Radiophrenia 2019 Production Commissions

Radiophrenia 2020 Production Commissions

Radiophrenia 2022 Production Commissions

Radiophrenia 2023 Production Commissions

Radiophrenia 2025 Production Commissions

Nwando Ebizie - 

Fire Prevention
Or
How to sing a labyrinth
Or
The rebeing and the burning of the labyrinth

An experiment in an audio-ing a labyrinth;  tangling and untangling the thwarted pathways of a mythopoetisised history towards a transformational fire ritual.

How to weave a story into being when I am caught, tangled in the middle
How to reach the crux when the wyrding way turns me about and about and I know the point is far away. And I have to crawl on bandaged knee to get there
How to share a journey when you were never there to feel the stony ground
What rough beast is waiting, waiting to be born in the embers
When were they burned?

The task of the wild woman is to open and be opened
The doors of perception are always just beyond reach but a constant cycle of life death life, of re-initiation will bestow many keys
The labyrinth will determine the correct key
And you are the whole
The task of the wild woman is to open eyes and open thighs and allow the light to pour in

To pull the thread and follow around the walkways
Then gather it all together and weave the tapestry of her own existence
To gather dead stuff, lay it down, sing over it, breathe from the vagas enraptured soul and begin again, remake the broken body and sing the old song until it is new.

We travel through time and space while we listen
You my friend and I
I guide you and you guide me

Maybe by the end of you listening to me I will have the answers

Includes binaural recordings, headphone listening welcomed.

Nwando Ebizie is a constellation point for a spectrum of multidisciplinary works that call for RADICAL change.

She challenges her audience to question their perceived realities through art personas, experimental theatre, neuroscience, music and African diasporic ritualistic dance. Carving out her own particular strand of Afrofuturism, she combines research into the neuroscience of perception (inspired by her own neurodiversity) and an obsession with science fiction with a ritualistic live art practice.

Works include her immersive sensory environment Distorted Constellations, her pop persona Lady Vendredi (a blaxploitation heroine from another dimension!) and the building of her long-term operatic experience, Hildegard: Visions. This award winning work has toured across the world. She has performed in Tokyo (Bonobo), Rio de Janeiro (Tempo Festival), Berlin (Chalet), Latvia (Baltais Fligelis Concert Hall) and Zurich (Blok) as well as across the UK from Home MCR to the Barbican and Southbank Centre.

Nwando works across media, genre and artforms creating mythopoetic metanarratives and alternate realities. Her work is a drawing together of the pieces that she is in a frozen moment of ever-living infinite regress.

Always political and grounded in a mytho-scientific perspective she invites viewers and participants to join her at the Crossroads. At the crossroads where you can choose to pass through the cosmic mirror and touch alternate realities. The realities of what could have been and what should have been and what may possibly be. She works with speculative fictions, possible dreams and lucid worlds.

www.nwandoebizie.com

Nwando Ebizie - Fire Prevention

The Yard, The Room Upstairs (Still Life) is a tape work inspired by allegorical vanitas paintings. Aiming at a moving target, the piece explores the elusiveness of memory by alternating two thematically connected field recordings, each time with overdubs and treatments gradually replacing the original source.

Two memories are revisited alternately three times each. The piece starts out from two short scenes recorded on site: a yard sounded by crickets and a piano in a room. Banal yet charged with what is absent: other senses, inaudible sonic details, layers of emotion. These scenes are recreated three times: first with the original source, the second time with part of the source and the third time without the source.

Scene I: The Yard
Date: August 14, 2020, South-West Finland
Setting: An almost empty camping ground. A remnant of the welfare culture of decades past. A remote bay surrounded by forest, houses, cottages and sheds, peeling red paint. An overgrown playground and mini golf court half sunken into the soft ground covered with pine needles.

At dusk, walking across the yard. The air has a smokey quality and is filled with the rise and fall of the sounds of crickets. They are always at a distance, never near, stopping when you enter their field, then starting again a few moments after leaving it, like the wake of a boat swelling back into the sea. A mouse runs across the gravel and freezes motionless under your gaze. Faint movements in the surrounding trees in full dark green at the peak of late summer. The light scent of burning logs.

Revisit the memory of this moment over and over as it evades you, like the crickets, the wake.

Scene II: The Room Upstairs
Date: August 29, 2020, Southern Finland
Setting: A yellow house surrounded by fields. Windows in all but one direction. Afternoon sunlight. A rarely played piano in a large living room. A dishwasher humming in the adjoining kitchen. The presence of people downstairs felt but not heard. Amateur oil paintings adorning the walls. Portraits, landscapes and still lives, mostly. A book case filled to the ceiling with 70’s and 80’s bestsellers. A stuffed snake on a shelf, a cow hide rug, a hearing aid and batteries on a mahogany coffee table, a pair of large slippers. Another scene inhabited by the remnants of hobbies, leisure time, objects to fill out the measures of an afternoon that grows longer with each year.

Play along to the piano.

The piece contains samples of rehearsal recordings from another work in progress with Aino Juutilainen (cello), Johanna Kalliokulju (mezzo-soprano) and Villa Ruscica (harp).

Marja Ahti (b. 1981) is a Swedish-Finnish sound artist and composer working with field recordings, electronics, feedback, magnetic tape and digital treatments. Her work gravitates towards organic textures and intuitive tunings, assembling rough edged yet precise compositions, poetically narrative and rich in detail. Ahti has presented her music in many different contexts around Europe, in Japan and the United States. She is currently active as a duo with her partner Niko-Matti Ahti and in the artist/organizer collective Himera.

www.marjaahti.com

Marja Ahti - The Yard, The Room Upstairs (Still Life) (excerpt)

Revisiting a shared archive of recorded sounds, it, still is a patchwork of edited, processed and resampled material. Listening for small sounds and moments of intimacy, the work explores the potential of previously disregarded recordings to form new relationships.

soft tissue is a collaboration between Glasgow-based artists Feronia Wennborg and Simon Weins. Working with DIY electronics, domestic recordings and digital feedback, the duo plays within networks of lo-fi amplification, blurring the boundaries between initiated and environmental sounds. 

Recent projects include a self-titled tape release on London-based label Penultimate Press (2019), a commissioned audio-visual piece for West Den Haag, Leaks (2020), and a residency at CCA Creative Lab through AC Projects (2020).

it, still is a co-commission between Radiophrenia and Kunstradio Radiokunst for Ö1, Austria.
Visual Portfolio, Posts & Image Gallery for WordPress

Soft Tissue - It, Still

Ever and ever, forever and ever, you’ll be the one that shines in me like the morning sun. (This is an audiowork about joy and self-love and their interplay.) Ever and ever, forever and ever, you’ll be my spring, my rainbow’s end and the song I sing. (Initially envisioned as an hour long rendition of ‘forever and ever’ by Demis Roussos, the piece evolved to be a reflection on karaoke as a form of love.) Take me far beyond imagination. You’re my dream come true, my consolation. (Inspired by the philosophies of Audre Lorde, Sonya Renee Taylor, Prentis Hemphill, adrienne maree brown and doggface from instagram, along with the love songs of Roussos, Burt Bacharach and Whitney Houston, the piece evokes joy as an act of resistance to capitalism.) You’ll be my dream, my symphony, my own lover’s theme. (The piece practices self-love by singing love songs to itself. The piece remembers joyful dreams dreamt during lockdown, euphoric dreams of endless space, adventure, friendship and belonging.) Ever and ever, forever and ever, my destiny will follow you eternally.  

Tilly Alexander Hallworth aka tandsmør (she/her) is a poet, musician, sound artist and cycle instructor living and working in Glasgow.

https://tandsmor.bandcamp.com/

Tandsmør - ever and ever (forever and ever)

Time is a sliding door –  but if so, what does it mean?

“Time is a Sliding Door” is a variation of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s saying that “Reality is a Sliding Door”. As if that wasn’t tricky enough, substituting ‘reality’ with the noun ‘time’ unravels a kaleidoscope of meanings and implications that turns the ground of our presumptuous existence into a wobbly pudding. If Time is a Sliding Door, and we push it aside, what happens beyond the threshold? The act of sliding means that the other side is only slowly revealed. As well as with a thud, thunder and roll. As radio is a medium which transgresses our notion of time and space, both naturally and effortlessly, how does it come into the picture? If the door opens onto a 5th dimension, and/or still others, how could this be ‘enlistened’ into a radiophonic scape? To be honest, the author of these lines doesn’t actually know, and how could she?

