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Wet assemblage of dank & dark delights. Malfuncioning themes of humidity, wetness and everything moist. Neo tropical thrills to watch the (early) sunset by...

Picture: Jambiani, Unguja Island, Zanzibar, 2015

Discrepancies is a global showcase of disparate music with a focus on earthly field recordings and international sounds, curated by the Discrepant record label, presented by Gonçalo F Cardoso.

This episode features Matt Krefting, Erell Latimier, Puppet Wipes, Prick Decay, John Trubee, Alan Licht & Aki Onda, Polly Shang Kuan band, Henry Flynt, Clarence Bison, Rick Potts and more.

Sound collage, record spinning, havering, ear wonk and general head scratch with Dylan Nyoukis of the Chocolate Monk label.

Glasgow-based Bobby Jewell presents a series of ambient mixes for Resonance Extra with guest features by musicians and artists.

The International Institut for Research on Radio and Magic is concerned with finding imaginary solutions at the border between technology and magic.

In this episode: Laurent Schmid

Radio Picnic is a mobile radio art project by zonoff which invites multi-disciplinary artists to create works inspired by the radio medium.

A monthly collection of audio experiments and listening objects with sound artist Matt Burnett from Berlin.

This episode features Beachers, d-Thed, A'Bear, Trianglecuts, Harmergeddon, theskyisthinaspaperhere and Ruido.

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

Alphonsine Koh is a DJ, producer and artist from Singapore, now based in Germany.

Twice-monthly broadcast showcasing electronic music produced by members of the female:pressure international network of female, transgender and non-binary artists practising in the fields of electronic music and digital arts.

In this episode, Sonic Hugs, curated by Colin Black for This Sonic Life.

Curator's statement:

No matter where we live in the world, we all feel alone from time to time, some of us more than others, some of us to the point we can’t bear it anymore ... this collection of new works entitled Sonic Hugs is a reminder that we are not alone. With this objective at hand, I invited nine of Australia’s most distinctive & esteemed artists to create original new works that express their interpretation of a “sonic hug.”

At the time, I remember wondering, just how will these artists combine the ideas of “sonic” and “hug” into their new works? If we explore the word “hug” by itself, then we usually start to think of the following: hug … to anticipate a hug, to be hugged, to have been hugged, and that research has shown that a hug can reduce feelings of loneliness and the harmful physical effects of stress. A hug can also boost feel-good hormones such as dopamine and serotonin, the antidepressant hormone that reduces feelings of loneliness, controls anxiety and elevates mood. Psychologically, a hug builds trust, boosts self-esteem, and creates a sense of safety, creating a pathway towards a deeper connection.

But this was not just a hug, but a Sonic Hug … then I also remembered a quote from an interview I did for my PhD with Andrew McLennan about his experiences as an ABC radio producer working with artists at The Listening Room program where he explained, “But artists don’t always do expected things …”(1) In this context, McLennan is discussing the potential awkwardness between the public media programming directives and the artist’s desire for creative, uncensored, boundless possibilities.

While with the Sonic Hugs collection, there are differences (e.g. there is no overarching government programming directive other than the request to compose a sonic hug), artistsboth delivered works that met and challenged my expectations, all of which I found sonically highly stimulating and was touched by. What emerged from this diverse mix and treatments of the subject matter is a multi-faceted creative exploration of embrace, connectedness, and community.

If we listen deeper into these individual new works, in the order that they will be presented, we can hear that with Cat Hope’s 7 Options (as performed by The Low Tone Orchestra), we are listening to how musicians empathise with each other during a live recording as they are “moving in and out of each other’s timbre,” in effect exploring varying degrees of sonic connections.

With Ros Bandt’s Sonic Hugs, we enter a personal autobiographical soundscape of tenderness that, as Bandt explains, “metamorphose into a new magical energy empowering love, kindness, sharing, community, co-operation and selflessness, a larger hug from nature and the cosmos.” In Eve Klein’s Mantra of Enfolding we imagine our first embrace and connection as a zygote in our mother’s womb. Robert Sazdov’s “I Cried” Spasovden, electroacoustic compositional structure is based on “20-second sonic sections that aim to deliver 12 sonic hugs.”

Next, Stephen Adams brings us Close To Your Ears in which a single vocal gesture develops and is augmented with other elements to create intimacy, as Adams asks the question, “What is a sonic hug?” With, Claire ‘Furchick’ Pannell’s Berjalan, amongst other things, reaches across cultural boundaries by using music as a type of universal language. In Jim Denley’s Mixmaster Troposphere we explore embracing the Australian environment and place and is intended as a sonic hug to the Aboriginal people (Wayilwan, Gamilaraay and Wiradjuri) who had previously gathered on the remote site in the Warrumbungle National Park where the work is recorded.

With David Chesworth’s Cohesion Calisthenics we are listening to the “personal experiences of embodied hugs and being in larger social gatherings, which we sometimes struggle to be part of.” Finally, with Colin Black’s Embosomed, we are exploring the light and shades of embrace, a reaching out for connection and fragility.

I now invite you all to open your ears to this new collection of works that affords vulnerability, speaks from different levels and dimensions and brings focus to the need for more interpersonal/social connectedness and cohesion.

Members of Radia, the international group of independent cultural radio stations, explore new and forgotten ways of making radio.

