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 Dear Miss Nanji by Anna Margarita - sound design by Owen McDonnell Mind The Bleep by Nigeen Dara - sound design by Jo Kennedy ESCA by HL Truslove - sound design by Laura Campbell This Thing Called Life by Jed - sound design by Cameron Naylor Aquaphobia by Nosa - sound design by Cameron Naylor and Owen McDonnell Planted by Anisa Butt - sound design by Jo Kennedy My Last Night with Mandy by Spoken 2 Life - sound design by Laura Campbell The Shrewing of the Tame by Lisa O'Hare - sound design by Oliver Denman We Are Not Divided by Anna Margarita - sound design by Ross Burns

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 https://www.soundsurvey.org.uk Recordings – Ian Rawes / The London Sound Survey Words/voice – Kayo Chingonyi Composer/producer – Iain Chambers Mixing engineer – Peregrine Andrews Executive Producer – Nina Perry 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 Translation: Krzysztof Honowski Voice Actors: Peter Becker, Matthew Burton, Ian Dickinson, Riah Knight and Tomas Sinclair Spencer Photo Credit: Andreas Hartmann

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 Sound design by Rob Mackay Produced by Mark Rickards 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. West Burton was originally planned to close in September 2022, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine has extended its operations until the spring of 2023 to help with continuity of supply during the current energy crisis. Andrew's late father was a mechanical engineer, and he worked for the Central Electricity Generating Board, and fifty years ago he took Andrew around Cottam power station – which is just up the road from West Burton – and as you can imagine that tour around the plant left a big impression on an eight year old. As luck would have it, when Andrew was recording at West Burton, he was able to go to Cottam, which he discovered is now in the process of being demolished, and he walked again in his father’s footsteps. It brought back a lot of poignant memories. This soundscape in an operating, and disused coal fired power station is Andrew's homage to his father, before these cathedrals of power are reduced to rubble, capturing, before it’s too late, the sounds that would otherwise be lost to history. A BBC Radio Cumbria production, produced by Andrew Carter

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?” And also, “Where am I meant to go?” 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 Additional voices: Kate Bowen, Cristina Umaña Durán, Hannah Patterson, Ruoyi Shi, Sofija Stefanovic, and Canelo Joaquin Produced by Phoebe Wang A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 3

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 Co-created by: Mido A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 3

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 A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 3

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 Music by Kevin Kopacka Produced by Marta Medvešek A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 3

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 A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 3

Part poem, part surreal radio play, Ding Dong explores the difficulties of staying in the present through the mind of a millennial, and delves into why shutting off your senses with the content on your phone is far more appealing than opening your eyes to the discomfort of today (and even worse, the bleak uncertainty of tomorrow). When the Present Moment comes knocking, Leanne wants nothing to do with her. She’s far too smiley and righteous, and she has some difficult questions which are...

Acting as a lullaby, this 14-minute piece mixes together a narrative, spoken by Randolf Menzel, and music. Just before going to sleep, listeners will experience Randolf Menzel’s dream and question if bees dream as well. Dr. Randolf Menzel is a German neurobiologist who dedicated his life to the world of bees. At the beginning of his career, he was dreaming of becoming a bee. At nights, and sometimes during the day, he was transforming into his subject of research. These experiences helped...

Standing on Waterloo Bridge in 2021, the artist re-examines the personal impact of Derek Jarman’s final film, ‘Blue’ (1993). His celebrated experimental film is a poetic reckoning with his grief at the loss of friends, lovers and his own life as a result of AIDS-related illnesses. ‘Time is what keeps the light from reaching us’ is an audio essay, sampling from the film itself, asking the question, what does it mean to review Jarman’s film without an image today? A re-view, in this case,...

Five audio-makers from around the world take over The Essay to offer a series of Radio 3's innovative Between the Ears features in miniature. Each edition takes an image as its starting point - from a radio producer who finds herself caught in a news image to a painting come to life. Chromophonia explores colour for the ears, through the eyes of two colour experts. Cheryl Porter is a books and paper conservator, specialising in medieval manuscripts and methods of creating and preserving...

Five audio-makers from around the world take over The Essay to offer a series of Radio 3's innovative Between the Ears features in miniature. Each edition takes an image as its starting point - from a radio producer who finds herself caught in a news image to a painting come to life. Tonight, the audio artist Fallon Mayanja explores the idea of words as corpses, or shells, as she brings a photograph of crashing waves to life. Produced by Fallon Mayanja A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio...

Five audio-makers from around the world take over The Essay to offer a series of Radio 3's innovative Between the Ears features in miniature. Each edition of takes an image as its starting point - from a radio producer who finds herself caught in a news image to a painting come to life. In this edition, Australian documentary maker Mike Williams revisits the scene of a family photo on a road trip to visit a famous outback pub. An unexpected obstacle forces him to contemplate the future....

Five audio-makers from around the world take over The Essay to offer a series of Radio 3's innovative Between the Ears features in miniature. Each edition takes an image as its starting point - from an audio-maker who finds herself caught in a news image to a painting come to life. In To Have/To Hold, Aliya Pabani pieces together fragmentary memories of a protest from the news images taken that day. Standing trying to hold a line around a homeless encampment in Toronto, photo journalists are...

