London friends - join us in the Purcell Room on 26th November, for a performance as part of Sonic Essays:

Artist and composer Anna Clock shares listening textured by weather; sonic librarian Jess Rowley, with composer and sound artist afromerm, open a selection of sound archives; and radio art group Shortwave Collective transmit voices across the room, proposing ways to listen together whilst apart.
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Tickets: https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/sonic-essays-the-listening-glossary/

We contributed a short text on 'Plural Listening' to our member Hannah's new book Listening Glossary, out with Silver Press soon. The book contains over 200 proposals for listening from artists, activists, ecologists and others, and thinks about listening as a social, political and imaginative practice. We are excited to read it! Pick up a copy here.

We've been featured in this gorgeous zine Nothing is Background: Experimental Artists and Thinkers on Sound, Attention, and the Resonant World. Download a copy from the Phantom Power website here.

A joyful workshop at Soundcamp13 - perhaps fourty people working in pairs to make 20 Open Wave-Receivers, tested at sunset on the mound next to Stave Hill Ecological Park in London. 

We had a joyful visit to Chicago on invitation of the Experimental Sound Studio at the start of April. Whilst in town, we delivered two Open Wave-Receiver workshops for Northwestern University and ESS's Patchbent series, and made many new friends. We also gave a presentation at Univeristy of Chicago's 'Critical Sounds' conference. 

We were delighted to deliver a performance lecture at Auto Italia in London on 21st May. Attempting to engage the sculptural work of Zahra Malkani in her exhibition Noorani Metal Sound  as a giant antenna, we met in time for dusk, capturing radio signals diffracted off the ionosphere. The metallic elements of the sculpture were employed to help us transduce signals, in a collective demonstration of DIY radio-making.
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This event was part of the engagement programme Metal x Metal curated by Dr Syma Tariq. 
Link: https://autoitaliasoutheast.org/events/shortwave-collective-are-metal/

In February, asimtria, an organisation based in Peru, coordinated a series of online workshops with us building Open Wave-Receivers. Working with nine participants we constructed DIY radios, and reviewing radio recordings made in locations around Urubamba, Piura, and further afield. As part of this project, asimtria have translated our instructional zine into Spanish, and we are very happy to be able to share this in another language now!

In January 2026 we were invited by Thalia Raftopoulou to deliver a presentation to BA Fine Art students during their 'Art, City, Sound' elective, at Athens School of Art. We were able to join both online and in person, and shared a version of our latest work 'Radio-Dreaming into the Electromagnetic Commons' with the class. 

We are delighted to have been selected through open call by tekhnē, a collaborative project exploring the emancipatory potential of technology in music and sound art, for their online residency programme. 

For three months, we are experimenting with Citizens Band (CB) radio, it's culture and potential, testing in different atmospheric conditions and seeking out the poetry and community amongst it all. We're working towards a sound work, coming out early next year. 

Thank you for your support OUT.RA and Skaņu mežs!

Folkwang University in Essen, Germany, invited us to deliver a three-day workshop for students during their Sound Practice Research seminar series at SANAA. We invited participants to explore the political, creative, and ecological possibilities of radio as an artistic medium, through workshops on DIY radio construction, WebSDR composition and a range of practical and discursive activities. We plugged our DIY radios into the long metal walkways of the ex coal mine Zollverein, a UNESCO World Heritage Site located next door to the University campus. Through our fragile wires, we could hear transmissions in German, French and Chinese, perhaps bouncing off the ionosphere to reach us.​

We had a great time at Radio Music last week, a residential course by Dyski in Lizard, UK! After visiting the site where Marconi's first transatlantic transmission took place, we made and tested Open Wave-Receivers in a windy but beautiful location on a cliff. As the sun set, new stations drifted into our range of reception. We were also joined online for a talk with Shortwave Collective members participating remotely, and shared our approaches to using radio in performances and compositions. 

A selection of our audio works are featured in the exhibition ‘The Spell and the Dream’  by Tai Shani, first at Somerset House (London) and now at Jupiter Artland (Edinburgh). You might catch them online via the exhibition website here:  ​https://www.dreamradio.net/

We spent the weekend at 'Plug It Up', a sound art festival put on by the Bradford Sound Women network and part of UK capital of culture 2025 programming. We were invited to put on one of our Open Wave-Receiver workshops in an old mill at the University of Bradford, and this was one of those times where we really had to work for signal, trying out lamposts and fences and other metal fixtures around campus, with mainly local footie and some sferics beaming in. In a little twist of serendipity, we found signal through this plaque that says 'Party on the Amp'!

In September we devised a new performance, collaborating for the first time with artist Amanda Gutiérrez visiting from Mexico City. During the performance we read texts related to radio and women's voices - some humorous, and played with micro-transmission, sound diffusion via handheld radios, modulation and feedback loops.

The performance took place during an event celebrating the 20th anniversary of Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP) titled 'An Evening with CRiSAP', at Cafe Oto, London.

Thanks to Jonathan Crabb for the photos.

Reduced Listening, an independent radio production company in north London, invited us to lead a workshop building open wave-receivers in September! Working in pairs, we built simple radio sets out of everyday materials. Later on, we went out to a nearby playground and picked up tons of signal, with 5 Live coming in strong.

We were invited to lead an OWR-building workshop by a group learning queer survivalist skills! This workshop was so sweet and so fun. We were able to find ground in Gordon Square, and with the help of an extra-long antenna and the power of greyline, we picked up loads of signals: a K-drama, French news, Spanish and German talk radio, along with mysterious mechanical-sounding textures, likely from nearby infrastructure. The OWR pictured below was built on a book on the 'Power of Communication' and we discovered that keychains can work nicely as diodes!

We were delighted to return to Soundcamp to deliver another Open Wave-Receiver workshop. Our collective was founded at Soundcamp in 2020, and we returned the following year with our project Fencetenna, so we are grateful for the support! This year's workshop was packed - 35 radios constructed from scrap materials and tested at sunset on Stave Hill, London. Stiching wires together into long antennas allowed us to hear three stations, in three languages, at once. Magic!

Our latest audio work was broadcast on Radiophrenia at 8am on 15th April 2025. Originally a live performance, Listening Across Distance shares the praxis and the thinking behind our methodology of listening across distance. We've now shared the piece via Soundcloud, and you can listen to it here.

We are delighted to share that our text 'Plural Radio-Listening' has been published in Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear (2024), an anthology text from Silver Press, edited by Irene Revell and Sarah Shin.

​The book is available here.

Pic from the launch at Southbank Centre.