Transmissions
Festival Selects: All Under One Magnetosphere
Hannah Kemp-Welch + Oliver Sanders (UK 2025)
Hannah Kelp-Welch & Oliver Sanders (UK 2025)
28 min
Electromagnetic waves fill the universe, radiating from solar storms and bursts of lightning, but also from our electronic devices and infrastructures. Using simple, DIY tools, a community of audio enthusiasts translates these waves into sound, uncovering hidden sonic worlds.
Five dedicated ‘natural radio’ enthusiasts venture beyond the electromagnetic pollution of the city, tuning into the Earth’s natural static to reveal a rich, textured soundscape rarely heard.
Stephen McGreevy, a cult figure within this practice, shares stories of his recordings during the geomagnetic storm of 1989. Hannah Kemp-Welch travels to northern Norway in search of the electromagnetic waves of the aurora borealis, struggling to escape the omnipresent hum of the mains power grid. Alyssa Moxley captures the crackles of shooting stars in southern France; Matt Parker ventures into the National Radio Quiet Zone in Virginia, USA; and Anonea experiments with antennas from a remote location in northern Spain.
This audio feature encourages listeners to contemplate the vast, often invisible role electromagnetism plays in our daily lives. It invites us to look up at the sky and imagine radio waves bouncing off layers of the atmosphere, connecting us all under one magnetosphere.
Produced by Hannah Kemp-Welch and Oliver Sanders
Research & Development: Hannah Kemp-Welch
Editing & Sound Design: Oliver Sanders
Executive Producer: Lucia Scazzocchio
Special thanks to Anonea, Alyssa Moxley, Dan Tapper, Francesca Thakorlal, Matt Parker, Rob Stammes, Rebekah Breding, Ruth Stewart, Sébastien Robert and Stephen P. McGreevy.
A Social Broadcasts production for BBC Radio 4- Illuminated
Festival Selects: Shorn Women
Chloe Turpin (UK/FR 2025)
Chloe Turpin (UK/FR 2025)
33 min
At the end of WWII, around 20,000 women across France were accused of ‘horizontal collaboration’. Their alleged crime: sleeping with German soldiers. And their punishment was having their heads shaved and facing a public beating. Chloe’s grand-mother’s Émilienne was one of the shorn women of French liberation. Like many others at the time, her story was always shrouded in shame and mystery.
From uncomfortable conversations with family members in Brittany to a trawl through the French National Archives, Shorn Women looks at this controversial and overlooked historical event. Confronting official and personal narratives, it's a story about justice, taboo and the power of speech.
Produced, Written and Music by Chloe Turpin
Voices: James Davey, Naomi Bloomstein and George Roll
Festival Selects: Gigi Riva and I
Cristina Marras (IT 2025)
M. Cristina Marras (IT 2025)
12 min
A story about childhood, wonder, memories and (a bit) about mischievous revenge. Well, the story is about the soccer player Gigi Riva who became an actual god in the mind of all Sardinians, my fellow people, when he "led the very modest soccer team of Cagliari to win the Serie A championship in the 1969-70 season." All I can tell you is to advise you that this is not a story about sport, but I’d rather not spoil the plot as I am certain it will surprise and enchant, if you have 12 minute to spare.
Produced by M. Cristina Marras
Festival Selects: Radio Limbo Live From St Leonards-on-Sea
Pete Hazell/Limbo Tapes (UK,2025)
Pete Hazell / Limbo Tapes (UK, 2025)
47 mins
Radio Limbo returns to St Leonards for another guided audio-trip — an unusual quest through original music, collage, soundscapes, and disembodied voices. The show celebrates radio as a shape-shifting portal to other worlds, a wilderness of its own, and its unique qualities of companionship. Join Pete for this curation and performance of surreal scenes and sonic experiments, using local intrigue and lost histories as the jumping-off point.
Pete Hazell is a music and audio artist based in Bristol. His various projects fall under the ‘Limbo’ umbrella, known for their signature blend of curious music, sound design, storytelling, and collage. His cassette label Limbo Tapes focuses on releasing music, monthly residency on Bristol’s Noods Radio is both a mix of new , and in 2024, Pete self-produced and released the audio series Limbo Calling as a podcast, expanding the Limbo universe through character, voice work, and surreal audio fiction.
His latest focus is performance — bringing Limbo sonics to a live audience.
Limbo Tapes
Written, recorded and produced by Pete Hazell
patreon.com/radiolimbo
limbotapes.bandcamp.com
soundcloud.com/limbotapes
instagram.com/limbo_tapes/
Festival Selects: The Gold Line 2026
Dinahbird (FR 2026)
Dinahbird (FR, 2026)
27 min
High-frequency trading uses complex algorithms to scan multiple markets and execute orders in microseconds, demanding the fastest, most direct links between exchanges. In 2012 traders began using microwave radio networks, relayed by antennas on tall, often unnoticed structures, to send data between the New York Stock Exchange’s data centre in Mahwah, New Jersey, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in Aurora, West Chicago, in about 4.01 milliseconds along a route insiders call the Gold Line.