As humans we continue to be tethered to time as a condition of our communication, our perception, our being. It just seemed fit to start with a speedy panorama of the “Swabian-Alemannic Fasnet”. Fasnet (or “Fastnacht”) is also called the “fifth season of the year”, and is recorded in central Europe at least since the 13th century. Its presentation of an inverted world, the parades of Jesters, Fools and Witches, the almost deafening onrush of drums, ‘Fools Cries’, trombones, trumpets and bells truly create a different time horizon.Other acoustic inhabitants of this composition are the cuckoo-clock and clocks in general, as this region of Germany is famous for its clock-makers since the 17th century. And after all, it is not just the shamans of the Northern Tunguska who believe that the cuckoo’s call presages the number of years one has left to live…

 Time is a Sliding Door sticks to the human dimension, playing with the acts of acceleration and deceleration, with the notion of journeying (we shall be travelling from the Black Forest to New Mexico and from there to Slovenia – at least), spellbound by folk tunes, with the whisperings of shortwaves captured in open and discreet places. Hidden stories keep on drifting through radio space, sites and signals keep travelling, and wherever they may go, eventually an alien molecule, touched by radio might spark off the impulse for that door to open up into the unforeseeable. Meanwhile, we’ll keep hanging around this auditory doorstep.

Credits:

Accordion: Olsen auf Aldebaran

Musical Saw: Mimosa Pale

Singers: Sanne Drouhin-Kok, Ulrike Stoehring and Lilli Moors, Fernando (guest appearing for “Adopta una planta”/Datscha Radio, Madrid).

Drums: Paddi (Patrick Guderitz), Toni Brokoli (Pascal Dinser aka Kalle Dinsko) & Junk (Thomas Jank)

Special thanks to: Global Forest e. V., Black Forest!

Gabi Schaffner works as a trans-disciplinary artist within the realms of radio art, composition and performance. Her artistic practice is determined by the methods of poetic ethnography in connection with fluxus-like mise-en-scènes, radio-making and sound art performances. Much of her work originates from journeys. Next to her radiophonic productions, Schaffner creates speculative musical genres and inserts them into music history in order to raise awareness for cultural, gender-related and/or geographical conditions.

Schaffner has been realising award-winning productions with Deutschlandfunk Kultur, radia.fm, Hessian Cultural Radio and ABC Australia. Since 2012 she maintains “Datscha Radio”, a nomadic transmission project that links the medium of radio to current ecological issues.

As a writer and translator, she has published numerous texts; most recently: “RevoltenDiaries”, in: Radio Revolten, 2019. She holds a MA in literature and ethnography and a diploma in visual communication. Gabi Schaffner lives in Berlin.

Current work:
Fazzoletto per un eternità. Performance and vinyl edition, 2020
Rapid(s)Trains: Geolocated audio walk for Open Gorey, Wexford, Ireland. 2020-2021

https://schaffnerin.net

Gabi Schaffner - Time Is A Sliding Door

Alexandra Spence – “Do jellyfish breathe?”

A reworked version of this piece has been released as the album 'a veil, the sea' as a cassette tape or download on the Mappa label. You can purchase a copy here:

https://mappa.bandcamp.com/album/a-veil-the-sea

During Sydney’s most recent lockdown I submerged* a 15 minute-long piece of cassette tape in seawater collected from a local beach. The cassette tape contained a field recording of waves, and a recording of my voice offering a (non-definitive, and non-hierarchical) list of things found in the Pacific Ocean.

I’ve been thinking about connection with bodies of water, as well as connections between bodies and water, and how we might reimagine our bodily limitations to examine the things that connect us to each other and to our surroundings. The sea has always felt like home, and having lived on both the east and west edges of the Pacific Ocean it has become a place of connection for me.

I’ve been thinking about the Pacific Ocean as a home – not only to marine creatures and sea currents – but to the obscure movements of global trade, offshore data barges, and sunken satellites deactivated and dumped from space. Vast bodies may seem infinite, but nothing is – the depths hold mysterious, beautiful, and troubling things.

…Bottlenose dolphins, ancient artefacts, Lego pieces, approximately 36 species of shark, underwater mines…

Imagining an infinite ocean has led to overfishing, floating plastic-particle gyres, lost whales (as a result of the underwater din of shipping and naval industries), and an international sense of unaccountability.

“… Do jellyfish breathe?” is a kind of sonic traversing of oceanic layers, exploring imaginary landscapes, entwining and encountering unequal forms, such as breath with wave, fish with fishing line, along the way.

*Submerging the tape in salt water is an expansion of an ongoing project in which I bury tape loops 7-second field recordings on tape loops before burying them in the earth at the location in which they were recorded. I imagine this as a collaboration of sorts — I make a recording and the physical variables of each place and location alter it. While the magnetic coating of the tape retains sonic remnants of the recorded sounds of the place, the physicality of the tape ribbon retains material remnants of the place: sand, salt, other, which, in turn, impart audibly on the recording in the form of crackles, scratches, tape-warp, and hiss.

Alexandra Spence - Do Jellyfish Breathe (excerpt)

Alias Domaines   – “Being On This Boat Is Not Revenge”

Alias Domaines is a cross-Atlantic collaboration between Sukaina Kubba and Craig Mulholland.  
Alias Domaines is a semi-fictional space where exchange occurs by proxy. 
Alias Domaines is theoretically and virtually located on a cruise ship that travels between the ports of New York City and Southampton, UK. 
Our ship is part of the Cunard Transatlantic Fleet, a real cruise ship company. 

CUNARD: The Cunard brand is a nostalgia for art-deco design and lifestyle aspirations. 
From a post-colonial perspective, art-deco functions as sugar-coating or white-washing of harsh modernist and colonialist power relations driving international capitalism.  While it inhabits a space outside national lands and laws, the Cunard is an allegory for British class relations and British colonialism.  
A cross-section of the ship reveals a microcosm and floating representation of the hierarchy of class and racial structures. 

SETTING: First Class Lounge, Deck, Cabins, Storage Unit and Connecting Spaces 

CHARACTERS: 

Beverly Valenzuela: Concierge and Aspiring Fashion Designer
John Templeton: Entertainments Manager and Pianist   

“Being on this boat, it’s not revenge”

Edouard Glissant, filmed aboard the Cunard from Martinique to France, reflecting on the terrible journey his ancestors took in the opposite direction across the Atlantic. From “Edouard Glissant: One World in Relation” directed by Manthia Diawara, 2009

ALIAS DOMAINES (2021-22) is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts

Alias Domaines - Being On This Boat Is Not Revenge

https://2022.radiophrenia.scot/artist/manja-ristic/

In January 2020 I found myself in Ljubljana exploring abandoned spaces as a continuation of my obsession with listening to the Third Landscape – Gilles Clément’s concept which considers, among other things, abandoned urban landscapes or those which suffered an explicit human intervention as places good for thriving bio-diversities which are building the genetic reservoirs that an overall Ecosystem is dependant on. I instantly got hooked by the largest city project – The Sport Park Stožice. It was supposed to include sport facilities and a vast commercial area but only the public part was built, the arena and the stadium. Eighty thousand square meters of the shopping centre remained unfinished.

As often, politics and economics are inseparable, and as corruptive mechanisms become more obvious, both reveal deep submergence into necropolitics. A capital cumulation on the detriment of basic social rights leading to a radical devaluation of a human life. To cut the story short, most of the “modern” societies “background” economics can be reduced to arms sales, drugs, and human trafficking routes. Beneath them are stock value of oil and lithium, gold and diamonds. 

“Please be careful, you’ll be trespassing”, said a dear friend.

The private partner in the public-private largest investment in Slovenia since the 1970s went bankrupt in 2012. 

There were irregularities in the expenditure of EU funds, the then-Mayor pleads not guilty in the latest lawsuit investigating the case. 

“There used to be a wonderful pond, and a hilly landscape… now it’s just concrete, wherever you look, there’s concrete.”

It was a crispy January morning, I wore my army boots. The site was enormous. Several concrete terraces were covered in various surfaces, reaching as far as the eye can see. I decided to just walk.

..... (see web link for full text).....

Every time you think “That is somewhere over there. Nothing has to happen”, a child that dreamed of freedom disappears.

