Between the Ears

Emerging talent from two BBC talent development schemes - Sound First and Words First - collaborate to create new soundworlds of spoken word and sound design.

Evocative, thoughtful and challenging, new poems recorded at the BBC Contains Strong Language festival in Leeds by the Words First spoken word artists are interwoven with new sound designs from our Sound First sound artists.

Sound First is supported by ambassador Ben Brick, the producer of Have You Heard George's Podcast? by George the Poet. Words First is supported by the poetry organisations Apples and Snakes and Young Identity.

Poems and Sound Designs by:

Stories in Storeys by Lisa O'Hare - sound design by Caitlin Hinds

Ian Rawes (1965-2021) was a sound recordist best known for creating the London Sound Survey, a huge collection of his recordings of the sounds of London.

Before his death, Ian was recording the course of the night across the wilder places of East Anglia. He made these field recordings in remote locations across Norfolk and Suffolk, sometimes camping overnight in bird hides to capture the different nocturnal moments.

Ian called the project, ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’, and handed the recordings to his friend, composer/producer Iain Chambers, saying that he wanted them to bring about something new.

Here, writer Kayo Chingonyi responds to the recordings, and Iain uses both elements to create a new composed sound piece, in tribute to Ian Rawes.

We start at sunset: the sounds of wildfowl travel far across the flooded fields of the Ouse Washes in Cambridgeshire. Many are Bewick's and whooper swans spending the winter in the Fens before migrating back to Iceland and Siberia.

https://thelondonsoundsurvey.bandcamp.com/album/from-dusk-till-dawn

Recordings – Ian Rawes / The London Sound Survey

An Open Audio production for BBC Radio 3

A sonic journey into Japan's unique culture of music cafés and listening bars. Places where people come together to indulge in deep listening in audiophile quality, with venues for fans of everything from classical, jazz, to electronic music.

This culture has its origins in the time prior to the second world war, when imported records and audio equipment were prohibitively expensive. People began to gather in cafés where, for the price of a cup of coffee, they could listen to rare records on the highest quality gramophones.

While the traditional classical and jazz cafés are slowly disappearing, there are new modern listening bars emerging, often concentrating on specific genres and even microgenres of contemporary music, with a focus on the same concept of concentrated and collective listening.

Rich in binaural recordings, this radio documentary features the owners and regulars of legendary music cafés, like the classical music cafés Violon in Tokyo, and Musik in Kyoto, the jazz café Downbeat in Yokohama, as well as the DJ-Bar Bridge, a cutting-edge listening bar in Shibuya, Tokyo.

Producer: Andreas Hartmann in collaboration with Julia Shimura

The permafrost is a thriving ecosystem, teaming with life, mythology, histories and futures, hidden just below the surface. Yet unlike tropical rainforests or the deep oceans, this frozen expanse rarely appears in the cultural imagination. Curator Sophie J Williamson ventures on a journey to discover the life of the permafrost.

In -40° winter of the Canadian Yukon Valley, ancient forests, perfectly preserved by the permafrost, are uncovered by miners and 10,000-year-old grass seeds sprout into life. In the blustery remote Artic town of Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard (the world's northernmost settlement) cryomicrobiologists drill boreholes hundreds of meters deep to explore the deepest and oldest of earthly ecologies, bringing to the surface living microbes that are hundreds of thousands of years old. And in unceded Sápmi lands of northern Finland, permafrost mounds decompose into marshy peatlands, while biologists trace the shifting bio- and geoacoustics of a changing ecology.

From the piercing-white tundra and the hundreds of thousands of lakes across the vast expanse of Siberia, indigenous folklore emerges from the unknowns of the icy underlands. And scientists in Yakutsk (the world’s coldest city), travel the icy landscapes to discover the stories secreted within the still fleshy, visceral carcasses of mammoths and ancient creatures that are exposed as the millennia-year-old ice thaws.

With contributions by Hannu Autto, Jonathan Carruthers-Jones, Tori Herridge, Karen Lloyd, Sanna Piilo, Svetlana Romanova, Nikita Tananaev, Peter von Tiesenhausen, and other members of Sámi, Sakha and Yukagir communities of unceded Sápmi territory and Northern Siberia who prefer not to be named.

Specially commissioned spoken word piece by Sata Taas (written and spoken by Al-Yene and Jaangy, with sound design by Karina Kazaryan aka KP Transmission)

With excerpts of Jana Winderen's 'Energy Field', 'Listening Through the Dead Zones' and 'Pasvikdalen'. Published by Touch Music.

Recorded and curated by Sophie J Williamson

A Whistledown Scotland Production for BBC 3

Imagining the Permafrost is part of the wider arts programme, Undead Matter. Follow on Instagram @undead_matter

The UKs last remaining coal fired power stations are about to close, bringing to an end our use of coal to produce our electricity. West Burton is one of the last coal fired power stations still generating electricity, and Andrew Carter was able to record a soundscape there before it falls silent for ever.

In this piece, the fool stands at the edge of the cliff, looking up at the sky.

She asks herself, “How did I get here?”

Part of our recurring series of miniature audio-works for Radio 3's home for adventurous radio-making - Between the Ears. In this series, five audio-makers from around the world were invited to choose a card from the tarot deck as a creative prompt for their idea. The card at the heart of this edition is The Fool.

