World Service # Strange Transmissions Live From Cafe OTO

Live broadcasts and releases by World Service, an avant-radio label founded in 2024 by Glasgow-based artist and curator Max Syedtollan with the aim of documenting work made specifically for the medium, with an emphasis on audio drama.

Strange Transmissions: The World of Experimental Radio – the label's inaugural live event hosted at London's Cafe OTO – features presentations, discussion and performance exploring contemporary radio practice, curated by in partnership with The Wire Magazine.

Appearing at the event will be Shortwave Collective, Death Is Not The End, Neil Luck and Laurie Tompkins (Duo) and a panel discussion chaired by Emily Bick (The Wire).

Shortwave Collective will share their work on the Open Wave-Receiver, a simple DIY radio. Shortwave Collective is an international group of creative practitioners from various backgrounds and disciplines (sound and radio art, activism, social science, media and artistic research) brought together by an interest in feminist practices and the radio spectrum. The collective’s approach aims to create an inclusive, collaborative, tech-based learning environment, one which acknowledges and attends to gendered education gaps and one that purposefully removes potential hurdles, such as unexplained components lists that assume knowledge.

Death Is Not The End is Luke Owen. Comprising an NTS radio show and record label, DINTE seeks to unearth and bring light to archival music and field recordings with a focus on early gospel, global folk music, soundsystem tapes and various other audio curios. Death Is Not The End's two-volume compilation release of advertisements taken from London pirate radio broadcasts in the mid 80s to early 90s were covered by The Guardian & the New Yorker, and together with multiple pirate radio-focused mixtapes (scanning and spanning the airwaves of 80s-00s Bristol, and contemporary pirate broadcasting in New York) constitute a keen area of interest.

Performers and composers Neil Luck & Laurie Tompkins share a new body of work for 2 brazen voices and electronics. Conceived during an intense and remote period of cohabitation on the Isle of Wight their duo trades in strange communications, broken conversations, weird interferences, and mis-heard genre tropes.