← Sunday 24th December 2023 →

In the first half of this show, Melbourne-based producer Marara captures an impression of her city in her distinctive style of sonic collage; fragments of conversation, found sound, and a curated selection of music from the area come together to form a considered and tender portrait of life in Victoria's capital.

Hyperdawn take the reins for the second hour, with a mix of field recordings, music, and exclusive material that honours the full range of Manchester's vibrant character; flitting between the city's outer marshlands and its bustling centre, intimate home recordings and bass-driven productions.

Each month, First Light Records invites two artists to take an unplanned journey with a microphone around their city to curate an hour-long mix. Each show captures the unique atmosphere of a city from each artist's perspective, through music and found sound.

In this episode, Brandi brings you some jams to close out the year.

Maximum Rocknroll Radio is a weekly radio show and podcast featuring DIY punk, garage rock, hardcore, and more from around the world. A rotating cast of DJs pick the best of the best from MRR's astounding, ever-growing vinyl archive. You can find MRR Radio archives, specials and more on their website.

Hedonist and wannabe playwright Olga Adessi, 19, is struggling along the prom to get to her morning shift at the chippy with a monstrous hangover, trying to remember exactly what happened with Rachel Watkins, 19, a strange and fragile girl she had an encounter with the night before.

Former gymnast and teenage mum Treesa Reynolds, 19, is off to the Sandcastle Waterpark with her mum Lou and daughter Lulu, looking forward to a sausage and egg McMuffin on the way. Pleasure Beach breathes and exhales the unique sea air, fish and chips, donuts and candyfloss scents of Blackpool, bringing to life everything the town is famous for, portraying the gritty magic and sheer unadulterated fun of the city and its people across a spectrum of sensory experiences and emotions.

Palmer’s readings are accompanied by found sounds and samples – noise and ambience borrowed from Blackpool’s beaches, streets, and ballrooms – and features refrains drawn from Benedict Drew’s Music for Bookshops.

"A book as mind-bending as the town itself" – Jeremy Deller

Helen Palmer is a writer from Blackpool. She is the author of Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense (London: Bloomsbury, 2014) and Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). She is a 2023 Interdisciplinary Resident at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Virginia, USA. She currently lives in Vienna. Pleasure Beach is her first novel.

Published by Prototype, Helen Palmer’s Pleasure Beach is a queer love story from the North West’s saucy seaside paradise, Blackpool, on one day: 16th June 1999. Written in multiple voices and styles, Pleasure Beach follows the interconnecting journeys and thoughts of three young women over the course of 24 hours and over 18 chapters which are structured and themed in the same way as James Joyce’s Ulysses. Serialised in four instalments (to conclude with its publication on June 16th 2023, “Bloomsday”), and read by the author, Pleasure Beach (Cochlearical) was produced by Dominic Jaeckle and Milo Thesiger-Meacham for Resonance Extra as a part of a rolling series of collaborative broadcasts from Tenement Press and Prototype Publishing, Railroad Flat Radio.

Sienna Mustafa is a musician from South London. Here, she presents a sound piece imitating some of the remembered soundtracks Bordello had heard among dreams. Instruments played and collated by Sienna Bordello. Includes some samples from Jonny Pyke (drums) and Anthony Boatright (guitar). You may be aware of Bordello’s work from the art rock group Black Bordello.
Apathy, Existence and Contentment

B.Rupp is a Bristol-based musician. They have a beautiful body of work released on avant-garde indie label Stay Awake, with a collection of submerged swamp sonics scaling over drive mountain, burnt out electronics. Tape Hiss galore with dubbed out delay. All the way to ambient piano works, definitely worth a listen.

Ruth Hughes is a sound artist, composer and DJ currently based between London and Sunderland. Angelus Enim is inspired by placing its language between pop-trance lyrics and transcendent religiosity. Virtually performed in the chapel by vocalists Rubie and Ciara Reddy.

Louis Grace presents Teaching Computers to Love. This is a collaborative platform for artists to develop an episode sonically with a 10-20 minute body of work.

Tse Tse Fly Middle East was a nonprofit arts and activist organisation that existed from 2015 until 2023. Throughout that time, it presented a monthly two-hour radio programme showcasing sound art and experimental music from the Middle East, India and North Africa.

In this episode, Dronica meets Lou Barnell.