The composition is made around an excerpt from my Stožice abandoned construction site field recording archive. Recorded in January 2020 during the reZone residency in Ljubljana.
Poetry excerpts from the collection Stories Untold.
Mastering by La Plant Studio Belgrade.

http://manjaristic.blogspot.com/

https://manjaristic.bandcamp.com/

https://sonicmatter.bandcamp.com/
photo: Nina Pernat

‘Nothing Has To Happen, Fortress Europe’ is a co-commission between Radiophrenia and Kunstradio Radiokunst for Ö1, Austria.

Manja Ristic - Nothing Has To Happen, Fortress Europe

Marco Paltrinieri – “Untitled (an anecdote)”

Untitled (an anecdote) is a composition that tells the story of a journey away from reality and towards what could be a newfound awareness for some or perhaps madness for others. But there is no moral to be drawn here. Instead, what matters is the experience of listening itself, to be understood as an act of openness to the possible. In a world largely dominated by the immediacy of vision, I do believe in the role of other senses in bringing a renewed depth to the experience of the world itself and to our role in it.

Starting from these assumptions, Untitled (an anecdote) has a twofold nature: on the one hand it is an homage to the ability of sound to help reconsidering reality and to foster imagination and on the other, it relies on such qualities to accentuate the nuances of the story while experimenting with narrative possibilities.  

—

Written, recorded and mixed by Marco Paltrinieri 
Words by Marco Paltrinieri
Voice by Lucie Page
Mastered by Renato Grieco
Artwork by Mirko Smerdel

Marco Paltrinieri - Untitled (an anecdote)

Siobhain Ma & Rhiannon Walsh – “Journey Through the Auricle”

“Journey Through the Auricle” is a voyage through an elevator centring on exploration and internal and external discovery. Stop one consists of a commission from your ears. They have enlisted our help to clear out the clutter and clatter of what is going on upstairs. Stop two takes you to an unknown land, rich in colour and restorative light beams. While stop three nourishes your roots and provides a sound bath for the senses. Throughout this collaborative piece Siobhain channels the imagined environments through dreamlike synths, while Rhiannon uses metallic and machine-like sound and voices that are not her own.

Siobhain Ma is a sound artist who explores themes of identity, environment and (sometimes) the supernatural in her work.

Rhiannon Walsh is a sometimes audio maker, writer and Reiki practitioner. She enjoys producing content centred around the body, nature, rest and meditation – including ASMR.

Siobhain Ma & Rhiannon Walsh - Journey Through The Auricle

Late Junction - Radiophrenia Feature - BBC Radio 3  18-04-2025

The sounds of aquatic plant photosynthesis interpreted. 

Taking inspiration from the mixtape format, where versioning and remixing are common tropes, Plant Playback presents sections of subaquatic source material, each initially in a raw unprocessed state, followed by sonic diversions exploring the inherent rhythmic and harmonic properties of these sounds.

Interview excerpts with researchers specialising in freshwater bioacoustics, as well as computer-processed interpretations of the sonic data, such as audio-to-MIDI capture, further illustrate a personal quest to understand and appreciate the complexity and strange unknowable nature of these sounds.

With special thanks to acoustic ecologists Camille Desjonquères, Gea van de Lee, and Jack Greenhalgh for their time and expertise on the subject.

Biography

Tom Fisher is a sound artist and musician based in the marshy edge-lands of North East London. Working primarily under the name Action Pyramid his projects vary from site-specific sound installation and headphone based works for galleries and museums, to experimental radio works, music and documentary.

With a background in electronic music and audio production his creative practice involves using sound and composition to re-examine and reconsider our surroundings, looking at the relationship between ourselves and the nonhuman, and our part in the wider ecologies of landscapes. With a multitude of recording techniques, often aimed at exploring and re-interpreting the seemingly unnoticed and unheard elements of our surroundings, he looks to present compositional and spatial expressions of these acoustic phenomena in a way that attempts to offer up alternative perspectives regarding perceptions of scale, hierarchical bias and the interconnectedness of living things.

www.actionpyramid.com/


Action Pyramid - Plant Playback


“Who remembers all that? History throws its empty bottles out the window.“
Sans Soleil, Chris Marker, 1983

A song is playing, in the background. Hey —

Schock!

Still, alive.

Waste(d) land revisited.

This is an acousmatic cadavre, reassembling thoughts and samples that are rotting on a hard drive in a box, in the downloads folder of my laptop causing slow pace or being captured in the fields very soon. As if it was a prehistoric cave, creatures pass in and out. The traces of another time lie buried in the undefined terrain, but I will arrange and add yet another layer to this palimpsest of sounds and form a loop of sonic references and anecdotes, like a Stone/r/d henge in a sonic sphere. Roll out a carpet of sub frequencies! You may hear the echoes of the sirens, they speak with a German accent in their voice in dramatic tone… still, I feel the same.

With voices of Meta D-1, Gertrude Stein, Anna Oppermann, Fiona and the author and a quote by Lawrence English.

Biography

Antonia Alessia Virginia Beeskow, born in Düsseldorf, studied archaeology, Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft and Klang & Realität. As artist, sound designer and performer, Beeskow works in the independent scene, radio plays, podcasts, installations, experimental films and in the theater in different collaborations and writes about female* composers and sound artists for the grapefruits.online fanzine.

www.antoniaalessiavirginia.com

‘Ecce, sigh! Siren calls… still, I feel the same.‘ is a co-commission between Radiophrenia and Kunstradio Radiokunst for Ö1, Austria.


Antonia Alessia Virginia Beeskow - Ecce, sigh! Siren calls… still, I feel the same



Two strangers matched together, their practices intertwine
A blank page
Growing from there
An open cupboard buzzes and humms
Sending snippets in stolen moments
The circle drops, opening a wide and generous hole
Slippage
Talking, passing, exchanging, reasoning, corresponding, joking, transposing
Systems cycle in loops
Accents, language, tones, intonations, cues, pitch, syllables
Prompts
The megalithic Ouroboros fun machine that is Barbie
Touching an elephant
Circles, water, falling sound
Escalators, circular systems, sleep, not sleep
Words that don’t exist
Gleichgewicht
Walking with dizzy spells in saturation
Reflecting, twisting, alternating, translating, modulating, jumping from
On the edges – a Hallwall
Again the elephant, transponder, closed water, eyes
What does it mean to be open and what slips away?
Souffleuse, Echoschwelle, Tonfall
X1, mnemonic, delay
Asking, loops, deathbed
What’s wrong with my eyes, oscillating, brown noise
Pulse
What is an orbit sound
Missing the radiator, voices, vertigo
I could spell it fownetikally/ foʊˈnet̬.ɪ.kəl.i
Meter eater
Mi devas uzi la ŝtuparon

This piece was developed during a week long residency at CCA funded by the Goethe-Institut Glasgow in collaboration with Radiophrenia. We are very grateful for their support.

Biographies

Becky Šik is an artist filmmaker based in Glasgow whose work spans moving image, installation, sound, music, writing and publishing, often working collaboratively. Their recent moving image work explores the echo, electromagnetic phenomena and technologies as way of understanding the body’s relationship to constructs of time and state. 

Becky has presented work across the UK and Internationally, most recently with a film screening at Supernormal festival; Footnotes, a collaborative Radiophrenia broadcast with Sarah Forrest; and the solo exhibition Mercury at Collective Gallery, Edinburgh.

Nika Son studied Fine Arts in Hamburg and has since worked as a musician, artist, film composer, curator and DJ. Influenced by Musique Concre te and the outer space of electronic music, her compositions are built from modified and fragmented field recordings, interwoven with analog synthesis, broken rhythms, rare voice scraps and modulated tape. Sounds of various origin are translated into a very unusual musical language, as if one watches the audible. 

She appeared on various labels, such as Mmodemm, Kashual Plastik, VIS, First Terrace Records, TAL, Sky Walking, Anti-Ghost Moon Ray and her own imprint Noctui. Her latest album To Eeyore was released on the label Entr’acte in 2020. A new album is coming this year. 

Alongside her solo concerts, she creates radio pieces, video and sound installations, and has collaborated for many years with various companions, most notably with filmmaker and artist Helena Wittmann and musician F#X (Cwelle). In her work as a soundartist for experimental film, she is among other responsible for the score and sound design of Helena Wittmann’s highly acclaimed films DRIFT and Human Flowers of Flesh. For over a decade she hosts regular art and music events at the Golden Pudel Club in Hamburg with various international guests. In 2018 she staged a two-day festival called Eruption, freely based on the musician and video artist Conrad Schnitzler. Since 2019, she co-curates the festival Papiripar together with Felix Kubin and Florian Bräunlich. 

www.nikason.de

Supported by the Goethe-Institut Glasgow.

