Various venues, St Leonards-on-Sea, UK
The last weekend in September sees the seaside town of St Leonards transform into a psychogeographical hub for audio enthusiasts. XMTR (pronounced Transmitter) brings together people involved in traditional radio production with those operating on the medium’s fringes by facilitating workshops, performances and installations that centre the breadth of radio’s creative applications.
Friday night is dedicated to a cabaret at the Crown House, where audio shorts are performed live. Jude Montague premieres her musical about television inventor John Logie Baird, leading the room in song. Jesse Lawson follows with his gender transition experience framed through a psychedelic vision of a pigeon’s lifecycle. Lucy Dearlove concludes with Slob, Slub, Sleech, which explores a Sussex dialect with dozens of words for mud, collaging anecdotes about iguanodon footprints and sculpting with native clay.
Mornings offer interactive listening events in contrasting settings. For Habitual Rituals by Lucinda Guy and Alice Armstrong, you wander amid the ruins of Hastings Castle listening for migrating birds. Miri Berlin and Eloïse Bertil, meanwhile, utilise the shingled beach for a silent disco that combines local field recordings with digital revisions of the source sounds. Both experiences ask the listener to slow down and attentively engage with the environment around them. Those interested in the texture of transmission can build a hula hoop antenna in Hannah Kemp-Welch’s VLF workshop or swim in the sea listening to free diving stories using Safe+Sound’s bone conduction headphones.
Several record shops are taken over for talks (DinahBird sharing her research about female roles in the record production industry at Stereo Retro), family workshops (Cath Roberts and Tullis Rennie’s collage, trombone and loop-heavy residency at Tough Love) and broadcast (Ed Baxter’s Resonance Extra sit-in at Dayglo Studios). Repurposing a pair of antique salon hairdryers, Resonance FM co-founder Sarah Washington presents the installation Under The Hood at the Project Art Works gallery. The listener sits in a locally sourced barber chair, head under a plastic hood modified to emit sound, immersed in an 18-hour compilation culled from Washington’s Clingradio show (2002-03). With orphaned Black Sabbath samples swimming around your head, it’s a reminder of how radical experimental programming was at a time when community radio was a new concept in the UK.
Saturday’s Sonic Communion event at Henry Ward Hall is a highlight, particularly Buy Me A Drink And I’ll Tell You A Story by the Dutch collective URLAND. Mediated through wireless headphones, storyteller Thomas Dudkiewicz and sound designer Tomas Loos engage the audience in a Rocky Horror-like tale about torture and abduction in a haunted house. Despite bearing witness to the performers’ every stage move – custom Foley board et al – you succumb to the fear.
The real jewel is Tony Birch’s wireless headphone installation under Hastings Pier. Recorded in the day, using geophones and an ambisonic mic, the hour-long piece foregrounds listening beyond human perception. As the incoming tide smashed against the pier’s joists, the resulting vibrations were fed into a Pocket Scion MIDI synth that translated the resonant frequencies of the structure into harmonic ambient passages. It’s an impossible juxtaposition – you stand together with scores of strangers at low tide, listening in solitude, to a time earlier on when the water would have consumed you entirely – just like the electromagnetic waves consuming us now.
Ilia Rogatchevski
Originally published by The Wire, November 2026
