Transmissions
Momster
Suvi Tuuli Kataja (FI 2026)
Suvi Tuuli Kataja (FI, 2026)
4 min
Momster is an audio poem about how everyday life changes when exhaustion awakens the monstrous porridge brain of motherhood. Using documentary voice messages as its source material, the piece explores the boundaries between documentary, sound art and music.
Produced by Suvi Tuuli Kataja ja Jussi Liukkonen
Voice messages: Milla Puolakanaho
XMTR Radio Hour #44: Strangers On A Train
Social Broadcasts (UK 2026)
Produced by Social Broadcasts (UK 2026)
60 min / Episode 44 of 44
This XMTR Radio is a tribute to train travel and the pleasure of sharing a journey with strangers or those shared moments on the platform. Here’s a reminder of what taking the time to travel cross country, absorbing the scenery and sharing anecdotes with strangers sounds like. These are two tributes to train life from Social Broadcasts. The first is Trainline, where London based food entrepreneur Petra Barran is travelling in the US, southbound for 36 hours from New Orleans to Tucson Arizona on Amtrak’s Sunset Limited. She gets out of head, ignores her growling stomach and goes on a mission to make new encounters. The second audio work Kings Cross Connections, takes us back in London where we experience some moments of serendipity and coincidence at Kings Cross station as passengers wait for their tannoy announcement to travel north.
Listen to Lowlines
Listen to the rest of Kings Cross Connections
XMTR Radio Hour Produced by Lucia Scazzocchio
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Many Moons Ago
Bárbara Fonseca (PT 2026)
Bárbara Fonseca (PT 2026)
4 mins
Many Moons Ago is an audio piece that reflects on oral storytelling traditions using a family weredonkey story as a starting point. The story, told many times, was transformed along the way, shapeshifting according to each narrator’s will.
In this piece, the artist weaves the voices of her family members with her own, materialising it into an intergenerational narrative. A new collaborative version of the story, containing pieces of each narrators perspective, is created. Not in order to be a definitive version, but to inspire and evoque the fluidity and magic of oral storytelling.
Produced and Recorded by Bárbara Fonseca
Mastered by Wawrzyniec Wróblewski
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
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
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.
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.
Produced by Pete Hazell.
Music by Dive Reflex Service
Instrumental Romance
Kim David Bots (NL 2025)
Kim David Bots (NL 2025)
45 min
In 2023, while walking with his dog friend Miemel, Kim found a CD in the river Maas near Maastricht. The CD was clearly unplayable, but its title still readable; Instrumental Romance. It felt like a question from a not so distant past. What is romance as an instrument? Romance instrumentalized? At the same time he was experimenting with text to speech voices and recognized something that you could call an instrumentalized form of romance. These voices 'work' because they use pauses, timbres and intonation your ear recognizes as human. At the same time they can’t convince completely. In them exists a sort of auditory uncanny valley. From the idea of the uncanny and romantic in sound/music/story he started experimenting and writing and out of it came 'Instrumental Romance’. It consists of a chain of 11 narrative, musical vignettes (some more narrative then others).
Produced and composed by Kim David Bots
XMTR Radio Hour #40: Shorts 2025
Social Broadcasts (UK 2026)
Produced by Social Broadcasts (UK 202)
60 min / Episode 40 of 40
This XMTR Radio Hour is a compilation of short audio works that have been submitted to xmtr.fm over the past year. XMTR is an online portal championing and showcasing sonic storytelling in its many forms and genres. These short audio works represent the variety and scope of audio craft from both new and more seasoned audio makers from all over the world. No theme, just interesting uses of sound.
Works featured:
The Box by Oliver Morris
Slag Speaks by Emily Candela
Echo Charmer by Xelis Del Toro
Live or Dye by MariaConterno
Offleash by Terry Halbert
Are We Only Dreaming by Lily Sloan and Zara Zimbardo
1001 Stabs by Fari Al Meghari and Lina Prestwood
The Well, The Bay, The Sea by Suzi Lamb
The Graves in the Ocean Are Burning by Per Wilhelm Wahlroos.
XMTR Radio Hour Produced by Lucia Scazzocchio
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39 Alpha, 39 Bravo - The Sound Of Detention’s Economies
Earrational Measures (IT 2025)
Earrational Measures (IT 2025)
10 min
9 Alpha, 39 Bravo tells the story of profit and exploitation within a specific immigration removal centre throughout 1 day, through data sonification.
It is an uncanny journey through the 24 hours of Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre (near Oxford, UK) in 2016, from the perspective of Pilo Moreno, the co-producer of this track and expert by experience. Pilo guides the listeners through a whole day in Campsfield House, retracing a generic day, a recurring and repeating sequence throughout the 5 months he spent there.
In the background, and as part of the track’s rhythmical backbone, you will hear how much three different characters earned in one day back in 2016: the director of the private corporation managing the removal Centre, the custody officer working in the facility, and a detainee who is employed by the centre for menial duties. All the sounds associated with the incomes of these three social actors were chosen by Pilo.
Through the juxtaposition of data-sonification, haunting sounds and first account narration, the listeners delve into the brutal economies of detention - characterised by extreme exploitation built on processes of dehumanisation which are woven into the daily practices and restrictions of UK Immigration Removal Centres.
The title - "39 Alpha, 39 Bravo"- is an explicit reference to the numbers of the bed Pilo and his cell mate were called by during their time in detention.