Summer holidays time! A break from interviews until August and today we have a return to 2024 with a compilation of sounds from last year. You will hear sounds from all of the artists I interviewed this year ranging from archival sound pieces to techno to sound art compositions to meditations and trash music. Thanks so much to Veronica Mota, Veerle Pennock and Etta Harbor as Parallel Problems, Felipe Vareschi, Monica Sand, Priscilla Haring-Kuipers from This is Not Rocket Science, Melissa Ingaruca Moreno, Juan C. Duarte Regino, Gina Lo, Luis Fernando Amaya for sharing their sounds. And there are some sounds from me – drusnoise – in there too.

Check out the show notes for the track listing and links to all of the artists. And don’t forget you can always go back and listen to past episodes at sustain.fm/radio, on the RBL show site or on your favourite podcast platforms.

Get in touch with us through sustain.fm or info@drusnoise. We would love to hear your thoughts on our shows, ideas or suggestions for future shows, or if you want to bring a sustain.fm event to your town.

Track listing

Monica Sand – Elegi

Luis Fernando Amaya – Bestiario @luisongolilongo

Melissa Ingaruca Moreno & drusnoise – Endarken @mel_ingaruca

Gina Lo – Live at Berlin Modular Society @ginalololo

drusnoise – Future Soundscapes - Live in Gothenburg @drusnoise

Juan Carlos Duarte Regino – Soundgifts @j.c_d.r

Felipe Vareschi – Noise Mapping @frmvar

Veronica Mota – Utopie und Widerstand

drusnoise – We are but dust and shadows – Live in Graz

This is not Rocket Science – Live at Clubsynth @rocket_not

Parallel Problems – Live at Voltage Control Amsterdam @elektortek @ettaharbar

Welcome to today’s edition of sustain, I’m your host Steve Williams. Today we have some really interesting sounds and a conversation with Zuzana Hamm performing as FridaY. Zuzana is the founder of the new project bitumen lichen. We talk about boundaries and connections – between the organic and artificial, between pasts and futures, between natural and industrial. Zuzana explores all of these boundaries and disrupts and connects across the boundaries through her music and the bitumen lichen project. We hear some amazing sounds from their first live event including the premiere of a soundtrack to Flora’, the latest book by Jonáš Zbořil that narrates a story of a creature born from nature and industrial waste in the wilderness of the toxic outskirts of a city as well as an excerpt of a performance by Nina Pixel that was also part of the live event. I really enjoyed our conversation and the sounds so let’s get into it.

Bio

Zuzana Hamm aka FridaY is a musician, DJ, music journalist and copywriter, event organiser and a shipping and community manager at KOMA Elektronik. In 2021, she completed a music production mentorship programme with Sebastian Mullaert (Minilogue) and the Amplify Berlin residency under the mentorship of Hainbach. In 2025, she finished the School of Song songwriting course with Brian Eno. In her productions and shows, she combines the use of synthesizers, controllers and Ableton with vocals, harp, bass, field recordings and improvisation. bitumen lichen is an outlet for electrorganic music, sound, photography and other fruiting bodies of work, founded by FridaY. The platform explores intersections, commonalities and liminal spaces between what we understand as the natural & organic and the artificial, industrial and urban. Sonically, bitumen lichen’s spectrum ranges from ambient, drone, field recordings and experimental electroacoustic music to low end frequencies, polyrhythms, percussion and breaks.

Links:

Bitumen Lichen https://www.instagram.com/bitumen.lichen/

Friday https://www.instagram.com/friday_musik/

KOMA Elektronik Chromoplane https://koma-elektronik.com/new/product/chromaplane/

Nina Pixel https://www.instagram.com/ninnpix/

Flora by Jonáš Zbořil https://www.paseka.cz/produkt/flora/

Community Chai Berlin https://www.instagram.com/community_chai

From do-it-yourself to make-it-together: Making music (or musical instruments) never happens as individuals. We are connected to other people, other genres, communities, and the materials that go into the instruments we use. Today we talk with JacqNoise, an amazing sound artist and live performer but also a super connector. We talk about sound and music and the power of community. Exploring how connections become part of a community, moving from do-it-yourself to make-it-together. It was a great conversation, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

To close the show we have a recording of a live performance by JacqNoise and her frequent collaborator Dan Graveyard. Thanks so much to Jacky and Dan for sharing this with us. Enjoy the sounds!