Becky Sîk & Nika Son - TONFALL – Remember, I must use the stairs

Buy here:
https://unpocofria.bandcamp.com/album/a-blurred-raganella

I received this commission proposal on March 14. The same day, my Grandmother Lea turned 99. On the 4th of May, she passed away. Nearly all the field recordings on it were taken on these two dates, in and around the nursing home where Nonna was cared for, using a bunch of her personal effects like: a pocket radio, a toy ratchet from 1930, a pendant reliquiary, a paper knife, her collection of pencils, a deck of cards etc. Voice, tapes, instrument and electronics have been recorded at home after her departure. 

Biography

Ezio Piermattei (b. 1980) is an italian sound artist living in Turin, Piedmont. He  has released solo and collaborative recordings  through Chocolate Monk, More Mars,  My Dance The Skull, Steep Gloss, Discombobulate, Staaltape, Joy De Vivre, Nashazphone. Piermattei also plays in Triple Heater – a duo with Brighton’s F. Ampism – and runs the label Tutore Burlato. 

https://eziopiermattei.bandcamp.com

http://tutoreburlato.blogspot.com 


Ezio Piermattei - A Blurred Raganella

“To enter the ____’s mouth” might feel like sitting on a flower and looking for trouble. While fighting chronic pain, Gura (The Mouth) is building up her character across dimensions using pareidolia, circumambulation and circumlocution. Mistaking entrances for exits, caves for cavities, venturing and fictionalising confidently confusion and coincidence, Gura seeks out loud origins of inherited fears and pains. All of this seems necessary for Gura to divert hypochondria with idiomatic sentences towards an anecdotal journey on a way inside of an MRI.

Comments and sampled sounds from: MRI Scan (Brain) sound by SEBsixsixsix on yt


Biography

Jasmina Al-Qaisi is a poet who writes for voice and paper, articulates and performs language with sound, food or care practices towards uncontainable forms of literature.

When writing with sound, Jasmina shape-shifts in inexistant institutional forms, invents jobs, engages in human and more than human relations and broadcasts temporarily or mobile on free and public radios.

https://jasminescu.com

Jasmina Al Qasi - To enter the ____’s mouth

End of the Line is an experimental radio play that juxtaposes found audio sourced from gay phone sex hotlines with electronically manipulated recordings of hold music from pharmacies across the USA. 

The hotline is an arguably outmoded telecommunication technology that has sculpted and mediated generations of queer desire. After obtaining a free trial to chat with “local guys” via hotline one lonely December evening, I was granted access to the explicit spoken word bios of men seeking erotic company throughout the United States, some of which seemed to be months-if not years-old. This aural landscape felt both divinatory and predicated on the ideologies of cruising; the faceless ghosts of public sex circulating in a feedback loop. This aura of unfulfilled expectation felt similar to the liminal psychogeographies that occur upon experiencing “hold music”; music created to fill a bureaucratic void and intended to ease the anxieties of waiting. 

Recorded directly from my phone, I began to document these voices while compiling snippets of hold music from CVS and Walgreens’ pharmacies throughout the nation. There were two predominant hold music compositions featured, but depending on the quality of the connection, the recordings were subject to aleatoric distortion and degeneration. These disparate audio sources delineate simultaneously purgatorial and quasi-cartographical spaces, and when in dialogue with each other, create a unique hauntological topography that addresses archival loss, queer longing, the failures of the medical industrial complex, and the occult properties of “being put on hold.”

Biography



Kamikaze Jones is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores extended vocal technique, queer hauntologies, and ritualized erotic transcendence. Utilizing counterarchival impulse and experimental research procedures, Jones endeavors to provide both sonic and ceremonial sanctuary for the ghosts of public sex. His work across mediums has been featured by Anthology Film Archives, Black Mountain College Museum, Montez Press Radio, Wave Farm, The Poetry Project, and Onassis USA. He was a founding member of the poetry and performance collective The Anchoress Syndicate, and the host of the podcast “Pure Garbage: An Oral Examination of John Waters.” He is the current arts editor of WUSSY Magazine.

https://www.kamikazejones.com

Kamikaze Jones - End of the Line



What I call my sound matrimony is the sum of the inner and the outer elements that I hear and listen to when improvising with my machine and recording phonographies. It’s a magma of noises, concrete sounds, voices, languages, poetry, riddles, screams and, sometimes creepy stories. The composition came to me as the place where I could share the ghosts in me and the vivifiant present around me, going through a montage of phonographies and a deconstruction of the dualism in between which is a morphological sound and a representational one.

Most of the speech and human voices arise from wonderful women, some of whom are my grandmother Wardia and her friend Haljia, but also a group of women called “Medahates” whose singing voices can be heard invoking the rain with traditional prayers because of this horrible spring canicule. All these voices were recorded by myself in April 2023 in Mayache, a little Mediterranean village in the countryside of Tigzirt in the wilaya of Tizi-Ouzou in the north of this very special and plural country – both beautiful and tragic – that I was born in: Algeria. The composition was made in my studio at Pantin, France.

I borrow this title “Immemorial Echoes” from philosopher Bernard Baas’s book “L’écho de l’immémorial” published in 2016 by Hermann.

See here for translation and contextualization of the piece


Biography

Sara Lehad is a Paris based and Algiers born sound artist and researcher. She’s currently working on her PhD at l’Université Paris 8 and she studied electroacoustic music composition at le Conservatoire de Pantin. Her current research aims to decolonize her practice of music through a matrimonial interest in Amazigh-Kabyle women culture and through thematics such as listening, voice, border of speech, immemorial and intergenerational trauma. She has also a practice of improvisation through an electronic dispositive of no-input mixing board. She performed in les Instants Chavirés, le Non_Jazz, Doxa Esta and Cmptrmthmthcs.

https://soundcloud.com/sara-lhd-554471127

‘Immemorial Echoes’ is a co-commission between Radiophrenia and Kunstradio Radiokunst for Ö1, Austria.



Sara Lehad - Immemorial Echo

An acousmatic composition.

A note from Valerio Tricoli:

Among the alleys of Palermo – the city where I was born – fragility, poignancy and beauty intersect in a unique way. The ruins of civilization, stabbed in the bowels of an earth that burns mysteriously, stand as asynchronous reminders of a history of art, and violence. 

They are also the ruins of someone’s adolescence, and of love stories stolen in soundproof rooms, while someone died of cancer just beyond the wall. 

On the shoreline, overshadowed by the hollowed-out rock of Palaeolithic caverns, the dried, elongated, black seaweed are fragments of magnetic tape, talking to those who are malicious enough to hear.

At funerals one cries, it is certain, in Palermo one cries much more, despite everything. So that emotions can more intensely dig indelible furrows in the mind, and be elevated to the purest philosophy, and the explosions become discourse.

I made this track in the spring of 2023, manipulating the sounds, music, voices, directly on analogue tape.

Biography



Valerio Tricoli (Palermo, 1977) is a composer and performer of electro-acoustic music, currently residing in Munich.

Since the mid ’00 is main instruments for live presentations is the Revox B77 reel-to-reel tape recorder, used as a completely analogue device for live sampling and real-time transformation / editing / mixing of prerecorded (field or studio recordings) and made-on-the-spot sound sources, the latter usually being vocalizations (including speech and singing), acoustic and electronic instruments, objects, and – in the case of group sets – whatever is produced by the fellow musicians.

On a formal level his sets focus on the impromptu creation of a narrative which takes into account the multiple relations intervening between reality, virtuality and memory during the acoustic event: sounds are always hovering between the “here and now” of the concert situation and the shady domain of memory – distant but at the same time present like in a deja-vu experience. Privileging fracture over continuity and by the use of a dynamic range that could often jump suddenly from near-silence to extreme blasts of sounds, an almost tactile feeling of brooding tension is often attained.

