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Another freeform episode featuring some current listening as well as my return to the microphone on radio dj styles. I think last time I talk during the a show was 2017 so after 6 years you get to hear my semi serious rambling.

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 music and sound by Dang, S Glass, Brant/Krueger, Ezio Piermattei, Natalia Beylis, Maggiore/Rice, Ark Drane, FAT CHANCE, Anton Bruhin, Maria Teresa Luciani and more.

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

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

In 1991, in the last year of the Soviet Union's existence, Melodiya decided to embark on a pioneering experiment in product marketing by launching the Signal Series of records. Each record in this series contained fragments of four new albums to be released, and the envelopes contained sketches of their artwork. The listener was invited to vote for their favorite artist by sending a written request to the major's editorial office to order the record through the label's official store. In essence, Melodiya launched the process of the first democratic elections in the Soviet Union.

In total, the series included 10 LPs with fragments of upcoming albums by 40 artists respectively. Most of them were bands playing the fashionable gorby rock - the so-called “red wave” guitar music of Gorbachev's perestroika period with screaming socio-political lyrics and manifestos. However, the series also included music by Russian art-rock bands, which at that time had already become cult in underground circles and had their own army of listeners (AuktsYon, NOM, NOL, Object of Mockery and others).

I compiled this episode from the music of projects that were less honoured by listeners - their albums were never released on Melodiya in full form. And the label was shut down shortly after the release of the last LP in the series. You will hear outsider new wave, occult hard rock, national reggae, free jazz and mesmerising folk. I'm kidding though - one project on this tracklist did release their debut LP on Melodia. You have one hour to guess who it was.

Uzbekistan-based DJ and boss of the experimental TOPOT label Eugenie Galochkin presents rare vinyl rips from the Soviet Melodia label. Melodia has released music from all around the world: from obscure Baltic electronica and free jazz from Siberia; to synth-pop from Tajikistan and academic avant-garde from Ukraine. The series will explore how national and cultural characteristics are embedded in musical language.

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.

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.

Chaos Kitten is a DJ, producer with Jungle Vibrations, and promoter for TruSelf Productions in Cleveland, Ohio. She first got her paws on the turntables back in 2008. She has evolved and refined her skills as a breakbeat freak and junglist throughout the years- bringing her unique sound to energetic house parties, underground raves and vibrant nightclubs throughout the midwest and east coast. Electronica is most certainly embedded in her brain. She believes music is love, and love is the energy that connects us all.

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.

Time travel has long been a tantalizing concept in both science fiction and theoretical physics. While we often imagine time travel as a physical journey through past and future landscapes, it can also be experienced in a more abstract yet profound way—through sounds.

Sounds of the Past

The past resonates with echoes that we can sometimes recreate or reimagine. Ancient musical instruments, historical recordings, and even the ambient noise of a bygone era—such as the clatter of horse-drawn carriages or the crackle of early radios—allow us to immerse ourselves in history. Time capsules of sound, like phonographs and vinyl records, are portals to another time. Through these, we don’t just hear the past; we feel its texture and rhythm.

Imagine walking into a cathedral where Gregorian chants are sung exactly as they were centuries ago. In that moment, the separation between now and then dissolves. Similarly, technologies like audio restoration bring forgotten voices and music back to life, giving us a sensory experience of eras we’ve never lived.

Sounds of the Future

The future, by contrast, is harder to predict. What will the world sound like in 50 or 100 years? Speculative sound design in films and media offers some possibilities—mechanical drones, synthetic symphonies, and alien languages. Advances in technology might also bring us auditory experiences we can’t yet conceive, like music tailored to our emotions in real-time or soundscapes of entirely virtual worlds.

The idea of time travel through sound becomes even more fascinating when paired with concepts like acoustic archaeology or audio synthesis. Could we someday accurately recreate the voice of a long-dead figure based on historical data? Could we design sounds that represent the potential noises of a future city or a space station?