In this first episode: new hit sound (John Cage - Radio Music 1956).

• audio / visual decomposer Lepke B posits the question - "How will we live in the 21st Century?"

This episode features a guest mix by musician and artist Richard Bundy.

“The result of all that came before, are we. Bound to a legacy of inherited trials and tribulations. Music shapes our space and time; dissolved within its solution, emotion, memory and magic. Transporting us, altering time; past, present and future. It looses us in a stream of forever; the now crumbles into what was and what could be.” – Richard Bundy

Injazero Records founder Siné Buyuka plays a selection of electronic, experimental, ambient and contemporary classical tracks.

Experiments in exploring humanity with Keno Westhoff of http://klanglabor.ayayay.eu.

Offering surreal glimpses of what might be identified as echoes of a post-Republic America, an imagined Middle East, and some other unnamed and unreachable world, Palace chronicles a vivid landscape of crumbling towers and heart-broken animals, eclipses, comets, and lovers in abandoned rooms. Produced by Dominic J. Jaeckle and Milo Thesiger–Meacham.

Kyra Simone is a writer from Los Angeles, now based in Brooklyn. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in a variety of literary journals, including The Baffler, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Conjunctions, Fence, The Anthology of Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere. She is a member of the publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse, and part of a two-woman team running the editorial office of Zone Books.

"From the stuff we unfold in the morning and throw in the recycling bin at night, Simone coaxes the rhythms of cyclical life, that baseline on which extraordinary events and crises exert their pressure. The world she constructs is recognisable, textured, gently humorous—but also luminously, piercingly exact, possessed of the strangeness of seeing something for the first or the last time".

— Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun.

"I was hooked by the very first sentence of Kyra Simone’s Palace of Rubble: ‘A breaking wave collapses on the bank before two half-naked women on white Arabian horses.’ The sentence is so precise, down to the use of the erotic “collapses.” Plunged into this direct, clear, and mysterious arrangement of words, I was always left wondering what will happen next. Where will the next sentence take me? I was never disappointed. Simone is able to maintain and shift that propulsive curiosity throughout the book. While dancing with us, each sentence is a journey. Each story is a multi-faceted gem—a ‘beguiling dream of eternal cinema".

— John Yau, author of Genghis Chan on Drums.

"Majestic flights of fancy spun around ravaged landscapes and savage realities, these are remarkable prose poems for the 21st century".

— Chloe Aridjis, author of Sea Monsters.

"Reading Simone’s work is reminiscent of an archaeological excavation. The writing has dug to the past and emerged in the future, passing on its way those civilisations, kingdoms and palaces long since blown away or buried, it is covered in their dust. I can’t help but think, isn’t this madness? Isn’t life beautiful".

— Vanessa Onwuemezi, author of Dark Neighbourhood.

Temporary Palaces is a special triplicate of hour-long broadcasts that serialises an unabridged rendition of Kyra Simone's debut collection, Palace of Rubble (Tenement Press, 2022). Initially inspired by a photograph of one of Saddam Hussein’s demolished palaces, Simone’s Palace of Rubble is a collection of one-page stories composed primarily of single words culled each day from the front pages of the newspaper.

Music by Eastern Fear Ritual, Panopticon, Elemental Noise, Chubby Wolf, Xqui, Azalia Snail, Neon, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Grimes, Sébastien Wright, Off Land and Jean-Michel Jarre.

Phantom Circuit is a show of strange and wonderful sound waves - featuring music that is alien, electronic, exotic, essential.

In this episode, we share recent performances and pieces from friends and members of the collective, including Lou Barnell’s performance for Yarmonics Festival, a Moses Batikva live set from Hamburg, and a selection of works from Stephan Barrett’s conceptually eclectic mix of projects (one of which “known for its boundless appetite and complex system of multiple void-like stomachs”).

Resonance Extra radio pals Littoral Transmissions also share sessions recorded with absurdist poet James Worse.

Colliding Lines present live sessions, cross-genre collaborations and left-field recordings drawn from the London, UK and international experimental scenes; a long-form love letter to recorded audio as soundtrack, as sound art and as storyteller.

From the most abrasive to the unbelievably sublime, Hope Valley Cement Works attempts to curate a selection of experimental music and sounds, from collected field recordings and sound collages, to serene ambience, impressive drone and the odd deconstructed club track. A series by Kris Cooper.

This episode features new music by Tescon Pol, Richard Bégin, AFTERVOLTER, Bruno Varvohza, Loo(p)cy, M.B., Wahn, Psionic Asylum, David Lee Myers and Jacob Audrey Taves.

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

Meg Woof presents their last show featuring music by Byard Lancaster, José Mauro, Bedouin Ascent, Prangers, Maral and more.

New music with The Wire Magazine.

In this episode: whilst sheltering from a storm on the marshes, new sounds are heard emerging from the Lea. Featuring field recordings by Helen Frosi.

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.

This episode features works by Morag Law & Ronan Doyle, TVO, Poe Sullard, Isobel McKenna, Various Networked Artists, Carrier, Inturist, BJ Nilsen, LABOUR, Points Of Friction, Orphax & PONI, Orphax, Diurnal Burdens & Matt Atkins, Orrest, Poly Gone, NWO and Jeff Brown.

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.

Ambient, folk, ritual, electronic, dub, free jazz and exploratory works selected by BroodingSideOfMadness.

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.