Sound artists Dinah Bird and Jean-Philipe Renoult, fascinated by these antennas and the paths they forge, have been documenting the physical routes the money makes since 2016.
In 2018 they made a ‘slow’ high frequency road trip along the Gold Line that took 6 weeks. Following towers in the Allegheny mountains of rural Pennsylvania, past Amish homesteads, through the flat plains of Ohio and past the immaculately mowed lawns of Indiana, they made extensive location recordings, both next to the antennas and by tuning into their frequencies over the airwaves.
This is an invitation to the listener to reimagine the movement of money. What exactly does this sound like? We hear the static pops and dissonant hums of radio signals intercut with the wind blowing in the antenna wires and the whirring of huge ventilation systems as we drive along Interstate 80. The road trip is punctuated by interventions from experts such as sociologist Donald Mackenzie who tells us how HFT works and just who takes part in these 'speed races'.
With contributions from : Donald Mackenzie, Alex Pilosov, Night Owl and Stéphane Tyc.
All recordings and music byBird & Renoult
Produced by Dinah Bird and Jean-Philippe Renoult
A Social Broadcast for BBC Radio 3’s Between The Ears
Shatto 39
Jenn Swann (US, 2026)
Jenn Swann (US, 2026)
5 min
This piece was originally made for a sound event that asked producers to envision what it might feel like to lose our favorite places in Los Angeles. It's a work of speculative fiction about a real place, and it's inspired by recent infrastructure failures and climate-based disasters in Los Angeles.
Written and Produced by Jenn Swann
The Film That Never Got Made
Iacopo Di Girolamo (UK, 2026)
Iacopo Di Girolamo (UK, 2026)
30 min
What does it take to prevent a rock ‘n’ roll star from fading into oblivion?
Join Iacopo on a personal journey to make a film about rock 'n' roll legend Del Shannon, a film that, for years, Iacopo couldn’t quite figure out how to tell. Over 25 years of searching, he never wrote the script, but he did find something else: the people who keep Del’s memory alive. A passionate biographer, a small-town museum curator in Michigan, a devoted fan from England, and a young hip-hop artist with a spiritual connection to Del. Has he finally found the story he was meant to tell?
Produced by: Produced and narrated by Iacopo Di Girolamo
Music extracts by Del Shannon
Momster
Suvi Tuuli Kataja (FI 2026)
Suvi Tuuli Kataja (FI, 2026)
4 min
Momster is an audio poem about how everyday life changes when exhaustion awakens the monstrous porridge brain of motherhood. Using documentary voice messages as its source material, the piece explores the boundaries between documentary, sound art and music.
Produced by Suvi Tuuli Kataja ja Jussi Liukkonen
Voice messages: Milla Puolakanaho
XMTR Radio Hour #44: Strangers On A Train
Social Broadcasts (UK 2026)
Produced by Social Broadcasts (UK 2026)
60 min / Episode 44 of 44
This XMTR Radio is a tribute to train travel and the pleasure of sharing a journey with strangers or those shared moments on the platform. Here’s a reminder of what taking the time to travel cross country, absorbing the scenery and sharing anecdotes with strangers sounds like. These are two tributes to train life from Social Broadcasts. The first is Trainline, where London based food entrepreneur Petra Barran is travelling in the US, southbound for 36 hours from New Orleans to Tucson Arizona on Amtrak’s Sunset Limited. She gets out of head, ignores her growling stomach and goes on a mission to make new encounters. The second audio work Kings Cross Connections, takes us back in London where we experience some moments of serendipity and coincidence at Kings Cross station as passengers wait for their tannoy announcement to travel north.
Listen to Lowlines
Listen to the rest of Kings Cross Connections
XMTR Radio Hour Produced by Lucia Scazzocchio
Follow the series
Many Moons Ago
Bárbara Fonseca (PT 2026)
Bárbara Fonseca (PT 2026)
4 mins
Many Moons Ago is an audio piece that reflects on oral storytelling traditions using a family weredonkey story as a starting point. The story, told many times, was transformed along the way, shapeshifting according to each narrator’s will.
In this piece, the artist weaves the voices of her family members with her own, materialising it into an intergenerational narrative. A new collaborative version of the story, containing pieces of each narrators perspective, is created. Not in order to be a definitive version, but to inspire and evoque the fluidity and magic of oral storytelling.
Produced and Recorded by Bárbara Fonseca
Mastered by Wawrzyniec Wróblewski