Transmissions
Festival Selects: nmiigea
Helen Zaltzman (UK 2020)
Helen Zaltzman (UK 2020)
3 mins
Helen Zaltzman reads the lyrics to ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon, with the words arranged in reverse alphabetical order, over music by Martin Austwick, based on the chords of ‘Imagine’ in alphabetical order.
Produced and voiced by Helen Zaltzman
Music by Martin Austwick
Festival Selects: Do You Really Have To Go? (excerpt)
Nicola Mecca (IT 2026)
Nicola Mecca (IT, 2026)
10 min
"do you really have to go?" is a long-form drone composition derived from the closing twenty-two seconds of the last known Nick Drake demo. Room tone, tape hiss, breath and the resonance of the guitar body are radically stretched, layered and processed until the original recording is no longer identifiable by ear.
These sonic remnants are treated as the last known traces of a final departure, and extended into a long-form goodbye drone.
This submission is a ten-minute excerpt from the complete twenty-two-minute work.
Produced and composed by Nicola Mecca (Keplero)
Festival Selects: Our Bodies
Martina Pouchlá (CZ, 2025)
Martina Pouchlá (CZ 2025)
6 min
A photograph of a nude woman raises the question: Are our bodies truly our own?
Produced by Martina Pouchlá.
Music: "Ana" provided by mobygratis.
Produced for Small Audio Art.
Festival Selects: Humare Tumare (Your Way, My Way)
Fin Kennedy (UK 2026)
Fin Kennedy (UK 2026)
1h32 mins
A feature length audio drama about an unlikely love story spanning 1960-70s London, India and Pakistan, with a glorious soundtrack from the period.
London, 1975. A young couple embark on a road trip to India and Pakistan with their 10-year old son, to reconnect with family across a border which never used to exist.
As the miles roll back the years, they are forced to confront the consequences of choosing love over tradition.
An epic new audio drama telling the true story of Surjeet and Iftikhar Husain, commissioned by their son Iqbal for his personal family archive.
After a live launch and listening event at Tara Theatre in London, and being featured on BBC Radio, the full drama is now freely available online.
The project showcases Applied Stories' unique approach to turning lived experience into compelling audio drama with an epic sweep.
Writer - Sharmila Chauhan
Director - Jatinder Verma
Sound design and music - Farokh Soltani
Producer and dramaturg - Fin Kennedy
Production assistant - Shemiza Rashid
Cast - Skanda Arun, Adwitha Arumugam, Bobby Khela, Shri Patel, Parvinder Shergill
Festival Selects: Siren Song
Kalli Anderson (US 2024)
Kalli Anderson (US, 2024)
7 min
A Ukrainian singer harmonizes with air raid sirens and reflects on the role of artists during wartime.
Produced by Kalli Anderson featuring music by melancholydi
The Stony One
Susanne Lambert (UK, 2026)
Susanne Lambert (UK, 2026)
4 min
This work was created for Flow - a project of artists interpreting the River Lech - a project by Dr Martina Cecchetto, with the scientific contribution of Dr Florian Betz and the artistic curation of Riccardo Fumagalli, in collaboration with Cities & Memory, the University of Padua (Italy), and the University of Würzburg (Germany).
I was intrigued by the changing relationship between humans and river, and the different uses of the natural flowing water in this place. I discovered Augsburg is one of the oldest settled places in Germany (around 2000 years). This fuelled my imagination in considering the scale and scope of change- within both humanity, and the natural environment, that the river has borne witness to over time. I was really struck by the impact of human activity on the river, not least the disruption of its natural flow and use of the Lech for multiple hydro-power plants along its course.
I took a walk along several stretches of the water in and around Augsburg and my overwhelming sense was that it needed our care and attention and that we have a responsibility to the guardianship of its course. Within the composition I wanted to depict contrasting sensations that I felt portrayed something of the complexities of this stretch of river, its history, its present and its future, including flux, chaos, beauty, dischord/disharmony and solidarity.
Working with my long-standing collaborator and dear friend, Nicky Rushton, we shared ideas and musical parts back and forth, and spoke about different aspects of the piece, and slowly over quite some time, the elements that seeemed to belong, began to emerge. We were both interested in the sense of the multiplicity of layers that comprise a river and its environment, thinking vertically as well as horizontally along its course.
