Summer 2026 # New Works for Radio
Resonance FM & Extra broadcast a summer’s worth of radical radio featuring new and archival radiophonic artworks, community activism, sound art, experimental literature, documentary, innovative music and more. Curated by Milo Thesiger-Meacham.
This morning:
- Harmonic Solo by The Self.
Evolving melodic phrases and harmonic rich passages, played on a homemade harmonic guitar, built and performed by Connor Haynes (The Self) exploring microtonality, drone and prepared techniques.
- Children of the Sun by Anna Friz
The Salar de Atacama in northern Chile was once the bottom of a sea but is now one of the driest places on earth. Located in the high-altitude desert in the Andes, the salt flats contain rare geologic and organic systems, but vast exploitative mining operations (currently lithium and nearby copper mining) continue to radically reshape the land for eons to come. The intense UV solar radiation due to the high altitude and the specific geological formations serve as ready analogs for off-planet conditions; thus this area has been a training ground for off-planet robotic probes and for developing mining techniques that may be applied on Mars or elsewhere. Meanwhile Earth’s ecology is becoming a little more like Mars every day. In Children of the Sun, a Martian returns to the damaged planet, encountering industrialized and wild lands in a process of metamorphosis.
Children of the Sun combines acoustic field recordings and electro-magnetic signals from various part of the spectrum recorded on the Salar de Atacama from 2017-2024, together with two-way radio communications of mining workers and recontextualized NASA Apollo mission communications, specialized electronic instruments, and voice in order to bring documentary sounds into the realm of science fiction, and to listen with the industrial desert and follow some of the many fields of influence at work.
Children of the Sun is one part of a larger suite of audio and audiovisual works entitled We Build Ruins based on intensive fieldwork in the Atacama Desert I have undertaken since 2017 with collaborator Rodrigo Ríos Zunino.
- Excess and Understanding by Anna Barham
A performance text that confronts the gatekeepers of speech. Written through the mishearings of speech-to-text dictation, it asks "whose voice is sound and whose voice is noise?" Moving from women's depiction as leaky vessels in classical literature to intimate queered archives of modern philosophy, the piece tracks how trauma overwrites the body, culminating in a breakdown where grief momentarily breaks through self-censorship.
- Exploration #1 for Two Radios by Kit Beaufoy
The discovery of a beast. A beast that lurks in the electromagnetic waters. A creature formed from the familiar sounds of analogue radio that is awoken by the turning of a dial sending ripples across the radio waves.
Over the course of the piece, the listener is hunted down through the radio, chased by a beast that is not confined to a single frequency and exists all around, silently stalking, watching, waiting until it is illumined by your receiver.
Kit Beaufoy is a London-based artist who works with a series of transmitters and receivers, composing within the radio, in an attempt to reanimate and reframe analogue radio listening in the 21st century.
His work proposes an alternative use for the radio spectrum - as a compositional device that is considered a whole rather than individual monolithic stations separated by static.