Transmissions
In The Dark - Penguin Dive
Hanna Brühwiler (DE 2021)
Hanna Brühwiler (DE 2021)
5 min
What is life like for a penguin?
Put on your headphones and lose yourself as this composition takes you underwater to answer that question.
Composed by Hanna Brühwiler using recordings from The Berlin Museum of Science’s Data Portal.
The piece was made as part of the competition “Music Hackathon: Your Ocean Sound”.
Selected as part of a new producers listening event be In The Dark
Soundworlds: Town Is By The Sea
Soundworlds (CA/UK 2022)
Anna Rheingans / Joanne Schwartz / Patrick Eakin Young (CA/UK 2022)
19 min
An audio picture book conjuring impressions from a childhood spent in the coastal mining communities of Nova Scotia. We follow Davey as he describes his daily routine: from waking up with the sea sparkling outside his window, to playing with his friends, buying groceries for his mother, and visiting his grandfather’s grave. Throughout the day, his thoughts keep returning to his father, working in the coal mines deep beneath the town.
Soundworlds is not just a podcast. It’s an audio stage for diverse stories told in extraordinary ways. It’s a place for an exciting new form of audio drama that we call sonic theatre. Created by musicians, writers, theatre-makers and sound artists, sonic theatre pieces are more than radio plays. They’re immersive sound worlds, intoxicating blends of music and storytelling, sound design, documentary and fiction.
Directed by Patrick Eakin Young
Music composed and performed by Anna Rheingans
Sound design and mixing: Ross Flight
Text by Joanne Schwartz, adapted from her 2017 book with illustrator Sydney Smith
The Balloon
Talia Augustidis (UK 2022)
Talia Augustidis (UK 2022)
5 min
Balloons are usually about celebration, yet this one represents so much more. This subtle and touching piece takes the listener into a deeply personal moment.
Producer: Talia Augustidis
Transformation Through Repetition
James T Green (US 2022)
James T. Green (US 2022)
4 min
What is a home when objects are not present? Jemma Rose Brown meditates on the routines and loops that invisibly cement the identity of a brand new place.
Producer: James T Green
Made for Earlid
Selected by guest curator: Laura Marina Boria - An independent audio producer based between Texas and Puerto Rico with an interest in stories about our relationship with places, sound or gender.
“Transformation Through Repetition is a piece about inhabiting a new place and the routines that make a place ours. I like the expanded use of loops to show the thoughts and movements of the narrator, Jemma Rose Brown. It is playful and meta."
I Will Not Grow Old Here: A Girl from Alex
Mary-Ann Nobele (SA 2022)
Mary-Ann Nobele / Radio Workshop (SA 2022)
27 min Episode 1 of 3
This story starts with a number: 70%. That's how many young people in South Africa are unemployed. Youth hustle and hope to find success, but how do you make it in a place like Alexandra township in Johannesburg? And how do you get out? In this three-part series, 23-year-old Mary-Ann Nobele brings listeners into her life in Alex and shows us why she's made this promise to herself: I will not grow old here.
Hosted by Lesedi Mogoatlhe, the Radio Workshop is a podcast of the Children’s Radio Foundation. We collaborate with youth reporters and radio stations across Africa to tell stories from places that are often overlooked, in ways that reflect how young people see the continent.
Narrated and Produced by Mary-Ann Nobele
The Painting
Neil Sandell (CA 2019)
Neil Sandell (CA 2019)
9 min
This we much we know. The woman in the portrait is wearing pearls, leaning forward, smoking a cigarette. But the rest is unknown – who she was, her relationship with an unknown artist. It is open to speculation. This absence of information invites those who see her to project their own stories onto her. She is like a mirror. Knocked off balance by the painting, the narrator ponders what lies behind his obsession with the woman in the portrait. He revisits an upheaval in his life and a stark truth that he has been avoiding.
Writer/Narrator: Neil Sandell
Producers: Neil Sandell with Mira Burt-Wintonick, Cristal Duhaime & Sarah Geis Sound Design: Mira Burt-Wintonick & Neil Sandell
Selected by guest curator, sound artist and podcast producer Cristina Marras
“I find this piece fascinating yet disquieting for the way in which it manages to embody absence, making us feel all the melancholy of not knowing, that transcends the search for information on the object at the centre of the narration, to become subtle nostalgia, a sensation well known to all expats around the world.”
Kaalavastha: Kerala Podcast
Vaaka Media (IN 2020)
Vaaka Media (IN 2020)
30min Episode 1 of 6
Kaalavastha can be roughly translated as 'weather' in Malayalam. Monsoons in Kerala bathe the state in verdant splendor. Even as this tropical change is romanticized by Keralites, the monsoon of 2018 brings back painful memories of loss and destruction. With hundreds of lives lost and critical lifelines of the state adversely impacted, the tenacity and perseverance of the people of Kerala refused to bring the state to a halt. Instead, the floods gave an opportunity to pave the way for 'Nava Keralam'- a new Kerala on a path to a progressive development trajectory.
This podcast series has been funded by the World Bank so there will be a bias in this story about Kerala's development, but it is region we hear very little about.
Narrator: Radhika Viswanathan
Written and produced by: Radhika Viswanathan and Samyuktha Varma
Music by: Erwick D’souza
A Vaaka production for the World Bank
Listen to the series
XMTR Radio Hour Ep18 : The Devil Museum by Jacob Dwyer
Social Broadcasts (UK 2022)
Produced by Social Broadcasts / Jacob Dwyer (UK 2022)
60 min / Episode 18 of 18
The Devil Museum is a one man radio play, the audio diary of a man photographing all three-thousand of the museum’s devil sculptures. (And yes the museum exists, we looked it up)
For a number of reasons, however, the project cannot be completed. As the diary tracks these failings, the piece moves subtly into less tangible subjects such as boredom, isolation and loneliness.
Produced by Jacob Dywer on residency at Rupert (Lithuania) and contains original compositions by Kareem Lotfy.
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Sound Observations with Maria Chavez & Christina Carter
Sonosphere (US 2018)
Produced by Sonosphere (US 2018)
40 min
Sound Observations is a quarterly performance and lecture series featuring experimental artists from around the nation. This recording features turntablist and DJ Maria Chavez, and vocalist and musician Christina Carter of The Charalambides on May 11, 2018. Maria and Christina's site specific works took place in the atrium of the Crosstown Concourse building, an old Sears Roebuck building retrofitted for art galleries, residential and commercial spaces. The result is echoing vocals and scratchy, vinyl sounds that swirl up a red staircase to the entrance of the stage.
Produced by Sonosphere
Selected by guest curator, sound artist Labrador Basin
“María Chavez’s work to me feels so savvy yet subtle. Incredibly developmental yet effortless. As a listener this piece in collaboration with artist Christina Carter facilitates my view of new angles.”
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Bad Taste: Will native grains be key to saving Australia’s water?
Jess Ho for SBS (AUS 2022)
Jess Ho for SBS (AUS 2022)
35min Episode 2 of 3
Farmers have grown grain in Australia on a commercial scale for years, but none of it is indigenous to our country. We talk to industry experts Bruce Pascoe and Jacob Birch about the potential of native grain crops and the impact they can have on Australia.