Links

JacqNoise https://jacqnoise.cargo.site/

JacqNoise Hijack show on RBL https://rbl.media/programs/hijack/

Erica Synths – Bullfrog and educational modular synths https://www.ericasynths.lv/

Berlin Modular Society – https://berlinmodularsociety.com

Every morning, if we are awake, we can hear the Dawn Chorus. The sound of birds and insects and animals waking up. But what do we really hear? How do those sounds change around the world? And what about the underwater chorus? Can we hear that too? Today we speak with Grant Smith and Mort Drew, both part of the Soundtent collaborative that organizes the Reveil project – a 25 hour long streaming of the dawn chorus around the world. We talk about sound, listening, and working collaboratively in ecological sound projects. It was a fascinating conversation and we listen together to some streams – underwater and above ground.

The streams are pretty quiet so make sure to listen on headphones and turn up the volume when we listen. We talk about flat listening and I encourage you to practice that for today’s show.

Bios

Mort Drew is a creative technician and sound artist working on live audio broadcasts, antihierarchical sound systems, and installations. Their practice explores ephemerality, activist radio, grief and displacement. Their work appears as broadcasts, workshops, publications, sound devices and performances. Mort is co-director of the artist cooperative Soundcamp and co-founder of Associació So (Sound Association) a new sound art collective based in Catalunya.

Grant Smith is a British artist and writer working on sound, transmission, text, domestic and social projects in Loughborough Junction, South London. Smith co-founded the Soundcamp cooperative with Kirsty Collander-Brown and Maria Papadomanolaki in 2013 soundtent.org. Soundcamp’s Reveil (2014-2022), a 24 hour broadcast of the sounds of daybreak on International Dawn Chorus Day each year presented in partnership with Wave Farm and broadcast on WGXC 90.7-FM.

Reveil, an annual 24 +1 hour live radio programme, assembled and broadcast from a temporary station at Stave Hill Ecological Park in Rotherhithe. Real time streams are supplied by contributors around the world at daybreak. The primary feed is hosted by Wave Farm in the Upper Hudson Valley, New York, and aired by UK broadcast partners Resonance FM / Extra in London UK and a collection of FM and net radio stations.

Links

Mort https://mortimerdrew.co.uk/ @mort_drew

Grant https://self-noise.net/

Reveil https://soundtent.org/index.html @sound_camp

Waterhall Dew Pond Livestream: https://locus.creacast.com:9443/waterhall_dew_pond.mp3 Jasper Ridge Livestream: https://locus.creacast.com:9443/jasper_ridge_birdcast.mp3 The Locus Sonus Soundcamp where these streams are hosted and listeners can find other live microphones: https://locusonus.org/soundmap/ The Reveil webpage which will go live at 05:00 UTC+1 Saturday 03 May, this is where people can listen to Reveil, read about the individual streams that create Reveil, and join the IRC: https://soundtent.org/reveil/index.html#/ Our most recent call for streams, if listeners would like to contribute a live stream for Reveil: https://poetic-wallaby.pikapod.net/campaign/7ee8f1b6-8049-4dad-a091-92656b680f65/d51edb44-193c-4df4-8634-029f4da10b5a Link to the hydrophones we mentioned, distributed by David Rothenberg: https://www.terranovapress.com/books/aquabeat-hydrophone Link to Zach Poff’s work Pond Station: https://zachpoff.com/artwork/pondstation/

So much about sustainability is about change. Looking at where we are and where we want to go. But often sustainability planning feels like binary choices about technologies, policies, and projects. What if there might be a different way to think about that? Today we explore a different kind of metaphor – metamorphosis. Xayide, the alter ego of musician Aura Danielle Muñoz Barragán, has described how metamorphosis implies potential, that “the blueprint for transformation is always there”. We talk about how those ideas of potential and transformation are part of music, sounds, and “the fluidity of life”.

