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 Jess Gell and 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. 

Shortwave goes to Rotterdam! The wonderful WORM and A Tale of a Tub invited us to lead a 2-day workshop over 26-27 October (2024). We spent the first day at the arts and culture space WORM, where we gave a presentation about our collective work and then built Open Wave-Receivers with 20 particants. The second day took place at A Tale of a Tub, an arts organisation in the former laundry of a 1920's Dutch housing estate, where we were able to test our radios on the roof. Afterwards, we went to a nearby stadium at greyline and extended our antennas with the enormous sporting infrastructure. The air was dominated by a sound we called 'the Rotterdam Hum' - a sort of highly textured waving sound - but we also heard Turkish football, talk radio in Russian, and music that was described as 'chipmunk disco'. We then went live on Radio WORM to talk about our findings with the organisers and a few workshop participants: upload upcoming!

We're fresh from a workshop with Multitrack, a charity working in improving accessibility in the audio industry, hosted at the luscious Dalston Curve Garden in London! It turned out to be a gorgeous day, and we had a romp building radios with particularly unconventional materials, such as using the rings on our fingers as antennae. A wide range of signals were overlapping in the air that day: local talk radio, the odd waves from communications equipment, two sports stations on top of one another, among others.

We're fresh from the Sound 2024 exhibition at LCB Depot in Leicester, where we have a piece titled 'Edges of Transmission', alongside which we ran two Open Wave-Receiver building workshops. We found multiple radio stations in the air onsite and had loads of fun attaching our antennas to everything we could find: a giant metal cistern, fencing, empty kegs, and the buildings themselves, to name a few. The exhibition is on through Friday 20 September, if you're in town! Also, we sat down with Rob Watson from Radio Lear for an interview: you can hear 'Transcending Traditional Boundaries' on the Radio Lear website.

We're looking forward to delivering a series of workshops with TACO! this autumn, with artists and local community groups in Thamesmead. We'll start with a day of programme for ​this year's cohort of artists taking part in Syllabus, a collaboratively produced alternative learning programme. The secord is an open workshop for local residents and anyone interested in listening practices and DIY radio (tickets here). And finally, we've organised a transmitter-building workshop and sonic treasure hunt for families, in collaboration with The Hundred Club. 

We're delighted to be one of three artists/collectives in residence at Yarmonics this year! From September, we'll be spending time in Great Yarmouth and working with local community groups to create a small publication based on our site-specific and DIY radio experiments. We kick off the project with a workshop on 20th September. More here: ​www.yarmonics.com/residencies

We're delighted to be delivering a DIY radio builiding workshop as part of this three day audio arts festival in St Leonards On Sea (UK).  Our workshop will take place on 27th September 2024, and tickets are live here: https://www.xmtr.fm/friday27th/radiomaking

In July 2024, we visited Soft Touch Arts in Leicester (UK) to deliver an Open Wave-Receiver (OWR) workshop. Radio signal is strong in Leicester - the moment we plugged in, we had an incredibly loud signal! Some things we noticed...

• Very long antennas are good! Ours were at least 12 meters. 
• We still got signal when pulling out the ground - it was just less ‘clean’. 
• When touching a scraped end of our very long antenna to a round fence (circling a tree), we suddenly got a secondary station playing alongside the first. Perhaps this extension of the length of antenna caught different frequencies.
• The OWR had a very loud signal through the combo of Zoom H5 + Marshall speaker, so loud we had it on half volume. As soon as the Zoom was removed from the circuit though, the Marshall refused to relay any sound from the OWR. Guessing it has some sort of overdrive protection built in that makes it unfriendly to the fluctuating power of the waves.

We hope this is of some interest to fellow OWR experimenters! We'll be back in Leicester throughout September for more workshops and to participate in an exhibition - more on this soon.

Shortwave Collective were invited to present our work in making DIY radio recievers at 'Strange Tramissions', a salon organised by The Wire magazine and the avant-radio label World Service, held at our favourite Cafe Oto in Dalston. We spoke about the Open Wave-Receiver, managed to find signal in a live demo, and then took part in a panel discussion, alongside live performanes and music by our friends, The evening was broadcast live on Resonance Extra! 

We were invited to lead an Open Wave-Receiver workshop at R-Urban in Poplar, east London as part of a summer solstice event called Earworms, a day of music, performance, lisening and radio in the community garden space. Luckily we had sunny weather, and we managed to pick up both Grerman and French radio at greyline. We loved plunging into the sauna as well!