His electro-acoustic studio compositions are aligned to the tradition of Musique Concrète and explore themes of the internal – represented both by the psychological and the physical – and of the occult, which together with the large use of spoken text makes them often deeply existential works, self-investigations of the psychological, emotional and irrational horror within.

https://valeriotricoli.bandcamp.com/music


Valerio Tricoli - A Sicilian Tape

The Mouras guard the earth’s hidden secrets. At the mouth of a cave, beneath a monolith, or in the mist of a hot spring, their enchanting presence watches over the entrances to mystical places, gauging the soul of anyone who wishes to enter these sacred sanctuaries.
Adventurous voices set out to encounter these Galician mythological beings, seeking the secrets etched in stone and the magical tales sedimented over millennia.
Will their songs reach the depths of the earth? Will they receive the Mouras’ permission to pass?
And will we be able to listen to the secrets that rise through geological layers, echoing as whispers in the hollows of our own bodies?

Credits:

MOURAS – Produced by Anne Lepère
Voices : Karina Mouriño, teacher of the school of Taboexa, Galicia, Marion Sage and Anne Lepère
Children’s voices : Emil Sebastião, Artai, Brais, Einar, Xurxo, Xián, Baia Rosalía, Seixo
Based on the legends of the Mouras and the stories of Karina Mouriño
Additional poetry, recordings, composition and mixing : Anne Lepère
Special thanks to Marion Sage, Thomas Wyatt, Karina Mouriño, Jeanne Debarsy and Mark Vernon.

Biography

Anne Lepère – Sound artist, composer, and radio producer. 

Since beginning my journey in sound art, I have woven together sounds, breaths, and words to cultivate a poetic practice of everyday life, from urban to rural settings. Inspired by Brussels’ creative hubs like ACSR, BNA-BBOT, and Q-O2, I began producing radio pieces in 2013, ranging from essays and soundscapes to spoken word and documentary poetry.

In 2016, my work expanded to the stage through the Prototypes III training at Royaumont Abbey (Paris), after which I began composing music and sound for theatre, performance, film, and dance, collaborating with directors, choreographers, and filmmakers across various projects.

My radio work includes Autopoïèse (2019), a piece awarded the Palma Ars Acustica and the Phonurgia Nova Prix Art Sonore, and Area (2022), a sound poem nominated for the Marulic Prize (Croatia) and the Radio Drama Festival (UK). Both pieces have been featured at international festivals.

Since 2023 I’m also leading sound creation workshops in Romania, Galicia, Togo,… introducing participants to the art of sound exploration. Currently, I am developing Nuages, a new long-form piece that uses clouds as a sound score and explores collective poetry through workshops.

www.annelepere.net

Anne Lepère - Mouras

'Cadogan Street, girl with Ribena box' attempts to describe a moment of complete absorption: a stranger on a Glasgow street, a child, stopping to sip from a juice box. Selected from a series of sketches that witness people in states of intense concentration, observed over days Kilmartin spent walking Glasgow’s inner city grid, the poem is expanded, looped, erased and supplemented in an editing process that, like the writing, tries to get inside the unexpected corners of a consuming, if fleeting, everyday experience.

Written, spoken and edited by Ash Kilmartin with bass improvisation by Dada Phone.

Produced as part of a residency / exchange with Radio WORM, Rotterdam.

Biography

Ash Kilmartin is an artist and radiomaker from Aotearoa New Zealand who lives in the Netherlands. She is interested in the uses and meanings of the speaking voice and in finding ways to document the small moments of private and collective experience that shape the way we think our own lives. She likes to play with the gaps. She holds an MFA from the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. From 2020 to 2022, she opened the doors at a shop called LIFE. Since then, she is part of the team behind Radio WORM, and the publishing collective Short Pieces That Move!

ashkilmartin.net

radio.worm.org

Ash Kilmartin - Cadogan street, girl with Ribena box

Buy here: https://persistenceofsound.bandcamp.com/album/errant-ear

This piece was composed at the end of 2024 with this feeling of wandering, of strolling in my memories that I was able to capture with my ears, my eyes, my nose, all my sensations, things that my life is made of and that I keep almost like treasures. Here, I feel free to enjoy surprises, to rediscover my memories, to give them new life.

I had the pleasure of using sound moments lent to me by Luke Fowler, Chris Watson and Luc Ferrari, and I mixed them with my own recent recordings and some of my archives from the 1970s onwards – albeit sometimes with painful joy.

Brunhild Ferrari, 24th of February, 2025

“Like most of my fellow human beings, I was born, I grew up, I attended schools, I passed exams, I failed, I loved, I worked hard sometimes, I enjoyed life; I continue. I worked with Pierre Schaeffer in the ORTF research department on the relationship between sound and image. Of German origin, I have had an activity as an interpreter and translator. Following Luc Ferrari’s advice in matters of life, music, and composition, and working with him over the course of our 40 years together, I made my own Hörspiele and radio plays broadcast on France Culture, in the United States, and the main German radio stations. Since Luc left us in 2005, I have taken care of the preservation of his vast archives; founded the “Association Presque Rien – Friends of Luc Ferrari”; initiated and organized the biennial competition PRESQUE RIEN Prize by providing artists with original sound material from Luc’s sound recordings; and edited a book of his writings and documents (Musiques dans les spasmes, published by les Presses du Réel, France) as well as one more book in English together with Catherine Marcangeli (Luc Ferrari: Complete Works, published by Ecstatic Peace library).  I composed music; I continue.”

‘ERRANT EAR -2024’ is a co-commission between Kunst zum Hören ORF Ö1 and Radiophrenia.

Brunhild Ferrari - ERRANT EAR

The piece ‘Tobraichean mo Sinnsearan’ is a layered Gaidhlig soundscape weaving memory and place, anchored in the voice of my great grandfather ‘Tuam Ross’ (1876-1960). The piece is derived from field recordings taken by my Great Uncle and Great Aunt (James and Anne Ross) for ‘The Scottish School of Studies’ aural archive in 1957. In the field recordings they interview ‘Tuam’ on the uses and behaviours of the different wells and springs of his local area (Fàsach, Glendale) on the Isle of Skye.

Some wells would dry up or get warm in the summer, while others would stay freezing cold at all times of year. There are some wells which are known to have healing properties. There is one he would visit to get water for his sisters or brothers when they were sick. His aged voice carries stories of water, earth, and tradition—of wells that served not just as lifelines, but as spiritual landmarks in the community. These transcripts are layered with contemporary field recordings I’ve taken at ‘Loch Shianta’- a health spring on the Isle of Skye located close to where my family was from.

Biography

Cashlin is a Gaelic-speaking artist and experimental musician. Her work explores themes related to ecology and often investigates capitalism’s relationship with nature and the human psyche. She enjoys examining subjects from different perspectives—ranging from the micro to the macro. She plays with time and the viewer’s subjective understanding of space to reveal hidden perspectives and create illusions.

‘Tobraichean mo Sinnsearan’ is a co-commission between Kunst zum Hören ORF Ö1 and Radiophrenia.

Cashlin MacKenzie- Tobraichean mo Sinnsearan/ The Wells of my Ancestors

Bloodline of Flower is drawn from poems by Forough Farrokhzad, Iranian poet and filmmaker (1934-1967). She was published and was widely read by many Iranians during her lifetime, and has now become somewhat of a cult figure. Her poetry is one of protest and rebellion, yet it captures everyday experience without any intention of guiding, educating or directing. Her poetry is the portrait of a generation undergoing radical change. In this piece, her verse lines draw songs from wavetables or modulate the breathy tones of a Ney. Only sound remains…

Voice: Carly Wijs
Ney: Arif Erkovan
Text: Forough Farrokhzad

Biography:

I may say that I devote most of my time to matters related to sound and music. Every now and then I leave the studio and walk the streets and, if luck is on my side I wander along beaches or up mountains. I produce works that help me to understand the world and that voice my questions, discoveries or feelings which are meant to be shared with a potential audience. My way of both learning and becoming a better human being is to make music and sound narratives that describe people and their environments, where sound communicates what words fail to do.

Charo Calvo is a Spanish electroacoustic composer, sound designer and teacher, living in Brussels. After having performed as a dancer with the influential Belgian dance company Ultima Vez, she started her studies on Electroacoustic Composition in 1992 with Annette Vande Gorne at Brussels Conservatory (now ARTS2 Mons). Graduated in 1999.

From 1992 her work as composer is being developed through different media, widely diffused on international venues and festivals, dance performances, theatre, film and radio. She has received several important awards such as Palma Ars Acustica 2014 EBU, Phonurgia Nova Awards Paris 2017/2023, Prix Marulic 2018 Croatia, Grand Prix Nova Bucharest 2019/2022 and was shortlisted for Prix Europa Berlin, Hearsay Prize Ireland.

