Sustain.fm

Fresh off an amazing sound workshop in Norway last week called Soundshed, we hear sounds reflecting sonic presence and absence, hauntings, ruins, and imaginaries. The project, funded by the Oslo Center for Environmental Humanities, explored sound at the intersections of art, ecology, and energy production at Kistefos, a sculpture park and museum located on the site of a former paper pulp mill about an hour outside Oslo. I was excit...

Thumper trucks and dowsing rods. Seismic listening and fraudulent maps. Ham radio and silence. Just a few of the ideas we cover in today’s show with Megan Gette. Megan is an artist, a writer, a poet, an editor, interested in how sensemaking is articulated and given material form. Playing with technologies of listening, fluidity and im/materialisms , her artistic and academic works made for a fascinating conversation. Check ou...

Today I am thrilled to have on the show Natalia Escobar. Natalia is a Colombian interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and DJ whose practice spans moving images, sound, performance, and installations. Her work explores Abya Yala phenomenology, Indigenous cosmovisions, identity, and memory, drawing from decolonial and intersectional feminist perspectives. Since 2021, she has been developing pedagogical projects and collaborations...

Today on the show I’m happy to have Robert Willim as a guest. Robert is an artist and a researcher working at the interplay between art, research and dialogue. His practice explores imaginaries, media-related practices and human experiences of technology. In our conversation we explore sound, technology, media, artistic research, industry and society, and questions around digital and material culture.

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We have a special edition this month, a look – actually a listen – back to 2025. Thanks to all of you and my amazing guests, we have quite a collection of sounds to listen to. Enjoy listening to everything from Bristol beats to pond soundscapes to raw heartbeat driven noise. Today we have some sounds from a live broadcast of the show at RBL with me drusnoise, then sounds from Xayide, a livestream recording provided by M...

Today I am happy to have Jeannette Petrik on the show. Jeanette is an experimental noise maker performing as Chebedajha, writer, and cultural worker based in the Netherlands. I have been fascinated by Jeannette’s work ever since I saw their live performance in Enschede using heartbeats to clock a live modular synth show.  We talk about live performance, working with environments, and building community and hear some of t...

Today I’m happy to welcome Hendrik Klatte to the show. Hendrik has science background and is also an artist, curator and also the founder of re:natura, a non-profit artist collective, music label and experimental laboratory. We get into the intersections between science and sound along with talking about the role of curators in building community and engaging audiences with sustainability through sound.

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Today I’m happy to welcome Polina Medvedeva and Andreas Kühne to the show. Polina and Andreas create amazing sounds on their own and in collaboration. Together they play with narratives, community, shadow economies, and human relationships with environments. They work with an impressive array of techniques merging merges documentary filmmaking, AV performance, interactive installation, electroacoustic instruments introducing ...

Summer holidays time! A break from interviews until August and today we have a return to 2024 with a compilation of sounds from last year. You will hear sounds from all of the artists I interviewed this year ranging from archival sound pieces to techno to sound art compositions to meditations and trash music. Thanks so much to Veronica Mota, Veerle Pennock and Etta Harbor as Parallel Problems, Felipe Vareschi, Monica Sand, Priscill...

Welcome to today’s edition of sustain, I’m your host Steve Williams. Today we have some really interesting sounds and a conversation with Zuzana Hamm performing as FridaY. Zuzana is the founder of the new project bitumen lichen. We talk about boundaries and connections – between the organic and artificial, between pasts and futures, between natural and industrial. Zuzana explores all of these boundaries and disrup...

From do-it-yourself to make-it-together: Making music (or musical instruments) never happens as individuals. We are connected to other people, other genres, communities, and the materials that go into the instruments we use. Today we talk with JacqNoise, an amazing sound artist and live performer but also a super connector. We talk about sound and music and the power of community. Exploring how connections become part of a communit...

Every morning, if we are awake, we can hear the Dawn Chorus. The sound of birds and insects and animals waking up. But what do we really hear? How do those sounds change around the world? And what about the underwater chorus? Can we hear that too? Today we speak with Grant Smith and Mort Drew, both part of the Soundtent collaborative that organizes the Reveil project – a 25 hour long streaming of the dawn chorus around the wo...

So much about sustainability is about change. Looking at where we are and where we want to go. But often sustainability planning feels like binary choices about technologies, policies, and projects. What if there might be a different way to think about that? Today we explore a different kind of metaphor – metamorphosis. Xayide, the alter ego of musician Aura Danielle Muñoz Barragán, has described how metamorphosis implies pot...

A special live edition of sustain.fm featuring drusnoise performing the composition ‘There is no separation’. drusnoise explores the sociomaterial world through light, plants, radio, electromagnetic radiation, heartbeats, and carbon dioxide concentration data. The improvised composition and performance questions the story that we are separate from nature. That nature is separate from us. That nature is for us to control...

Welcome to the end of 2024 episode of sustain.fm radio. I can’t believe how fast the year has gone by and it was a nice treat to put this episode together. It gave me a chance to reflect on the incredible variety of artistic approaches to sound, music, and sustainability. I am so grateful to all of the artists who shared their time and sounds with me over the year, and I hope you enjoy their sounds.

For this episode, we only ...

In many ways, music is all about relationships. Relationships between musicians, between artists and audiences, between artists and their instruments, even the relationships between sounds and notes in a scale. But we can also think of these relationships inside a wider web of connections. What would it be like to compose and perform music that embeds relationship between humans and non-humans such as plants, animals, or environmen...

Most of the time we think of humans and non-humans as separate things. We experience and live in different worlds. Humans may love nature but are separate from nature. What if that is a wrong – or at least limiting – way to think about it? What would it mean to break down that separation? How might that change our experiences of sound and life with non-humans and nature? I’m your host Steve Williams and today we e...

When people are asked what kind of neighbourhood they want to live in they often say they want a quiet neighbourhood. But by quiet, they do not mean silent! People want to hear the sounds of children playing, birds in the trees, and glasses clinking at cafés but may not want to hear sounds of traffic, construction, or planes overhead. They may want to preserve the sounds of the past or hear something completely different. The Futur...

What does it mean to give voice to nature? To the weather? How can we connect with ecological systems through sound and performance? And what does it mean to attune to nature? Today I am excited to explore these questions – and more.  Juan C. Duarte Regino is an artist-researcher, currently a Ph.D. candidate at Aalto University. Central to his investigation is the relation between the atmosphere, the act of listening, an...