Earth Day 2023 - Voices for Nature

Agathe Dijoud (FR 2024)

5 min

In this audio piece, Agathe Dijoud joins a march in London on Earth Day 2023, and capture sounds from speeches, music and personal thoughts throughout the day. Nature can take many forms, and has the belief that marches are one form of nature resisting the climate crisis, through a human lens.

Produced by Agathe Dijoud

---

Blue Heart + XMTR

Produced by Stellaria Media (UK 2024)

Stellaria Media · Blue Heart at XMTR

30 min

Recordings made in the 'Voices of Water' workshop at the XMTR festival, mixed with archive material from the Blue Heart project.

Residents of the area talk about their experiences of flooding, drought and water management, historians explain how things have changed over the centuries, and engineers look to the future and how systems can be managed to build resilience in the face of climate change.

Featuring the voices of:
Anna Hastings, Blue Heart Project Manager, East Sussex County Council
Evan Jones, Ecologist
Andy Durling, Eastbourne Eco Action Network
Lousie Elms, Eastbourne Allotments and Garden Society
Sally Lee, Grow Eastbourne
Oliver Sterno, Plastic Free Eastbourne
Kate Baker, Agile Rabbit
Andy Payne, Southdown Angling Association
Chantal Feyn, Eastbourne and District Model Yacht Club
Fiona Durling, Pevensey Forest Garden
Robert Slater, Pevensey Court House and Museum
Katherine Buckland, Heritage Engagement Officer, Eastbourne District Council
Brian Bailey, allotment holder
Neil Raymond, The Star Inn, Old Town
Louise Elms, Eastbourne Allotments and Garden Society
Ruth Kenwood, Gather Community Garden
John Hayward, Pevensey Parish Councillor
Dave Roberts, Gather Community Garden
Peter Birchalll, Pete the Pond
Clare Whistler, Artist, Water Week
Adrian Butcher, Treebourne
Caroline Kimber, Gather Community Garden
Chris Sweetapple, Exeter University

Producer: Stellaria Media

---

Radio Limbo LIVE in St. Leonards...

Pete Hazell (UK 2024)

60min

Behold the first-ever Radio Limbo live show, recorded at XMTR festival in St. Leonard's-on-Sea. Host Limbo Pete guides the audience through selected gems from the Limbo archive. But as the show reaches the control room of Outpost 83, The Operator becomes intrigued by Pete's curious connections between the town’s history and Limbo lore. Could the seaside town’s saintly namesake hold a deeper, unsettling connection to Old Leonard’s disappearance?

Produced by Pete Hazell

Listen to more

---

Brothers

Giacomo Bagni (IT 2024)

Giacomo Bagni · Brothers

13 min

Giacomo and his father have had a fragmented relationship for years. Then, all of a sudden, a new character appears, replacing Giacomo as a son. Based on the author’s biographical story, Brothers is a trip in his inner world while he tries to understand what happened and make peace with it. A fresh take on autofiction, the piece is constructed by using a mixture of first person narration and re-constructed dialogues from the past, with the author inhabiting and voicing all the characters as a way to materialize his inner discussions and trying to make sense of them.

Written, Produced by Giacomo Bagni
Music by ST.ELVIO

---

Beautiful Writing

Stella Sims (UK 2024)

stellastar80 · Beautiful Writing

7 min

Calligraphy is a ancient craft where art, language and words intersect. But in a world of screens, phones and computer-generated fonts, what does calligraphy do for us? Take a journey into the magical world of A to Z as calligraphers explore this question and reveal the joy of letter art and handwriting.

Produced by Stella Sims

---

The Stone Men of Newcastle

Daniel Hinds (UK 2022)

Daniel Hinds Poetry · The Stone Men Of Newcastle

14 min

The Stone Men of Newcastle is a sequence of poems told through the eyes of The Commuter, the speaker and poet-figure, as he encounters the statues of Newcastle as part of his daily life working in the city. The sequence takes in Sir Antony Gormley’s vandalised Clasp sculpture, the St George and the Dragon war memorial at Eldon Square, another monument for the First World War, The Response 1914, and the Mercutio statue in Newcastle’s Theatre Royal. The Stone Men of Newcastle concludes with a consideration of the future figures we will immortalise in bronze and stone. The sequence enters into the current debate, typified by the Rhodes Must Fall movement and the toppling of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol, on how we engage with art and history in the form of statues. The statues sometimes co-exist uneasily with their setting: they are surrounded by the distractions of modern life, represent a past impossible to compete with or at odds with our values, and are vulnerable to defacement. Yet, they can also be sources of inspiration, beauty, and connection to the past, sites of contemplation as well as conflict.

Writer Daniel Hinds
Cast: Dan Pyre and Stacey Ghent
Lead Audio Production Partner: Naked Productions
Partners: BBC New Creatives, Tyneside Cinema, Arts Council England, BBC Arts.

---

I’d Rather Be Swimming

Produced by Clair Urbahn (UK 2024)

7 min

Produced especially for the XMTR Audio Arts Festival. This is an ode to living by the sea. It's why we are all here so please stop dumping sewage in it Southern Water. Cheers to the fellow swimmers that helped, young and old.

Clair Urbahn, an audio enthusiast since broadcasting at an independent FM station in Wellington NZ (radioactive.fm) moved from NZ to London in 2008, had a hand in setting up NTS Radio (nts.live) and set up pop-up stations when that was a thing. Currently overseeing podcast production and network infrastructure for Brazen (brazen.fm) as Head of Audio.

Producer: Clair Urbahn

---

Smugglers Song

Produced by Mary Hooper (UK 2023)

4 min

This track is a remix of Kiplings Smugglers Song created for Hastings Country Park as part of Creative Coast Art Geocache Tour.

Producer: Mary Hooper
Read by Cath Cooper

---

Walking through the submerged forest

Produced by Mary Hooper (UK 2023)

9 min

This piece is composed from field recordings and readings of letters from Bexhill Museum archives, layered to bring to life a part of our eroding coastline and an archive which lies quietly unearthed.
The field recordings were made whilst walking at low tide through pre-historic submerged forest remains, at Bulverhythe in EastSussex. This is layered with field recordings made in nearby woods.

Julian Porter, Rother Museums' curator found photographs and letters in the Bexhill Museum archives relating to the forest, which Actor and Theatre Producer Leigh Shine, read for me in a recording session.
”I hope the piece creates a spirit of place, a sense of timelessness and ever evolving change. The magical experience of walking through thousands of years of human and environmental ebb and flow.”

Producer: Mary Hooper

---

Channeling

Dan Am (UK 2024)

Dan Am · Channeling with Dan Am

7 min

XMTR AUDIO ARTS FESTIVAL is blessed to be framed and mapped by its continued approximation and geolocation to the English Channel. Channeling invites you to stare out into your horizon and tune in further into this oscillating and fluctuating expanse. Channeling is a chance to connect and go somatically deeper whenever you find the opportunity to perch on the many seats, posts and outcrops that are generously dotted along promenade.  Your guided medication to pause and come back to throughout the festival. Whenever you want to step into and separate your own signal from noise and dive in deeper.

Channeling comes from a seminal work called 'Hail The Chimaeran' from Dan Am. Dan Am is a sonic ritualist who explores transmuting his anthemic mythic folk into varying and emanating invocations, incantations and initiations. He is based in St Leonards-on-Sea and his work can be tuned into and explored more deeply via all music streaming platforms.

Produced by Dan Am

---