Links and bio

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/xayidemusic/

Chrysalis https://renatura.bandcamp.com/album/chrysalis

Label re:natura https://www.instagram.com/label.re.natura/

A special live edition of sustain.fm featuring drusnoise performing the composition ‘There is no separation’. drusnoise explores the sociomaterial world through light, plants, radio, electromagnetic radiation, heartbeats, and carbon dioxide concentration data. The improvised composition and performance questions the story that we are separate from nature. That nature is separate from us. That nature is for us to control. But we are a part of nature. Nature is part of us. There is no separation. drusnoise performs with modular synthesizers, samplers, sensors, electro-acoustic instruments, climate data and poetic explanations of the performance element with vocals by Erbse followed by an artist talk and Q&A.

Recorded live at RBL.LAB Berlin 22.01.2025

Many thanks to Dario and the RBL team for technical support for the performance and live broadcast

Bio

drusnoise integrates analog modular synthesizers with digital FX and organic samples to create a style that flows from lush ambient tones to gritty techno. Known in the outside world as Dr. Steve Williams, his academic work includes conducting and publishing research on sustainable energy transition, sound, and energy justice in Canada, Germany, Sweden, and Norway. He brings plants, heartbeats, light sensors, sonified climate change data, quantum physics concepts, and air quality data to create sustainable live techno and sound art sets. drusnoise is a live, electronic music producer, sound artist, co-founder of Berlin Modular Society, curator of sustain.fm showcasing sound, music, and sustainabiility through live events and workshops, and the host of the Radio Banda Larga show ‘sustain’.

https://rbl.media/en/programs/sustain/

https://instagram.com/drusnoise

https://sustain.fm

Steve Williams’ researcher profile

https://www.sv.uio.no/iss/english/people/aca/stephegw/index.html

https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=mHq_ZhEAAAAJ

Welcome to the end of 2024 episode of sustain.fm radio. I can’t believe how fast the year has gone by and it was a nice treat to put this episode together. It gave me a chance to reflect on the incredible variety of artistic approaches to sound, music, and sustainability. I am so grateful to all of the artists who shared their time and sounds with me over the year, and I hope you enjoy their sounds.

For this episode, we only have music, no interviews this time. You will hear sounds from all of the artists I interviewed this year ranging from archival sound pieces to techno to sound art compositions to meditations and trash music. Thanks so much to Veronica Mota, Veerle Pennock and Etta Harbor as Parallel Problems, Felipe Vareschi, Monica Sand, Priscilla Haring-Kuipers from This is Not Rocket Science, Melissa Ingaruca Moreno, Juan C. Duarte Regino, Gina Lo, Luis Fernando Amaya for sharing their sounds. And there are some sounds from me – drusnoise – in there too.

We have an exciting 2025 coming up with some great guests already on deck, live events planned in Berlin, Oslo, and Lisbon, and some cool research projects starting up soon too. Get in touch with us through sustain.fm or info@drusnoise. We would love to hear your thoughts on our shows, ideas or suggestions for future shows, or if you want to bring a sustain.fm event to your town. Have a great rest of 2024 and will see you next year. For now, enjoy the sounds.

Track listing

Monica Sand – Elegi

Luis Fernando Amaya – Bestiario @luisongolilongo

Melissa Ingaruca Moreno & drusnoise – Endarken @mel_ingaruca

Gina Lo – Live at Berlin Modular Society @ginalololo

drusnoise – Future Soundscapes - Live in Gothenburg @drusnoise

Juan Carlos Duarte Regino – Soundgifts @j.c_d.r

Felipe Vareschi – Noise Mapping @frmvar

Veronica Mota – Utopie und Widerstand

drusnoise – We are but dust and shadows – Live in Graz

This is not Rocket Science – Live at Clubsynth @rocket_not

Parallel Problems – Live at Voltage Control Amsterdam @elektortek @ettaharbar