Charo Calvo has been a guest the residential program for international artists in Berlin DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm during the year 2017/2018.

Last concerts at GRM-INA Paris, KONTAKTE FESTIVAL 17 Berlin, Akademie der Künste, Berlin; MIKROMUSIK, Daad Galery, AUSLAND Berlin, VILLA ELIZABETH Berlin in duo with Natasha Barrett, ELECTROBELGE, Brussels, HEROINES OF SOUND 2019, EPICENTROOM, St Petersburg, CITYSONIC CINEMA, Belgium, BELGIAN MUSIC DAYS, PLEAYADES, Madrid, CCCB Barcelona.

https://soundcloud.com/user-562545561 

Charo Calvo - Bloodline of Flower

The ground opens up, we fall inwards, the shifting rubble opens to ineffable depths. A world unseen, but heard into being. The synth becomes the conduit, transmitting in frequencies, straddling the boundaries between organic and artificial sound, guiding the antipodeal line through layered interiors; crust, lithosphere, asthenosphere, mantle, and core.

The synthesizer is not an instrument of control but a porous interface navigating the imaginary of the natural datum. Turbulence shapes new forms, inverted waveforms, liminal cocoons, subharmonics and overtones, a cartography of the unexplored. The tunnel wall fractures, revealing not just space, but something beyond the reach of engineered design. A cavernous expanse.

Above, renewal? Or at least, a reckoning?

A Line Drawn Downwards blurs the space between history, prophecy, and fiction; folded into the
Earth. We bore into the hum of the world and hope something answers.

Recorded at WORM Sound Studio in Rotterdam, this sonic cartography unfolds through the distinct textures of each instrument; Kawai 100F, Syntron Syrinx, Soma Enver, Korg MS20, Korg PS3210, Optigan, Moog Prodigy, ARP 2600, EMS Synthi, Publison DHM89 B2, Yamaha CS100, ARP Odyssey, Roland TB303, Blippoo Box, Juno 60, Organelle, Boss DD7, Paia Proteus, Roland SP404, Roland D50, Yamaha 40M, Yamaha 60M, Phillips Philicorda, and the Fender Rhodes.

Biographies

Murray Collier is a musician and producer from Ayrshire, now working in Glasgow. He has released music on Sacred Summits (Emotional Response/ Firecracker Recordings), 12th Isle, Real Landscape, Optimo Music and Domestic Exile. He has performed at the Tate Modern, Turner
Contemporary, the ICA, and Tramway, and for festivals such as Rewire (Den Haag), Glasgow Film Festival, Counterflows, 53100 (Siena, Italy) and Donau Festival (Krems, Austria).

Hannan Jones is an interdisciplinary artist whose current research expands hybridity, language, and rhythms associated with cultural and social migration, and psychogeography.

Underpinning her practice is an evolution of sound, Hannan works with electronics, music concrete,
improvisation and analogue recordings. Using samples and layering of audio material, she reclaims parallel histories, and reimagines connections between them.

She is a graduate from Glasgow School of Art’s Sculpture and Environmental Art department. From 2020-21 she was an Associate Artist at Open School East. In 2023, she became a recipient of the Oram Award, a platform to elevate the work and voices of women and gender non-conforming artists innovating in sound, music and related technology. Hannan has performed at Counterflows, Glasgow; SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin; Cafe Oto, London; REWIRE; The Hague; The Tate Modern, London; New Radicalisms, Rotterdam.

Hannan Jones & Murray Collier - A Line Drawn Downwards

The work emerges as a collage of spectral remnants, weaving fragmented memories and sonic decay into a textured exploration of fragility and persistence. It navigates the temporal erosion of sound and memory, uncovering layers of meaning through glitch, plunderphonics, and drones.

Using obsolete media (minidisc’s / CD), loops, and layered field recordings, Home Truths incorporates re-recorded WhatsApp voice messages—modern-day answer machine fragments degraded through repeated transfers onto minidisc. In some instances, these recordings underwent extensive processing, including guitar pedals and vocoders,  to craft the central sonic textures and motifs. Traditional musical elements—electric piano, guitars – were layered around this degraded archive of sound, creating harmonic interplay with the spectral echoes of friends, family and found radio recordings from the early 2000’s on minidisc. Special thanks to artist and friend Bel Gilbert Scott.

JW: acoustic & electric guitars, mini-disc players, CD players, electronics, field recordings, contact mics and objects.

 Biography

Jennifer Wicks is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans durational installations, audiovisual performances, sound art releases, and creative-critical writing. Her work interrogates memory, language, and states of being through experimental methods, emphasising light, time, and sound. Employing obsolete media, 16mm film, reappropriated materials, and custom light-to-sound instruments, she explores the materiality of sound and image. Using Media Archaeology and contemporary technologies, she treats them both as subjects of inquiry and as tools to critique the dominance of digital culture in shaping memory, perception, and our relationship with time.

Her solo live performances explore temporal dynamics, chance, and the mechanics of sound. Working at the intersection of industrial noise, sample culture, cut-up techniques, and expanded cinema, she addresses the limitations and possibilities of analogue film and sound systems. Using modified 16mm projectors, contact microphones, and multiple guitar effects pedals, she crafts immersive, textured, and dissonant audiovisual installations.

She has training in conventional music and holds an MLitt in Fine Art Practice (Glasgow School of Art) and an MSc in Sound Design and Audio-Visual Practice (University of Glasgow). She has received a Leverhulme-funded artist residency at Glasgow University (2011-2012) and was Artist in Residence at the University of Stirling (2022), working with the Norman McLaren archive. Her recent projects span international exhibitions and festivals. She makes music with WOMEN’S HOUR (Wicks and Contort Yourself head honcho Murray CY). LP released on L.I.E.S. Records, December 2023.

https://jenniferwicks.co.uk/

Jennifer Wicks - Home Truths

How can you use the art of sound to make painful memory joyful, without negating the importance of painful experience? What is myth? What is awe? How can you honor, yet document the unknown? Where do the personal, cultural, emotional politics collide in a rendering of sonicity? What does it mean to endure? 

These are questions that currently fascinate me.  My current work is focused on collaging experiential process through soundscape exploration, based on unique embodied experiences.  

Just before the world shutdown in 2019 I voyaged on an English cargo ship from the United Kingdom to North America. I wanted to know…to embody the motion, movements of not only a history but of a wonder around sounds, memory, what we carry, what we leave behind whether by choice or force.

I carried with me a small “roberts radio”, that refused to work of course, b/c there was no signal. So I kept an audio diary and from that, a series of field recordings, and footage I made during this time,  I present to you a radio collage, of a life changing moment for me not only as an artist, but as a person, entitled “Chasing Hopes on the Star Atlantic…” 

Biography

Matana Roberts is an internationally celebrated composer, performer, band leader, saxophonist, sound experimentalist, and mixed-media practitioner. 

Working across many contexts and mediums, including improvisation, music composition, visual art, dance, poetry, and theatre, Roberts is perhaps best known for their acclaimed Coin Coin project – a multi-chapter work of ‘panoramic sound quilting’ mixed media performance work, that aims to expose the mystical roots and intuitive traditions of American creative expression, while maintaining a deep and substantive engagement with narrative, history, community and political expression within sonic structures.

“Chasing Hopes on the Star Atlantic…” is a co-commission between Kunst zum Hören ORF Ö1 and Radiophrenia.

https://www.matanaroberts.com/

Matana Roberts - Chasing Hopes on the Star Atlantic

‘I hear her call: Salome…? Danu…? Come ah-come…’ is a surreal folkloristic sonic tale or a journey through memories encountered in a fever dream. Scenic echoes intimately evolve, looped until they burst into strange atmospheres and rhythms. We meet a hopelessly entangled voice, haunted and lost. Bewildered by fragmented distortions she attempts to unpick a series of flickering scenes. Delving into the emotional world of both adult and child. Something significant that happened. Imprinted in memory. Amorphous and vague. A lament. The forest is crying against a blurred background. A ritual unfolds, lifts a spell of silence. Hidden behind the noise she remains indistinct. Vibrant matters pulsating. A gatekeeper of invisible worlds. An empty corridor filled with footsteps. She flees into the river. A ghostly figure. A cry. A flower left on the kitchen table. A chant.

She leads us through chaotic waters of electro acoustic instrumentation, field recordings, noise, singing, spoken narration, decaying tape loops, and a rich tapestry of both analogue and digital experimental recording processes. Mocking, hiding, guiding, waking, haunting, lost, mourning, grieving, she runs through rhythmic glimpses, moving between nuances of lightness and downfall.

