Low Vines - Pulled Down In Peru

Petra Barran, Lucia Scazzocchio, Lina Prestwood (UK 2024)

45 min

Lowlines is a sonic scrapbook and a passport to roam. Following one woman’s pull to tune into the pulse of place - befriending strangers along the way. Feeling pranged out by the London business hustle, food entrepreneur Petra Barran brought an audio recorder and set off with no itinerary, guided simply by a hunger to get lower and closer to the ground. The series is a holiday for the ears, taking us to the heartbeat of New Orleans, the low-slTw

Two weeks at a plant medicine centre in the Peruvian Amazon - Petra thought this would be a good thorough deep dive and that I might get wiser and closer to the plants, but she soon discovers that two weeks is nothing and that she knows nothing. Everything at Aya Madre is a challenge to what you think you understand and who you think you are. An assault on the senses, a take-down of the ego, an all-out reckoning with not even the release of a firm conclusion.

This final episode of the first season of Lowlines is the anti-conclusion episode. Give it up to the twisting, knotted vines and the soaring, deafening jungle chorus. Just go with it. Petra tried to…!ung wetlands of South Louisiana, the slow gyrations of the Amtrak to Tucson. Down to the brittle rasp of the Sonoran desert, the rich, volcanic soil of Mexico City’s Aztec allotments and further, to the soaring jungle chorus of the Peruvian Amazon.

Produced by Lucia Scazzocchio of Social Broadcasts,
Executive-Produced by Lina Prestwood of Scenery Studios
Mixing & Mastering: Jobina Tinnemans
Music by Hannah Marshall and icoros sung by Maestra Estela, Maestra Yaca, Maestro Nestor and Maestro Daniel

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Historicity Tokyo - NEO-TOKYO 1: Seamy Dives and Corporate Towers

historicity / Jelena Sofronijevic (UK 2023)

59 min

A series of audio walking tours, exploring how cities got to be the way they are - starting with London and Tokyo.

Sometimes taking an audio tour from your armchair works just as well as being there!

This walk explore how Tokyo has allowed authorities, developers, and people around the world to reimagine what a city might be, in the last fifty years. Discover how Shinjuku has distilled the swirling currents of postwar political economy from transport and towers to nightlife and riots.We start at the entrance to Shinjuku Gyōen, a rural estate converted into a national garden, and near the post station, where sex workers gathered in the early modern period. On the other side of the street is Nichō, where the LGBT community has flourished once the sex workers left. It’s a fitting introduction to the nightlife that flourishes in East Shinjuku, which continues across the road, behind the shops and restaurants on the main drag, which started coming here after the earthquake in 1923. By the late 1960s, Shinjuku was a mecca for young Japanese, drawn here by cutting-edge art and political protest. They soon migrated south, but it wasn’t until the next century that the government started to clean things up, even Kabukichō, where the yakuza controlled the sin. At the heart of Shinjuku, though, is the station – the world’s busiest, currently undergoing a redevelopment, which will take 25 years. On its other side, in West Shinjuku, things are very different. A vast water purification plant has been replaced by corporate towers, capped and culminating in the new Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, which dominates a deserted people’s plaza. The walk ends in the garden on its far side, from where, once upon a time, you could see Fuji.

Narrated by Angus Lockyer
Produced by Jelena Sofronijevic

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Mexico City Travelogue

Julia Mitrić (US 2023)

13 min

The narrator collects sounds on the streets of Mexico City and weaves them into an audioscape about music and the experience of traveling while recovering from illness.

Produced by Julia Mitrić

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