Lou is an award-winning vocalist, sound and performance artist. She is one of Sound and Music's New Voices 2022 Composers, and Manchester Jazz Festival Hothouse Residents 2023. She was winner of the 2021 Oram Awards, supported by The PRS Foundation and BBC Radiophonic Institute in recognition of innovation in sound and technology.

Lou’s work gives language to her alienating and disorientating experiences of being a neurodivergent woman. It communicates her synaesthetic experience of sound, hyperfocus and sensory overload.

This show is dedicated to Lou's Practice and the focus of her practice led PhD called Live Dreaming. This concept reconsiders her body as a mirror, reflecting and refracting parallel states of dreaming and performance. She emulates this duality in her work by creating scores and live performances with sculpted, shapeshifting, re-useable materials such as ice and thermoplastic. She uses wearable sensors and biorhythmic data to play and score music.

"As a woman growing up with a learning difficulty, the way I experience the world does not align with the way the world experiences me. To make sense of unfathomable surroundings, I use my voice as a material. My voice can be a compass, or a totem, it can be sculpted, broken and reformed.

It is the core of all of my music and production. I use wearable instruments and sculptures to contain, shape and release my body and voice. My aim is to become more than myself, to possess ways of communicating and receiving sound that are true to how I experience my surroundings."

Nicola Serra, founder of East London's experimental music festival Dronica, presents new and archival material.

Thematic mixes and reflections, captured along the Dorset coastline by ATTN:Magazine's Jack Chuter.

Watch Tarmac Garden, a track which currently exists exclusively in Kinn’s Live setlist, filmed in the studio. Recordings engineered by Shaun Duncan. DOP and editing by Herbie Lomas.

Live sampling, challenging performance cues and locked in a knife edge focus, a statement of the Kinn’s intent to make profound and provocative music.

A one-off broadcast of two tracks performed, recorded and filmed by Kinn at Resonance Extra's studios in October 2022 to mark the imminent release of his sophomore album Dogtooth. He is joined by Barkumdeer, a duo made up of violist Jenny Ames and percussionist Louis Giannamore; cellist Will Boon; and Eli Callingham, who plays out the final moments with harmonica.

This episode features a mix by Lucien Balconi.

Instagram //
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Bandcamp //

Guest mixes selected by Ian Bruner.

The parking garage is a the "inferno of the same" (the agony of eros). It is a labyrinth in which the ceiling is often the floor, a schizophrenic environment that does not allow the face to be recognized. The(se) structures or modern functional ruins are a global phenomenon and in most cases duplicate a common design. In this way the parking garage can act as a portal, an access point into multi-linear spaces (this way amd/or that). All parking garages comprise a kind of universal parking garage, when we are in one parking garage we are in all parking garages.
The global effects of the internet have displaced direction and have effectually erased all horizons. The rhizomatic connections of the internet, a(nother) decentralized and/or multicentered domain.

Communiques from Thanet Tape Centre, Hard drive sludge. audio tidal pools. Music sediment. Friends utterances, sea walls of noise, salt marsh drone.

This episode features music made by Naviar’s community inspired by Raymond Cobley’s poem “dark clouds menacing – / I doubt we shall reach shelter / before the deluge”.

To have your music featured on the show, participate in the Haiku music challenge.

Thirty minutes of experimental music made in response to a weekly haiku poem, curated by Marco Alessi of Naviar Records and Naviar's international community of composers.

An improvisation under a railway arch at the site of the Avro 1's first flight on the Walthamstow Marshes accompanies a navigation through a nexus of transport routes old and new, commemorated and long forgotten. A sonic journeying through air, across land and on water.

Littoral Transmissions meander through the sonic landscape of the River Lea from Stonebridge Lock to Leamouth. Recordings from the field converge with layers of sound to create an aural impression of the navigation.

On the 6th of October 2022, Tenement Press held an evening at Brick Lane Bookshop to mark and celebrate the publication of SJ Fowler's debut novella, MUEUM, with readings and contributions from Gareth Evans, Chris McCabe, Chloe Aridjis, Iain Sinclair, and SJ Fowler (in order of appearance).

See here for more information. Sound recorded by Milo Thesiger – Meacham.

SJ Fowler is a writer and poet living in London. His collections include Fights (Veer Books, 2011), The Rottweiler’s Guide to the Dog Owner (Eyewear Books, 2014), {Enthusiasm} (Test Centre, 2015), The Guide to Being Bear Aware (Shearsman Books, 2017), I will show you the life of the mind (on prescription drugs) (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2020) and *The Great Apes *(Broken Sleep Books, 2022).