Living Between Past and Future

We live at an intersection of temporal sounds. While digitized archives allow us to dive into historical audio, modern soundscapes are already capturing this era for future generations. Every recording, from a bustling city street to a personal podcast, becomes a thread in the fabric of history.

Time travel, then, doesn’t require a machine. It requires listening—tuning into the echoes of the past and the imagined vibrations of what’s to come. Sounds are a bridge, a timeline written not in years but in waves and frequencies. What does your time sound like? What echoes will you leave behind?

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

-mercy mercy mercy

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

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.

Night Trippin' unearths alternative sounds from around the world, one country at a time.

This episode features music by Joe Frawley, The Night Monitor, Elemental Noise, Danny Hale, Grouper, Sam Sklair, Cacero Lazo, Bruford Levin, The Bonzo Dog Band, Cyberaktif, Bit Cloudy, Humanfobia, Château Flight, Hollow Vessel and Tomita.

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

In this episode, we revisit the best of 2021 and beyond, showcasing work produced by out collective and associates. The show features work originally aired this year by art lab IKLECTIK's show VOIXXE, and by recorded audio festival Helicotrema.

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.

This episodes marks the announcement of the next plates article Memory After Memory with selected audio surrounding the themes of plagiarism, sampling and mimicry. Featuring Led Zeppelin, Arthur Lipsett, The Muppets & David Attenborough. You can read the introductory text and editors' notes for the article here.

The radio counterpart to live intermedia event series Late Works, hosted by founder Joseph Bradley Hill. Each week a new guest joins Joe in the studio to discuss and perform their work. Expect in-depth interviews, live performances, conversations and new event experiments.

This episode features music by Vitor Joaquim, Henrik Meierkord, TraumaSutra, Alwin van der Linde, Taphephobia & IDFT, Kloob, Mario Lino Stancati, Michael Bonaventure and Stefan Klaverdal.

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

This episode hosted by Joe Stannard features a superlative sonic selection with tracks from Klein, Knives, Dead Pioneers, Zoë Mc Pherson, and more.

New music with The Wire Magazine.

Joined by Bettina Schroeder we follow raindrops falling from steel grey skies, seeping through drip drain cracks in greasy tarmac roads, and deeper still into subterranean waterways. Down and down, running beneath city streets, submerging to re-emerge in streaming confluence.

Bettina Schroeder is a London-based multimedia artist. Works include painting, drawing, installation, sound art, music, poetry, video and live art. Her album with Tony Irving, Shatter Resistant was originally released on Linear Obsessional and featured on BBC Radio3, FREENESS, Vision Festival, programme by Corey Mwamba.

Her book of poetry Flirting on an Escalator is published by London Poetry Books.

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 month: presenter Theo Sayers plays a varied selection of pop, electronic and ambient music, including songs by Vashti Bunyan, The Television Personalities and Daphne Oram.

Electronic musician Theo Sayers transports listeners with a mix of electronic, ambient, spiritual and new age music.

Worthwhile Unions is a radio series by Anna Clegg with a focus on meeting points. Often collaborative and pulling heavily from online sources, the series works to extract a kind of cinema of feeling, contradicting and evasive, from dense combinations of music, sound and samples.

In this episode, we journey to Powys, Mid Wales and talk with Ellis Green to explore the musical genre of Dungeon Synth. We discuss its origins, aesthetics and shed light on Ellis' new DIY cassette-based label Verdant Wisdom.

The conversation is interspersed with a selection of Dungeon synth, Forest Ambient and other like-minded sonic offerings. Featuring tracks from Mortiis, Fåntratt, Lunar Womb, Sunken Grove, USKK, Oaklimb, Winter Seer, Middlewood. Find out more about the Verdant Wisdom label.

Gwaith Swn's Sonic Darts is a London-based sound art collective presenting new sound works, performances and discussions.