Biography

Mondlane is the solo moniker of sound artist Lisa Fabian, also in the Glasgow trio NEY. As Mondlane, she layers field recordings with processed vocals and manipulated fragments and electroacoustic instrumentation. She draws from a growing library of intimate recordings, using her narrative rich samples as instruments in improvised performances.

Interested in the personal and collective experience and unconscious, she explores the fragmentation and reassembly of narrative. Often touching on themes of intimacy, temporality, otherworldliness, and relationships that materialise in-between bodies and memories, as well as archival or collected material.

Most recent work was shown at: The Old Church Stoke Newington (London), Cafe Oto (London), The Old Hairdressers (Glasgow), EXIT (Glasgow), 90mil (Berlin), Globe Gallery (Berlin), The House of Bell Street (Glasgow), The Briggait (Glasgow), Hoxton 253 (London), Keep in touch Gallery (Seoul), CCA – Centre of Contemporary Arts (Glasgow) amongst others. Recent residencies include CCA Creative Lab Glasgow (2023), Countdown Grabowsee Berlin (2024), Countdown Grabowsee Berlin (2023).

Mondlane - “I hear her call: Salome…? Danu…? Come ah-come…”

As a child I travelled the world on BCL radio and was fascinated by the music and languages of distant countries with fading phenomena.

Once, while checking the shortwave band, a ‘pheeew’ noise passed by. 

The frequency range was very wide,and the overall frequency was heard to rise in a continuous sequence of changes.

What was that sound?

Jamming 2025 is an attempt to recreate that experience from memory.

Biography:

Phew is a musician based in Tokyo, Japan. While fronting Aunt Sally, one of Osaka’s earliest punk groups, Phew played a critical role in developing Japan’s underground music scene. Phew’s oeuvre spans a vast array of experimental sounds: from no-wavey synth-hymns; to poppy, shoegazing, industrial undertones; to eerie incandescent drones. Since the 1970s, Phew’s dynamic, compelling voice and her commitment to unfettered experimentation has been critical in shaping the sound of avant-garde music both in Japan and internationally.

https://phewjapan.bandcamp.com

Phew - Jamming 2025

Ute Wassermann interweaves her voice with field recordings of birds, insects, frogs – of creatures that move across the boundaries between air, water and earth and finds new and different resonance places far away from their original environment. Fragile, seemingly natural sounds, such as the buzzing of bees under water, can be transformed into technoid drones. Snippets of soundscapes ghost through objects.  Does the singer retain her identity or does she become the ‘other’? The boundary between self and environment becomes fluid, so that the latter itself becomes an illusion in favour of a more complex reality. The binaries of animal and human, object and human, nature and technology are turned upside down in favour of interwoven relationships based on reciprocity.

Ute Wassermann: voice, bird whistles
Felix Blume: field recordings 

Biography

Ute Wassermann is one of the outstanding contemporary vocal artists of our time. She combines composition, improvisation and performance art to create her own form of Gesamtkunst, in which environmentally relevant themes play an essential role. At the centre of her research is the continuous and uncompromising exploration of her voice. Ute Wassermann’s singing goes far beyond the human voice and manifests itself in multidimensional sculptural sounds that oscillate between electronic, animal, inorganic and human qualities. She takes this to the extreme by creating a visceral sound space through the use of different types of microphones. In addition, she expands and alienates her voice through the use of bird whistles, lo-fi electronics, resonators, field recordings and objects.

She has been touring the world as an improviser and performer of contemporary music for many years. In the last ten years, she has increasingly realised audiovisual performances, installations and compositions for soloists and ensembles.

“Imaginary Habitats” is a co-commission between Goethe-Institut Glasgow and Radiophrenia. We are grateful for their support.

Photo credits: Cristina Marx/Photomusix

https://utewassermann.com

Ute Wassermann - Imaginary Habitat



Year of the Dragon. A mother draws a circle. Spins round. Pins everything but the tail on the donkey. She wants to know how the dragon makes fire, gets inside it. On the inside things slow.

Written in the Year of the Dragon, Zara Joan Miller’s long poem traces fire across a year. The figure of Saint Margaret, who freed herself from the belly of a dragon, is relocated in living voices that challenge structures of oppression today. A year of feeding fire, of dousing and soft loving. A mother waits in disguise by the fire exit.

Biography

Zara Joan Miller is an artist working across poetry, performance and film. Her work seeks to unravel boundaries between human and non-human nature, often playing with movement and sound as a way of reimagining a body’s rhythm. Zara is the author of poetry collection BLUE MONDAY (JOAN Publishing, 2022), which was also released as a duo LP with cellist Ute Kanngießer (Reading Group 2023). Her work has recently been presented at Barbican Centre, Muse Gallery, Horse Hospital, Cafe OTO (London), In Vitro (Brussels), Default

https://zarajoanmiller.com

Year of the Dragon is co-commissioned by Radiophrenia, TACO! and blurt. blurt is an experimental platform supporting artists to develop text-based works for live reading and performance, and synchronous live-to-air broadcast on rtm.fm. In this testing-site for testing text, four artists and artist-groups consider radio broadcast as an expanded form of publishing. This co-commission is supported by the Outlands Network Exchange programme.

https://taco.org.uk/About-Us
https://outlands.network/


Zara Joan Miller - Year of the Dragon

Tape letters between two friends, one living in a blanket fort, the other in a house of paper, and both deeming each other’s homes unsound, can’t seem to agree on who should visit the other. So instead, one of them builds a house they can meet in, out of the safest material: Noise.

Biography

Yara is a musician and puppeteer based in Beirut, Lebanon. She incorporates accordion, metallophone and electronics in her live performances. In addition to her musical work, she has participated in exhibitions where she featured sound and video installations including ‘Sonatina for 19 Music Boxes’ (interactive sound installation), ’The Cut-Throat Finch Preludes’ (tape loop installation), ‘I Liked it Better When We Lived on See-Saw Hill’ (video installation) and ‘Lapses’ (interactive sound installation). Last year she released  ‘Mr. Samuel’s Teatime Stories for Good Kids and Confused Adults’ – A puppet film in four parts.

https://yaraasmar.com/

https://yaraasmar.bandcamp.com/album/stuttering-music

@microwave.blues

Yara Asmar - I am building a house

“Administrative Embrace” grants unprecedented access to the inner workings and concealed logic of the enigmatic Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence. This transmission crosses rustbelt landscapes, pedestrian tunnels, flyovers, debris fields, and timelines, charting states of decline, delirium, immortality, and heroic obedience. Listeners are invited into the vast and impressive O.J.A.I. world headquarters. Through spoken word, modular sounds, architectural and bureaucratic fictions, lists, timelines, and ambient musical accompaniment, “Administrative Embrace” offers an hour-long exploration into institutional conjuring, information overload, camaraderie, and magic.

Produced by O.J.A.I. in 2024/25 for Radiophrenia Glasgow

Text and voice by Gary Farrelly
Sound and mix by Chris Dreier
Piano by Tim Löhd

Biography

Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence (O.J.A.I.) is the collaborative practice of artists Chris Dreier and Gary Farrelly based in Brussels and Berlin. The work is fuelled by recurring fascinations with architecture, infrastructure, finance, esoteric practices and institutional power manifesting in postal correspondence, installations, sound, performance and walks as well as limited vinyl editions and publications. The work has been presented at Hugh Lane Gallery (Dublin), Damien & the Love Guru (Brussels), Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles (Paris), Marres House for Contemporary Culture (Maastricht), De Garage (Mechelen) and Contemporary Art Center (Cincinnati, US), among many others.

O.J.A.I. produces a monthly music radio show for Dublin Digital Radio and for Cashmere Radio Berlin.

https://jointintelligence.org/    
@jointintelligence

OJAI -ADMINISTRATIVE EMBRACE

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay - Sonic Psychogeographies II

The diurnal anxiety of constant travel transforms dream logic into dream logistics. Vast apartments filled with mutated memories require urgent night-time packing and transport via all means of motor, machine, or mammal. Absurd dimensional incompatibilities produce carry-on bags which contain whole items of furniture. A radiophonic meditation on the containment and escape of material stuff, moved by land sea and night air, embedded in complex, half-imagined wireless communication channels and signal relays.