Chris McCabe's work spans art-forms and genres including poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama and visual art. His work has been shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and the Republic of Consciousness Prize. His latest poetry collection, The Triumph of Cancer (Penned in the Margins, 2018), is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and he is the editor of several anthologies including Poems from the Edge of Extinction: An Anthology of Poetry in Endangered Languages (Chambers, 2019).

Chloe Aridjis is the author of three novels, Book of Clouds (Vintage, 2010), which won the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger in France, Asunder (Vintage, 2013), set in London’s National Gallery, and Sea Monsters (Vintage, 2020), which was awarded the 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Chloe has written for various art journals and was guest curator of the Leonora Carrington exhibition at Tate Liverpool.

Iain Sinclair is a Welsh writer and filmmaker. Much of his work is rooted in London. He also continues his engagement with small independent presses, publishing Fifty Catacomb Saints with Tangerine Press, 2022, and Fever Hammers with Face Press, 2021 (who are also due to release Mental Travaillers: or, The Battle of the Books; Blake & Latham in Subtle Congress on Peckham Rye).

A four-part, unabridged broadcast of SJ Fowler’s debut novella, MUEUM — as read by the author — recorded on location in Resonance Extra's South London studios.

Andy Backhouse presents a two hour show of new and unusual music and sounds - playing everything from Free Jazz to Field Recordings. This is an open-format show with a difference.

An immersive psychosonic space, where sounds converse, collide and converge, featuring works, selections, edits, experiments, new music, non-music, archival objects, abstract artefacts, sound(system) and A/V art, pop, trash, noise, voice, and the associated mediums, processes and techniques that make up the ongoing audial investigations of Agents of the Culture Industry & OVT, all presented for art not profit.

"What more is there to say? it feels like the year ends every day

I look this way I look that way

piles of paper and static clay

I'm always having to ask myself if this is the one,

the one way, the one day, the one say,

Entrench the clay, under fingernail splay

grit grain and grime grabs me away

blody ell mate take me away

i'm flat stanly the cardboard felt flatten

frozen in place with no heat and no energy

not even any wind to lift me"

Commissioned new work from contemporary sound practitioners and other audio choices from experimental electronic collective The Spirit of Gravity.

Moods and preoccupations in a nonlinear narrative in and out of the club with COSI and The Source of Some Certainty - created by Corinna Triantafyllidis and Henry Rodrick.

This episode features new music by Hans Castrup + Philippe Neau, Irving Paul Pereira, The Decaf Conspiracy, Cadlag, Y. Holopoulos, I. Valsamara, X Communion, Oubys, Lazar Darkovski, The Tara Experiment, Cult Of Light, Harrison and Dunkley and The Washing Planck.

A selection of new experimental music and sound work from the international underground network Unexplained Sounds, curated by Raffaele Pezzella (Sonologyst).

Each artist plays for 20 minutes and starts their set before the previous act has finished, creating a constant flow of music.

Full Lineup:

• Nicola Serra

• Yewen Jin

• nunez

• That Travis

• Superasylum (Jeff Plink Plunk)

• Yeah You!

• Rick Jensen

• raxil_4 (Andrew Page)

• _subsignal (Thomas Rosser)

• Miles Lukoszevieze

• SW1n-HUNTER (Adam Dentone)

• XOLO (Edward Griffiths)

• estener + Egle Saka

• Mariam Morshed (Mariam Bergloff)

• Blood Music (Simon Pomery)

• Thomas Daley

• Jonathan Crabb

• kerosene (Mimi)

• ecolagbohrsac (Atay)

• Richard Crow (Miss Schreber)

• Hems (Henrique Matias)

• Nnja Riot (Lisa McKendrick)

• Bioni Samp

• Eight Fold Way (Mark H. Geary)

• Disgusting Cathedral (Tim Drage)

• Christian Duka + Avsluta

• Sculpture

• en creux (Lucia H. Chung)

• Oliver Torr

• Ravishing Rick Rude (Chris Smith)

• xname (Eleonora Oreggia)

• DHANGSHA (Aniruddha Das)

• Howlround (Robin The Fog)

• Hivern Liminal + Isa Barzizza

Over the course of 12 hours on 18th December 2022, Iklectik Art Lab brought together more than 25 artists to each play the noisiest live set they could. All ticket proceeds went towards The British Association for Performing Arts Medicine, a registered UK charity composed of health and creative industry professionals working together to support the performing arts.