Featuring: Briana Gutierrez

Produced by Phoebe Wang

Filling out a form, Mido is confronted with a series of boxes to tick. Two familiar boxes emerge from the crowd and stand side by side. One says ‘Male’. The other says ‘Female’.

Beyond the Box is an intimate and inquisitive immersion into the nature of these boxes and what life is like living beyond them.

Developed through a series of facilitated workshops, producer Christina Hardinge invites friend Mido to explore their personal lived experience of being ‘put in a box’. By integrating the therapeutic tools of visualisation and guided imagery with interview, together they imagine new ways of framing this conversation.

Christina Hardinge is a Bristol based audio producer and multi-disciplinary artist working creatively in the field of documentary. She has over 10 years experience of telling intimate personal stories rooted in interview; spanning across the mediums of audio, film, theatre and immersive installation. Winner of the Charles Parker Radio Prize and nominee for Prix Europa's Rising Star audio award, her work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Short Cuts and exhibited at international festivals.

Beyond the Box forms part of our recurring series of miniature audio-works for Radio 3's home for adventurous radio-making - Between the Ears. In this series, five audio-makers from around the world were invited to choose a card from the tarot deck as a creative prompt for their idea. The card at the heart of Beyond the Box is the Death card.

Produced by Christina Hardinge

feeling body is part of a series of pieces reflecting on the physical and psychological experiences during and after an extended period of illness (long-COVID). The work draws on multiple symbolisms, from The Nine of Swords in the Minor Arcana, to the undercurrent of water, where long baths were a point of solace during the experience of debilitating symptoms. Interspersed with perspectives of internal and external interactions, voiced by the composer in multiple ways as well as a by Kiswahili text-to-speech voice, and with additional sounds from performers Yaz Lancaster (voice, violin) & Michael O’Callaghan (trumpet), the piece blurs the lines between a perspective from the time of illness and one in retrospect, underlining an inevitable consequence of illness: how it arrests, irreversibly, one’s awareness of their living body.

feeling body forms part of our recurring series of miniature audio-works for Radio 3's home for adventurous radio-making - Between the Ears. In this series, five audio-makers from around the world were invited to choose a card from the tarot deck as a creative prompt for their idea.

Nyokabi Kariũki is a Kenyan composer and sound artist. Illuminated by musical sensibilities from her African upbringing, Nyokabi shares a unique artistic voice spanning across various genres — from classical contemporary to sound art, film, and explorations into (East) African musical traditions. Her works have been experienced in various contexts around the world, from audio art festivals (including the Hearsay International Audio Festival, where she received the 2021 Hearsay ‘Art’ Award), to performances by acclaimed ensembles like Third Coast Percussion and Cello Octet Amsterdam.

Produced and composed by Nyokabi Kariũki

Marta Medvešek explores a local legend she encounters on her summer vacation in Bol, Croatia – the story of the House in a House. A magical place where imagination meets reality, and fate–possibility.

The House in a House forms part of our recurring series of miniature audio-works for Radio 3's home for adventurous radio-making - Between the Ears. In this series, five audio-makers from around the world were invited to choose a card from the tarot deck as a creative prompt for their idea. The card at the heart of The House in a House is The Tower.

Marta Medvešek is a Croatian audio producer with a soft spot for helping stories cross language borders. She’s produced work for BBC Radio 4’s Short Cuts, Resonance FM, The Allusionist, Deutschlandfunk Kultur and BBC World Service. Since winning the Best European Radio Documentary prize at the 2021 Prix Europa, her piece “Fly or Die” has already traveled to Germany, Sweden, Lithuania, Belgium and Italy.

Featuring Ivica Jakšić Čokrić Puko and Mario Borovčić Kurir

Researchers Bongani Kona and Catherine Boulle have spent the last year piecing together the story of one woman’s decades-long search to find the remains of her father, a South African political activist who died in 1966. In between visiting old prisons and sifting through archival collections, Bongani begins dreaming about the ghost of his own father, a man he's never met.

The quest to uncover the meaning behind these recurring dreams leads to Julia, a spirit medium and healer, who practices one of the oldest forms of divination on the planet – “throwing the bones”. In consultation with ancestral and spirit worlds, Julia deciphers “energy fields within one’s psyche, spirit and soul body.” This is all to bring solace to troubled souls and minds; to “these soft houses in which we live”, as Kei Miller writes, “and in which we move and from which we can never migrate, except by dying.” Khangela, in isiXhosa, is to look, or to search.

Khangela forms part of our recurring series of miniature audio-works for Radio 3's home for adventurous radio-making - Between the Ears. In this series, five audio-makers from around the world were invited to choose a card from the tarot deck as a creative prompt for their idea. The card at the heart of Khangela is The High Priestess.

Bongani Kona is a writer, and a lecturer in the department of history at the University of the Western Cape. Catherine Boulle is an audio maker and writer, currently based at the University of Cape Town. Together, Catherine and Bongani won the 2021 Whickers Radio & Audio Funding Award for their documentary about South Africa's Missing Persons Task Team, and the case of James Booi.

Produced by Bongani Kona and Catherine Boulle