Transmissions
XMTR Festival 26: All Washed Up
Sarah Frosh and Pete Hazell (UK 2026)
Sarah Frosh & Pete Hazell (UK, 2026)
24 min
A site specific sound walk that can also be listened to on your sofa.
Washed ashore after an unearthly storm, you awaken on the beach with no memory of how you arrived there!? Step into a parallel town where ley lines, dark magic and strange seaside folklore await. You’ll be moving through an uncanny version of St Leonards where familiar streets become portals into the surreal. Guided by Sirens, broadcasts, music, and mysterious sonic signals, you’ll be led to question a thing or two...
Produced by Sarah Frosh and Pete Hazell aka Limbo Tapes
Comissioned for XMTR Audio Arts Festival 2026
XMTR Festival 26: Manhunt in St Leonards: Station
M Cristina Marras and Gianfranco Bitti (IT 2026)
M. Cristina Marras + Gianfranco Bitti (IT, 2026)
8 min
Manhunt at St Leonards-on-Sea is a 7-episode location-based audio drama unlocked via QR codes at historically significant sites across St Leonards-on-Sea. Listeners follow physical traces embedded in the neighbourhood (objects planted in thrift shops, "lost" posters) while characters based on real people observed and documented in the town drift through the plot, blurring fiction and reality until St Leonards itself starts to feel like a film set.
A woman hunts down a con man who stole valuable secrets. They're former lovers. She tracks him using Moscow rules — the private signal system from their relationship, now repurposed as tradecraft.
As part of their XMTR Festival Residency, Cristina and Gianfranco explored St Leonards, weaving in their personal experiences with a big dose of fantasy.
Produced by M.Cristina Marras and Gianfranco Bitto
Commissionned for XMTR Audio Arts Festival 2026
Glittering Prospects
Anna Bertmark (UK, 2025)
Anna Bertmark (UK, 2025)
20 min
Set on Brighton Beach in 2098, an local metal detectorist records search-reports for the Council's new Portable Foundle Department; a new requirement since mysterious artefacts have started appearing on the beach...
Glittering Prospects is an immersive audio drama exploring humans' relationships with changing coastal environments through treasure hunting and local folklore. This 20 minute peice weaves together Brighton Beach’s hidden histories, environmental mysteries, and the stories of those who search its shores. Inspired by cinematic interview techniques, found audio recordings, and through interviews with metal detectorists, wildlife and folklore experts, the piece presents a compelling fictional documentary drawing from the world of treasure hunting and local coastal history and superstitions. Through the power of place-based storytelling, this immersive listening experience explores how lost artefacts buried beneath our feet reveal meaningful stories.
Written and Produced by Anna Bertmark
Performed by Rachel Capell
Funded by the National Lottery.
Invisible Cities
Will Gore and Esme Curtis (UK 2024)
Will Gore + Esme Curtis (UK 2024)
14 min
A sonic interpretation of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities created for an immersive installation at the XMTR Audio Festival 2024.
Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is an architectural exploration of the complex relationships between memory, place, subjectivity and desire. Told through accounts of 55 fictitious cities, Will stands in as our tour guide, inviting us to look out of ‘sound windows’ that look out onto some of Calvino’s fantastical spaces.
In Ersilla, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the mesh of strings becomes too much and the inhabitants can no longer walk through the streets, they leave to set up a new city. All that remains is a labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain; spider-webs of intricate relationships seeking a form.
“These are fantastical, beguiling places, where things are never as they seem. There's Hypatia, a city of beautiful blue lagoons but where "crabs were biting the eyes of the suicides, stones tied around their necks"; Laudomia, the city of the unborn, whose inhabitants have constructed a parallel city for those yet to come; Octavia, the spider-web city, whose residents live suspended over an abyss, supported by a net they know won't last long; and Argia, a city with earth instead of air.”
Written, Produced by Will Gore
Assistant Producer/Voices Esme Curtis