XMTR Festival Selects: Slag Speaks (Extract)

Emily Candela UK (2025)

5 min

‘Slag Speaks’ centres on a seemingly unassuming specimen found in the backroom archive of the Lapworth Museum of Geology in Birmingham: a small chunk of slag, cast off by a Bilston steelworks in the 1950s. Slag is an industrial by-product of steel production that is found all around the post-industrial West Midlands. While it is indelibly linked to the region, it lacks the public attention and respect reserved for monuments and the monetary value of the glistening minerals displayed in the front of the museum. Slag is easily dismissed. But it is a persistent and powerful reminder of the industrial past. ‘Slag Speaks’ is a polyvocal life story of slag, including voices of a steelworker, curator, geologist and the fictional voice of slag herself. Together, these voices stitch together themes of labour, the blurring line between human-made and natural, and the dynamics of the often-overlooked, or ‘slagged-off’ industrial byproduct and post-industrial region.

Produced by: Emily Candela in partnership with the Lapworth Museum.

It is part Emily’s Arts Council funded Sonic Minerals project that sits at the intersection of her audio and experimental history practices, and explores the role podcasting can play in museums.

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XMTR Festival Selects: 1001 Stabs

Lina Prestwood (UK 2025)

8 min

To be born in Gaza is to be born already bleeding.
Before you take your first step, a blade is pressed gently, precisely, against your soul, the first of 1001 stabs

Produced by Lina Prestwood
Written in August 2025 by F. (Gaza) 
Read by F. and Lyana Mansour (USA)
With thanks to  Fatima Zahra Gahzli (Turkey)

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XMTR Festival Selects: Radio Incantation - Dzëë

Amanda Gutiérrez (CA / MX 2025)

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8 min

Rooted in the artist’s Zapotec heritage from the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, the work channels ancestral teachings on listening and evoking through the art of terrestrial transmission. In this sonic ritual, radio waves become vessels for connection with unseen and intangible presences, intentionally engaging with the territory of St Leonards-on-Sea — across time, between past and future spectra.

Produced by Amanda Gutiérrez

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XMTR Festival Selects: Posidoniaceae

Giacomo Bagni + Veronica Lugaro (IT 2024)

5 min

In this episode of Botanismi, winter leads us into the sea, where Posidonia oceanica sways in the currents. Once a land plant, it found its way back to the water, weaving vast prairies beneath the surface. A hidden world, fragile and alive, waiting to be heard.

Written, recorded and produced by Giacomo Bagni and Veronica Lugaroy

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XMTR Festival Selects: The Allusionist: Gay Animals

Helen Zaltzman (UK 2023)

22 min

A relaxing list of animals that are gay. Sometimes you just need to listen to a list of animals that are gay.

Hosting/writing/production: Helen Zaltzman
Music: Martin Austwick

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XMTR Festival Selects: Last Station Fog Stories (Extract)

Mary Hooper UK (2025)

5 min

This clip is a new mix from oral history recordings from 2013, Mary Hooper made for 'Last Station' a large scale Touring Project looking at the cultural history and legacy of UK Floating Lightships, devised by herself and Elise Liversedge .

Recording and editing: Mary Hooper

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XMTR Festival Selects: Radio Limbo LIVE in St Leonards...

Pete Hazell (UK 2024)

60min

Behold the first-ever Radio Limbo live show, recorded at XMTR festival 2024 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

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XMTR Festival Selects: Moving House, Moving Kitchen

Lucy Dearlove (2023)

35 min

This clip is a new mix from oral history recordings from 2013, Mary Hooper made for 'Last Station' a large scale Touring Project looking at the cultural history and legacy of UK Floating Lightships, devised by herself and Elise Liversedge .

Produced and presented by Lucy Dearlove for the podcast Lecker

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XMTR Festival Selects: County Lines | Episode 1 | Their World

Phoebe Mcindoe (UK 2024)

41 min

This powerful and highly personal series investigates how criminal networks systematically exploit vulnerable young people, transforming them from ordinary schoolchildren into drug dealers through manipulation, violence, and trauma. An estimated 50,000 children in Britain have been groomed into county lines drug trafficking, yet their stories remain largely hidden.

In this first episode, Phoebe McIndoe hears from those caught in the web of county lines. Between the promise of quick money and the reality of extreme violence, we reveal how Britain's drug trade is being built on the backs of traumatized children, and why the system often fails to protect them.

Presented by Phoebe McIndoe
Produced by Redzi Bernard and Phoebe McIndoe
With original music by Phoebe McIndoe
A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4

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XMTR Festival Selects: Lightning Refuge

Kristina Loring (US 2025)

4 min

What are the gems that lie beneath the wounds? Ruha's family escaped violent riots in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 1983, just three months before she was born.  They were targeted because they were Tamil, the minority. Their successful survival could be seen as a string of coincidences, the result of deep human connections. Or was it the result of supernatural intervention?

This piece was created for The Golden Tape project by Kristina Loring, a mixtape of human essence where artists share their secretive and beloved pleasures, grief, ritual, and desires that they want to keep hidden from AI commodification.   

Producer by: Kristina Loring
Voices: Ruha Devanesan and AJ Devanesan 

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