The joys and horrors of the internet, evoked by stories, sounds and an exciting new electronic and vocal work composed by Kieran Brunt. Opens with an introduction by the composer. 30 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee created the very first website. This powerful edition of Between the Ears explores how the internet has dramatically reshaped our lives over the following three decades. In 1990s Glasgow, a young woman in a physics computer lab glimpses a different future for the world - and herself. In Luton, the web awakens a young man’s Sikh identity - a few years on, it will bring him riches. In 2001, a young mother in France finds escape through Wikipedia. Ten years later, an Austrian law student is horrified when he requests his personal data from Facebook… Over four movements of music and personal stories, the Virtual Symphony moves from sunny optimism to deep disquiet, as our relationship to the internet shifts. Around these stories, composer Kieran Brunt weaves electronic and vocal elements in an exhilarating new musical work commissioned by BBC Radio 3. Kieran Brunt and documentary producer Laurence Grissell worked in close collaboration to produce a unique evocation of the way in which the internet has fundamentally changed how we experience and understand the world. Composer: Kieran Brunt Producer: Laurence Grissell Interviewees: Melissa Terras, Harjit Lakhan, Florence Devouard and Max Schrems Electronics performed by Kieran Brunt Vocals performed by Kieran Brunt, Lucy Cronin, Kate Huggett, Oliver Martin-Smith and Augustus Perkins Ray of the vocal ensemble Shards Programme mixed by: Donald MacDonald Additional music production: Paul Corley Additional engineering: Ben Andrewes

A radiophonic exploration of The Gododdin, a lament for the fallen, bringing to life one of the oldest, yet enduringly relevant, treasures of European literature The Gododdin occupies a unique place in the literature of the United Kingdom. The oldest Welsh poem - a battle elegy from around 600AD - it was passed down orally, possibly in the form of song, for hundreds of years. Written down by two scribes in the 13th century in a form of proto-Welsh - Brythonic - then spoken from Scotland down through Cumbria to present day Wales, it's as strange yet accessible to Welsh-speakers today as Chaucer is to English-speakers. The events commemorated are real, but took place before Wales and England even existed, and long before there was such a thing as the English language. The Gododdin were a tribe based south of present day Edinburgh, who, as Britannia was reshaping itself in the post-Roman era, were fighting off incursions of Anglo-Saxons from the east. The poem describes a real battle. The time is the 7th century; the site of the battle near Catterick; the context, a warring world of rival tribes and chieftains. We can identify the lord, Mynyddog Mwynfawr, who gathers the Celtic warriors together from his own tribe, calling for help from Gwynedd in present-day Wales. And we know that the poem was composed by Aneirin, who must have been present at the battle. Aneirin recorded what he witnessed in a series of 100 elegies for the fallen. What we hear is an evocation of the men who went into battle, hopelessly outnumbered, and were cut down. Their names in themselves are a form of poetry, the naming a sacred act of commemoration. The characters of the fallen are here preserved like bog-men of fifteen hundred years ago. 'Madog cut down men like rushes, but was shy before a girl'; 'At court the quiet one, Erthgi made armies groan'. The Gododdin, largely forgotten, re-emerged in the early twentieth century. Its tale of the pity of individual lives ended in battle, often young lives, carries clear relevance today. The Gododdin also deals in what we would now call collateral damage: the bereaved and the bereft. The epigraph to David Jones's First World War masterpiece In Parenthesis is taken from The Gododdin, and it collapses the distance between the 20th century and the 6th century: 'Sennyessit e gledyf ym mhenn mameu' - 'His sword sounded in the heads of mothers'. Today, the Gododdin's ancient tale of warriors, far from home, serving a nobleman and paying with their lives, seems both timeless and timely. Between the Ears: Rhythms of Remembering enters into the world of The Gododdin, weaving extracts of Gillian Clarke's new English translation of the poem with an immersive soundscape and music. Her translation of Aneirin's words - the first complete one by a poet - read by Lisa Jen Brown, provide the backbone of the programme, and the poem's history and resonance today is explored through interviews with Gillian, theatre director Mike Pearson, and Ieuan Jenkins, who recalls his experience of serving as a young soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan. With music specially composed for the programme by Georgia Ruth. Produced for BBC Wales by Megan Jones

In early summer, as darkness descends, Berlin resonates with the sound of nightingales. You can hear their haunting, ever-changing songs in parks, woodlands and gardens across the city. From Kreuzberg to Treptower, Tempelhof to Hasenheide, Berlin has become a refuge for one of the most celebrated and mythologised birds on earth. The city is the summer home for over one and a half thousand nesting pairs. Nobody’s quite sure why nightingales have adopted the city so enthusiastically. Maybe it’s Berlin’s enlightened policy towards park management which leaves areas of untended scrub and dense bushes providing ground-nesting nightingales with perfect cover. Whatever the reason, this blossoming of nightingales means that their song has become the soundtrack to countless moments in Berlin’s residents’ lives: lovers listening to the nightingale’s melody in the depths of the night; a childhood memory of illness soothed by hearing the song – and the German name Nachtigall – for the first time; and a visit to one of the few architectural remnants of Germania, Hitler’s megalomaniacal plan for a new city on the site of Berlin. This programme gathers memories of the nightingale’s lingering, multi-faceted song and the sounds of city evenings to create an audio portrait of Berlin, its people and the bird to whom it’s given refuge. We hear too from a group of musicians who seek out nightingales in the city’s parks to play alongside them. They describe feeling their way into the nightingale’s song, the call-and-response between bird and human and the sense of each listening to the other. Some even describe themselves as nightingales: they’ve travelled from far countries to make music in Berlin. The programme is made in collaboration with Berlin Museum of Natural History’s Forschungsfall Nachtigall project that asks members of the public to record nightingales and send in their recordings – along with stories and memories of the bird which has become a symbol of the city. With the voices of Sarah Darwin, Korhan Erel, Gaby Hartel, