Transmissions
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
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
All-American Ruins: Sunset Town
Blake Pfeil (US 2024)
Blake Pfeil (US 2024)
6 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 Jakob Ahlbom, Anna Dager, Hanna Ekström, Sarah, the Illstrumentalist
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
These Places Should Only Ever Be Imagined
Isobel Anderson (UK 2015)
Isobel Anderson (UK 2015)
15 min
The document of a week spent walking on the Isle of Harris, one of Scotland's Outer Hebrides islands. Through field recordings, an oral walking journal, photographs and objects, the piece interrogates realities of remote locations amid their idealised associations of nature and wilderness. This work examines relationships of ruin and survival, the remote and the fetishised, body and decay, an has existed as a fixed audio piece, an installation and a live performance.
These Places... asks if solely imagining places of wilderness is preferential to inserting our human presence. Places of the remote and wild live and breathe just as our bodies do, but perhaps some places are better left to the mind?
These Places Should Only Ever Be Imagined was performed at Sound Thought Festival in CCA Glasgow in 2016.