We're busy busy busy at Shortwave Collective having run many workshops, given talks and interviews and shared our work on many radio stations over the last few months:

• Piksel Festival, Norwary - a unique opportunity for us to come together in a mini residency in which we ran two radio making workshops at the festival .... around 40 radios were made and listened to in the ice cold darkness of Bergen!
• We gave a talk about our work in the Sound Arts Lecture series at London College of Communication in December
• Constellations of Listening, our 22 hour sound work has been broadcast on  Resonance FM each week on between October 2022 and April 2023, and the first hour featured in the amazing Tsonami Festival in Chile in December 2022 
• How to Make an Open Wave Receiver, an audio work sharing the instructions for creating your own radio, has as been broadcast on RadioArt106, on Reboot FM, and on Melodic Distraction for International Women's Day
• The collective were interviewed on Patio Sound with our friends in Liverpool, a follow on from a workshop we ran last autumn.
• We've delivered a number of Open Wave Receiver making workshops: one with the Sound Arts BA and MA students at London College of Communication in March, another with the Bradford Sound Women Network in February, and we're running a hybrid workshop in New York in April!

Amongst many many other things, we're also working towards a new work for Struer Tracks festival in Denmark later this summer, at which we're collaborating with Bang and Olufsen. More coming soon on this ...

It's been a busy and exciting year with the Shortwave Collective. None of which I've kept on top of posting on my website. To round up some of the brilliant things ...

Last month a big project "Constellations of Listening" was broadcast on Radio Art Zone, this 22 hour sound work brought together 6 months or more of listening experiments with a whole range of radio devices by the collective, at different times and sites around the world - from our living room windows, to balconies, gardens, local neighbourhoods to holiday and international work destinations. It was a joyful coming together of our radio practice and our work making and using the Open Wave-Receivers. Have a proper read on the SW website: ​www.shortwavecollective.net/constellations-of-listening.html

Around this we've run a whole host of workshops, making radio and listening to radio transmissions with new groups of people. Each workshop included new experimentation that then becomes part of the radio design, and many of the workshops were included in the Radio Art Zone broadcast. There's more info about each one on the SW werbsite - the workshops were  in Liverpool (UK) with At the Library this month, in Elephant & Castle, London (UK) with CRiSAP's Points of Listening series in June, at Soundcamp in Stave HIll, London (UK) in May, and in Orléans (France) in June. 

We've also presented our work a number of times this month: at the Listening Academy in London (UK), at Sono-(soro)rities, Montreal (Canada), with Phantom Power Podcast (USA) for an episode releasing next month, and back in June at Hackacoustic, London (UK).

And coming up next ... we're going to Pixel Festival in November!

There are many more good photos over on the SW website, and some sound will be coming soon ... 

Our new sound work 'Open Wave-Receiver' premiers on Radiophrenia at 7pm on Feb 20th. Listen online here
en Wav
‘Open Wave-Receiver’ is an audio how-to guide from Shortwave Collective. In this piece, we share instructions on how to construct self-powered radio receivers, from the print version of our forthcoming 'how-to-guide' for Make Magazine. The work collages sounds of our collective, engaged in the processes of making and listening (including recordings made during a residency at Buinho Creative Hub, Portugal), as well as the sounds of our materials, our experimentation and workshopping, and finally, the signals received by the Open Wave-Receivers.

Read more about the development of  the Open Wave-Receiver here, and the Shortwave Collective here.

What an incredible week learning about, un-learning about, making radios and expanded radios in all kinds of ways. There were found materials, unexpected sounds, antenna games up in the air, all conducted out in a lovely village in southern Portugal (and online) with the Shortwave Collective (in hybrid mode).

Big thanks to Buinho Creative hub for having us. 

What began as a "foxhole radio residency" became an "open wave-receiver" residency as we made our own variations on what a simple radio receiver could be, and re-positioned the device we were working with as listening devices / microphones of sorts listening in to the wider radio field and electromagnetic sphere all around us. We've written up our experiences in a How-to article being published in Make Magazine early next year, and an audio version will be premiered on Radiophrenia. More soon.

We also left an Open wave-receiver built into the Buinho Creative Hub roof, ready for listeners.

Here are a few pics from our making week. Sound coming soon.

Why are we testing radios by night? To listen at the 'grey line' transmission, when radio is much stronger at dawn and dusk. And wow was it!

And the below is Messejana life. Pomegranates, chickens, 360 sunsets, roads that lead to the sky, amazing doorways and washing lines that do more than dry clothes. Looking forward to going back next year :)

​We ended the residency on a high, with a morning workshop making experimental radios, all of which worked and picked up the transmissions available at that time. Pics coming in the Make Magazine article showcasing each hand made radio.

Hannah Kemp-Welch and I just passed our Amateur Radio exam and are now licensed for the Amateur radio waves!! 

A giant home made aerial will soon be being strung out of one of our windows, as we get our radio shack set up... 

Thanks to the wonderful people at Eltham's Cray Valley Radio Society for the epic two day course to get us clued up and ready for the airwaves and part of the Radio Society of Great Britain.

Lovely to meet Robbie Judkins recently and to take a cricket song sound walk around east London together talking about the sound of crickets and insects.

His brilliant radio show Animal Sounds, has a new episode #8 Insects that will air on Resonance 104.4  FM on Friday 25th Nov at 20.00. and feature a bit of our walk.

Its also going to be online afterwards on the Resonance FM Mixcloud page.

The amazing poster image is by Wil Judkins

Very pleased to have been invited to Sound Traces Moves conference last weekend to share my work Walking with Crickets with dancers, choreographers, musicians and researchers at the Orff Institute, Salzburg, Austria.

The full programme is here:

An excerpt of Walking with Crickets will feature on an upcoming radio show on the BBC Radio 4 Natural Histories series exploring the cultural interest in Crickets.
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A cricket walk and interview were recorded on 8th August by Brett Westwood & Sarah Blunt with myself, Ximena Alarcon, Hannah Kemp-Welch & Francesca Oldfield in Elephant and Castle.

On air: November 2016 - Tuesday 1st @ 11am & Monday 7th @ 9pm.
Online in November listen here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05w99gb/episodes/player