventures into the National Radio Quiet Zone in Virginia, USA; and Anonea experiments with antennas from a remote location in northern Spain.
This audio feature encourages listeners to contemplate the vast, often invisible role electromagnetism plays in our daily lives. It invites us to look up at the sky and imagine radio waves bouncing off layers of the atmosphere, connecting us all under one magnetosphere.
Produced by Hannah Kemp-Welch and Oliver Sanders
Research & Development: Hannah Kemp-Welch
Editing & Sound Design: Oliver Sanders
Executive Producer: Lucia Scazzocchio
Special thanks to Anonea, Alyssa Moxley, Dan Tapper, Francesca Thakorlal, Matt Parker, Rob Stammes, Rebekah Breding, Ruth Stewart, Sébastien Robert and Stephen P. McGreevy.
A Social Broadcasts production for BBC Radio 4- Illuminated
Festival Selects: Shorn Women
Chloe Turpin (UK/FR 2025)
Chloe Turpin (UK/FR 2025)
33 min
At the end of WWII, around 20,000 women across France were accused of ‘horizontal collaboration’. Their alleged crime: sleeping with German soldiers. And their punishment was having their heads shaved and facing a public beating. Chloe’s grand-mother’s Émilienne was one of the shorn women of French liberation. Like many others at the time, her story was always shrouded in shame and mystery.
From uncomfortable conversations with family members in Brittany to a trawl through the French National Archives, Shorn Women looks at this controversial and overlooked historical event. Confronting official and personal narratives, it's a story about justice, taboo and the power of speech.
Produced, Written and Music by Chloe Turpin
Voices: James Davey, Naomi Bloomstein and George Roll
Festival Selects: 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.