Transmissions
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.
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
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