This XMTR Radio Hour is a preview of what’s in store at this year’s XMTR Audio Arts Festival 25-27 September in St Leonards on Sea, UK.

Lucia speaks to local multi-disciplinary artist, musician and Resonance FM regular Jude Montague about some of the festival highlights and this celebration of sonic storytelling and all things audio.

The show also features audio works by festival contributors:
Floating in St Leonards Miri Berlin
Good Clean Fun by Hayley Clarke,
Habitual Rituals by Stellaria Media,
Manhunt in St Leonards by M Cristina Marras + Gianfranco Biffi,
Five and Twenty to Eleven by Limbo Tapes,
Our Bodies by Martina Pouchlà
FIELDS by Ariana Martinez.

Look out for the live festival broadcast hosted by Ed Baxter on Resonance Extra: 26 + 27 September 10am-6pm.

This XMTR Radio is a tribute to train travel and the pleasure of sharing a journey with strangers or those shared moments on the platform. Here’s a reminder of what taking the time to travel cross country, absorbing the scenery and sharing anecdotes with strangers sounds like. These are two tributes to train life from Social Broadcasts. The first is Trainline, where London based food entrepreneur Petra Barran is travelling in the US, southbound for 36 hours from New Orleans to Tucson Arizona on Amtrak’s Sunset Limited. She gets out of head, ignores her growling stomach and goes on a mission to make new encounters. The second audio work Kings Cross Connections, takes us back in London where we experience some moments of serendipity and coincidence at Kings Cross station as passengers wait for their tannoy announcement to travel north.

This XMTR Radio Hour is a radio journey through 20th Century American Radio with radio pirate and sound art enthusiast Tom Roe. He co-founded 87X and free103point9 and the home for sound and radio art in Hudson Valley, New York State - Wave Farm. Tom is a radio artist, DJ and writer. He produces the weekly Donald Drumpf Theatre show and a regular all things radio and sound-art newsletter ’Turn on The News’. This is a personal history tour through the power of airwaves from comedy sketches to phone ins and everything in between.

Tracklist:

1. Spike Jones and His City Slickers, "The Sound Effects Man"
2. Orson Welles being interviewed the morning after his "War of the Worlds" broadcast in another great acting role.
3. Bill Cosby, "Chicken Heart" excerpt.
4. WFBR baseball radio call Bill O'Donnell, June 22, 1979.
5. WPLP excerpt of talk radio host Bob Lassiter.
6. Excerpt of interview by Tom Roe did with pirate radio operator Loni Kobres in 1997 shortly after the Federal Communications Commission came with a SWAT team and helicopters and a battering ram to shut down his radio station in Tampa, Florida.
7. The Donner Party, "Sickness." sung by Tom Roe
8. Scanner, "Turning the Dial" from "Warhol's Diary."

This XMTR Radio Hour features Tom’s House an audio drama created by British born - Amsterdam based artist Jacob Dwyer. After a short interview with Jacob, we enter Tom’s House with the meanderings of someone who’s returned home for the first time in 15 years. Walking up Haddon Drive he spots the house of an old friend, Tom. The front door is open, so he goes inside. Wandering around the empty Tudor cottage - making cups of tea, rearranging CD collections and zoning in on the minutiae of domestic space - he ruminates on ideas of emotional intimacy, friendship and grief.

This XMTR Radio Hour is a little different. Lucia speaks to Garry Hunter the director of arts and heritage organisation Fitzrovia Noir - and composer/violinist Jack Campbell about a new commission from the educational foundation that has grown out of the Tommy Flowers community pub in Poplar, East London. The pub’s namesake Tommy Flowers designed and built Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer, to help decipher the encrypted messages sent by the German High Command during WW2. 23-year-old composer and musician Jack M.Campbell has recently written and extensively performed a piece inspired by Alan Turing’s Bombe. With a bursary from TFF, he has now composed a score responding to Colossus, the computer built by Tommy Flowers to greatly expedite the reading of Lorenz traffic. The code was cracked by mathematician Bill Tutte, who, after the war, went on to teach at two universities in Canada, Jack’s home country. Following the conversation about outsiders, music, algorithms and maths, is an exclusive rendition of this composition: ‘Colossus’ by Jack Campbell.

This XMTR Radio Hour is a compilation of short audio works that have been submitted to xmtr.fm over the past year. XMTR is an online portal championing and showcasing sonic storytelling in its many forms and genres. These short audio works represent the variety and scope of audio craft from both new and more seasoned audio makers from all over the world. No theme, just interesting uses of sound.

Works featured:

• The Box by Oliver Morris
• Slag Speaks by Emily Candela
• Echo Charmer by Xelis Del Toro
• Live or Dye by MariaConterno
• Offleash by Terry Halbert
• Are We Only Dreaming by Lily Sloan and Zara Zimbardo
• 1001 Stabs by Fari Al Meghari and Lina Prestwood
• The Well, The Bay, The Sea by Suzi Lamb
• The Graves in the Ocean Are Burning by Per Wilhelm Wahlroos.

In this XMTR (Transmitter) radio hour we are taken into the liminal audio apace that is Radio Limbo. This guided audio trip is an unusual quest through original music, collage, soundscapes, and disembodied voices. The show celebrates radio as a shape-shifting portal to other worlds, a wilderness of its own, and its unique qualities of companionship. Join Pete for this curation and performance of surreal scenes and sonic experiments, using local intrigue and lost histories as the jumping-off point. This was recorded live at the XMTR Audio Arts Festival in St Leonards-On-Sea.

Radio Limbo aka Pete Hazell is a music and audio artist based in Bristol. His various projects fall under the ‘Limbo’ umbrella, known for their signature blend of curious music, sound design, storytelling, and collage. His cassette label Limbo Tapes focuses on releasing music, monthly residency on Bristol’s Noods Radio. In 2024, Pete released the audio series Limbo Calling as a podcast, expanding the Limbo universe through character, voice work, and surreal audio fiction.

In this XMTR (Transmitter) Radio Hour, Isobel Anderson (Girls Twiddling Knobs) is in conversation with James Wilkie founder and curator of sound arts festival Sono Electro and Lucia Scazzocchio, founder and curator of XMTR Audio Arts Festival that both took place in St Leonards-on-Sea in East Sussex (26th-28th September).
This is a candid conversation looking back on how the festivals emerged, transpired and developed.
We played sound from Ben Branegans’s Sketch for a Garden, Sound from the In Search of Sonic Wonders workshop by Lisa Hack and Robin the Fog, The Statue of Liberty Big band and Habitual Rituals by Stellaria Media.