Section of the river Lech reimagined by Suzi Lamb and Nicky Rushton.
Composed & produced by Suzi Lamb with Nicky Rushton
Festival Selects: FIELDS
Ariana Martinez (US 2023)
Ariana Martinez (US, 2023)
7 min
The technician seats me in front of a luminous hollow, as if a wide, wide bowl had been turned on its side, its open mouth spilling soft, white light. From this perspective, it’s as if my entire world is the luminous field—swaths of fresh snow, or sun-bleached prairie, or silver sand. In the field, a faint, black cross is joined by tiny, glowing apparitions. Points (each no bigger than a lentil, with a golden center and soft edges) flicker in and out, weave through my field, ask me to chase them. I log each one with a frantic press of my thumb. Thumb to controller, controller to computer, computer to technician. Me, in the field. The computer has generated data from my time in the field: what I caught and what I missed, a ratio of light to shadow. I return to the field every few months to trace its contours, to check that I’m not losing ground. FIELDS is a transmission from the edges of what can be seen and a document of an artist's changing sensory world.
Produced by Ariana Martinez
FIELDS was produced by Ariana Martinez for terrestrial broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Short Cuts with editorial support from Falling Tree Productions.
Found footage comes from publicly available educational instructional videos for ophthalmology technicians performing a visual field test.
Original music created with visual field testing output data graphics as interpreted by PIXELSYNTH (a web-based electronic instrument created by Olivia Jack).
Festival Selects: Habitual Rituals
Lucinda Guy and Alice Armstrong (UK, 2025)
Stellaria Media (UK 2025)
10 min
A composition made from the sounds recorded by participants of The Habitual Rituals Workshop at XMTR Festival, paying attention to habits and routines of how we open doors, walk across a room, use kitchen implements, pour water and other everyday moments. Participants recorded themselves repeating familiar actions, along with descriptions of what they were doing to create a a generative, multi-speaker sound installation that allows rhythms of existence to emerge and interact.
Stellaria Media are based in South Devon and within two community radio stations, Soundart Radio (Totnes) and Skylark (Dartmoor). Our background as artists means we are always exploring, listening, responding and creating together with communities
Produced by Lucinda Guy and Alice Armstrong
Jarman's Garden
Sherre DeLys (AU, 2000)
Sherre DeLys (AU, 2020)
15 min
Throughout a long illness towards the end of his life, filmmaker Derek Jarman put extraordinary passion into creating his unique garden at the edge of the sea in the shingle desert of Dungeness, Kent.
Years later, Sherre DeLys made this audio portrait of the garden - at the time, still tended by Derek’s partner Keith Collins. Keith stayed, he said, because he was held by the silence.
Mirroring Jarman’s own improvisatory process of assembling flotsam and jetsam from this rugged landscape to create the garden, the radio piece weaves manipulated recordings of wind playing on its sculptures created from old tools, chimes fashioned from rusted metal post-war debris and other features of the place, with Keith’s reflections, and music by Chris Abrahams to create an impressionistic rendering of a garden that Jarman described as haunted by paradise.
Produced by: Sherre DeLys
A Climate Revolution with Songs
Jess Hamilton (AU 2025)
Ned Hartford (US 2025-6)
19 min
Episode One of the 12-episode, Metra: A Climate Revolution with Songs, available wherever you get your podcasts.
Metra is an original musical fiction podcast about how we change the world. The show weaves myth, magic, and music to tell a story about the power of collective action—and about all we have that’s still worth saving. Featuring a Broadway cast including Tony nominee Jeannette Bayardelle, Fred Inkley, Cherrye J. Davis, Corinna Schulenburg, and many more.
Written and created by The Hartfords.
The year is 2043. The world is hot, water is scarce, the weather is unpredictable…and the fossil fuel industry continues to thrive. The wealthy are comfortable in their air-purified, cooled, humidified, superbly hydrated Bubble cities. But in a roadside bar on the Outside, an unlikely group of revolutionaries is about to demand a new story.
Script co-written by Emily and Ned Hartford
Dialogue directed by Emily Hartford
Music and Lyrics by Ned Hartford
Sound Design and Sound Editing by Ned Hartford
All audio produced, mixed, and mastered by Ned Hartford