Featuring original music and field recordings, and spoken contributions by writer and translator Cristina Viti and filmmaker Ahmed Yassin Aldaradji, Audible Heat ranges across continents, embracing Greek tongue twisters, the poetry of Ibn Quzmān and Harry Crosby, African-American mathematician Benjamin Banneker’s lost wooden clock, Plato’s Phaedrus, cicadas on the film sets of Sergio Leone’s ‘Spaghetti Westerns,’ the body language of Clint Eastwood, the apocalyptic premonitions of the Wampanoag, Geronimo’s hatred of telegraphy, and botanist Donald C. Peattie’s terror of the inescapable buzz of mortality.

Equal parts academic argument, travelogue, and critical collage, this synthesis of ideas pulls upon a wide-ranging bibliography of materials to examine the omnipresent sound of the cicada throughout human history and culture. Herein, this climatic sound acts as a conduit between ecology, identity and mortality, and the cicada’s sonic inference emerges as a codification of the unknown and unfamiliar—as a spiritual weathervane in desert settings—and as a means of teasing out the sensorial limits of human understanding.

Audible Heat was written, read, recorded, produced & scored by Milo Thesiger-Meacham. It was first commissioned and broadcast as a work for radio by Radiophrenia, September 2023.

As a manuscript Audible Heat was shortlisted for the inaugural edition of the Prototype Prize, 2024, and was published as a book by Tenement Press, February 2025. Its radiophonic counterpart will be released on CD by World Service, March 2025.

“A wonderful bringing together of natural and cultural histories.”

– Tom McCarthy, author The Remainder & Man Booker Prize nominee

“A work of great refinement and intelligence, entailing some beautifully crafted surprises.”

– Elizabeth Price, artist & 2012 Turner Prize winner

"Almost Borgesian in the levity by which it seems effortlessly to embody encylopaedic multitudes ... we understand – and appreciate the – the intricate assembly of fragments, quotations and images that factor in distance, as much as intimacy, as an engine to the work ... Audible Heat balances both the warmth of genuine passion for its material with a controlled and 'cool' gaze that makes for a singular outcome."

– Gareth Evans, writer, editor, film & event producer

"... nibbling at the edges of philosophy, entomology, anthropology, poetry, music, film and diverse technologies ... like a latter-day Langland, the author “wente wide in this world wondres to here” only to find in a sound at once familiar and uncanny, eternal and pregnant with anticipation and dread, a hall of mirrors for the restless human soul. Like the sun, the cicada looms like likeness itself and we are led down garden paths that form a maze of amazing information, suggestion and nuance ... It also speaks of the limits of species entrainment, of our faltering efforts at empathic behaviour, and tells us a lot about how we act in relation to other creatures, how culture sits with nature. Perhaps more important is how it subtly suggests how we should or might act."

– Ed Baxter, writer, sound-artist, co-founder Resonance, co-editor Works of Thomas De Quincey

“Beautifully written.”

– Bhanu Kapil, poet & Windham-Campbell Literature Prize winner

Many thanks to Max Syedtollan and Dominic Jaeckle. Thanks also to Cristina Viti, Ahmed Yassin Aldaradji, Dr Gene Kritsky, Dr Douglas Yanega & Matthias Loibner for their kind contributions. Thanks to Tom McCarthy, Bhanu Kapil and Elizabeth Price for shortlisting the text, and to Mark Vernon, Jess Chandler, Rory Cook and Gareth Evans. And for their help and encouragement, a heartfelt thanks to my dear friends Ed Baxter and Valentina Bacci. 

Milo Thesiger-Meacham is an artist, composer, performer and creative director of the community arts radio stations Resonance FM and Resonance Extra.

Milo Thesiger-Meacham’s Audible Heat is an extended documentary, a fitful academic essay, a mass-media probe, an idiosyncratic piece of travel writing, a densely illustrated sound-art montage, and a deep dive into man’s complex relations with the seemingly eternal sound of the cicada as ‘audible heat’ in human consciousness.