Anna Friz began broadcasting on campus/community radio CiTR Vancouver in 1993. Since then she has created audio art and radiophonic works for extensive international broadcast, installation, or performance in more than 25 countries, where radio is the source, subject, and medium of the work. Anna is Assistant Professor of Sound in the Film and Digital Media Department of University of California, Santa Cruz, a steering member of the artist collective Skálar | Sound Art | Experimental Music based in East Iceland, and a long time affiliate artist of Wave Farm (formerly free103point9) in Acra, New York.

nicelittlestatic.com

Anna Friz - How To Pack A Whale

In this piece I have recorded as many people as possible within a certain period of time. Wherever I went I asked people to say “here” in their own mother language. Each person was asked to say this word only once, and only in cases of perfect bi- or tri-lingualism did I allow them to say it in additional languages. I have edited all of these single-word samples chronologically in the exact order in which they were recorded. All recordings were made between August 12th and October 30th, 2017 in Vicobarone (IT), Milano (IT), Marseille (FR), Porto (PT), Marseille (FR), Taipei (TW), Bologna (IT) and Lyon (FR).

People, microphones and languages move, at least in relation to each other. Their movement is somehow unpredictable and free as a beautiful dance. Whilst scanning the territory I experienced how linguistic and geographical landscapes intersect in complex ways and how every territory is constantly transversed in multiple directions by so many living beings.

Each of these recordings of a single word is evidence of an individual being in a specific place at a specific moment in time although we may not know the actual details of who, where and when. People come and go and are found in unexpected places, each one of them with her/his own biography and memory. The microphone has its own schedule, its own agenda, and opens a window towards the future and the not here. Languages moreover, travel with people, sometimes the same person carries two, three or more. Languages are not bound to a specific location or to a specific person as they migrate from place to place and from mouth to mouth.

In triangulating languages, individuals and the microphone we obtain precise coordinates of pure existence but we may not be able to infer proper locations. Nevertheless all these coordinates draw a path, a road, a corrugated and fascinating itinerary worthy of travelling over and over again with our ears and imagination. Consider this piece a travelogue, or a meditation on voice in relative space and have a nice trip.

Thanks to Pedro Rocha, Mark Vernon, Camera Chao.

Alessandro Bosetti - Location Series #1

Eliane was my step-mother. She died last year from Alzheimers. In this piece I’d like to explore radio’s potential to evoke memory, disorientation and memory loss. Using her favorite songs on tape. And other memories. Sounds. Texts. Hers, mine. Ours.
sandstorm of memory/effacement/mental landscapes/details/temporal slide/bribes/cut-up method/erasing/éclats/sandstorm of details/memory landscapes/temporal cut-up/bits of landscape/erasing method/snipets of memory
Asking: In the end, is there anything to remember at all?

With the voices of François Cau, Isabelle Hainaud Griffiths, Eliane Ravanat, Gilbert Ravanat and Isabelle Stragliati.

noearnosound.net

Isabelle Stragliati - Nothing here now but - a tribute to Eliane

The work I have devised is a 19 minute sound piece that explores the tensions often experienced through extensive use of social media, hand held devices and digital dissemination of information.
I used screen captures of my online journeys while researching this composition as moving images to create scores from. The sonic narrative of these works echo the jarring imagery that was produced as a result of my low concentration span and complicity within the distractions of the web.

Inspiration for the sounds featured within the composition include: monitor refresh rates, loading and buffering rates, the speed at which information is sent and received, malfunctions, scrolling rates, 140 character limitations and push notifications. I reimagined these elements sonically to form the tonal palette of the piece.

Alicia Mathews - Click Bait

“Strange things stumble through the mirrors, they pulled a clock out of the river – it was oblivious. I loved those sisters; my shirt is stained with tears. At the factory, the Witches run the lathes. Ex-detectives loiter, not knowing who they are. Lacking time travel mechanisms, they attend funerals and take notes. No one notices. They are invisible. The characters converge upon a point in space.
The house.
Where it all started.
The birth of it.
The birth of them.
The beginning.”

VILE PLUMAGE - THE AMNESIAC EXPERIENCES THE VORTEX AS IF SHE WERE AN EEL [V02]

Line Clean 9-6 was a co-commission between Radiophrenia and Resonance Extra as part of Strands, supported by Jerwood Charitable Foundation.

Line Clean 9 – 6 is composed around a series of abstract, rhythmic recordings made on shift at work (in the cellar of a pub), household objects (bins, bikes and cookers) and snippets of found sound recorded on a phone. Using a process of layering and splicing plus augmenting with ‘traditional’ instruments, he aims to draw out the beauty and musicality in everyday sound exploiting the harmonic and structural qualities inherent in everything we hear. The resulting collage combines, water pumps, beer kegs, bin lids, sound checks, bouzouki, clarinet, MS20, cowbells, choral polyphony, pipes and whistles.

www.oliverpitt.co.uk

Oliver Pitt - Line Clean 9 - 6

If I were to tell you how I arrived here, I would have to explain the voicemails. The voicemails have been in the back of my mind for some time. They had accumulated over several years, in fits and starts. A waxing and waning of words spoken into the void. For months, I watched them arrive but I did not listen to them. When I eventually did hear the messages, certain things were immediately clear. The condition of his lungs was deteriorating. His breathing was laboured. The messages had never been easy to follow. They were often slurred, because of the drink. But now when he spoke his words were interrupted by coughing fits, more and more so as time went on. By groans and gasps. Belly-speech. Gurgles of outflow.

In The Absent Body, Drew Leder writes that the healthy body is ‘transparent’. In illness, the body loses its transparency by ‘dys-appearing’. In a state of dysfunction, it appears. When I read this, something about the idea of the loss of transparency seems familiar to me. The pregnant body is not transparent, but it’s not dysfunctional either. In fact, the cis female body is perpetually troubling this idea of transparency in health. I am not the first person to point out that the question of the body’s transparency is not as simple as it seems.

Breathless is a co-commission between Radiophrenia and Kunstradio Radiokunst for Ö1, Austria.

I try to listen to the groans and gasps between the words as sounds in all their electronically-mediated materiality, perhaps I am being evasive. I am finding it hard to breathe as I listen: the body impinges, despite myself. And they call this ‘reduced’ listening. The absent body, on the other side of the voicemails, of the radio. For something so absent, it weighs heavily. Dissipated, dys-appearing.

Hannah Ellul - Breathless

A radioplay by the X-Static Tics (Henk Bakker and Lukas Simonis)

The story is set in the year 2222. Dead Henk, a living corpse brought to life from a previous century (he died in 2121) is forced to be interviewed about his attempt to stabilize the world by introducing people to art. Was it due to his efforts that there are no more wars in 2222, that everyone has made peace? There are no more conflicts. Weapon manufacturers only make space ships. part of humanity is migrating to other solar systems although that is not really necessary; the earth is clean, pollution has been banned. The curiosity about dead Henk is great because with the disappearance of traumatic and conflict situations all forms of art are wiped out. Only the music has survived this genocide on the uncomfortable; after all, you must have something to listen to.

A live version of ‘the day of the great tit’ will be performed as part of an outside broadcast at Platform at 3pm on Saturday, 18th May.

The Xstatic Tics - Day Of The Great Tit

Hermits wear boxes of Kleenex on their feet instead of shoes and keep plastic trolls in the sofa, birds bring them bread, they count their days with potatoes, they live inside their own grave, naked and hairy or wear woven coats of camel hair.

Glass Enclosed is a co-commission between Radiophrenia and Kunstradio Radiokunst for Ö1, Austria.

Glass Enclosed is an epic, solitary incantation performed by one voice. Its points of departure are the ‘Ancrene Wisse’ and ‘Speculum Inclusorum’ – instructional texts on how to be alone written for recluses, anchorites and hermits in the 13th/15th centuries. Glass Enclosed combines myth, testimonial and trope into a placeless, cocophanous soliloquy spoken from beyond.

Kari Robertson - Glass Enclosed

Radiophrenia is a temporary art radio station – an exploration into current trends in sound and transmission arts. Broadcasting live from Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts, the station aims to promote radio as an art form, encouraging challenging and radical new approaches to the medium. The broadcast schedule will include live shows, pre-recorded features and a series of ‘live-to-air’performances. The majority of the programme will be made up from selections submitted to an international open call for sound and radio works.

Broadcasting across Glasgow on 87.9fm, and online at www.radiophrenia.scot 

Supported by Creative Scotland.

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