Transmissions
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
The Film That Never Got Made
Iacopo Di Girolamo (UK, 2026)
Iacopo Di Girolamo (UK, 2026)
30 min
What does it take to prevent a rock ‘n’ roll star from fading into oblivion?
Join Iacopo on a personal journey to make a film about rock 'n' roll legend Del Shannon, a film that, for years, Iacopo couldn’t quite figure out how to tell. Over 25 years of searching, he never wrote the script, but he did find something else: the people who keep Del’s memory alive. A passionate biographer, a small-town museum curator in Michigan, a devoted fan from England, and a young hip-hop artist with a spiritual connection to Del. Has he finally found the story he was meant to tell?
Produced by: Produced and narrated by Iacopo Di Girolamo
Music extracts by Del Shannon
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)
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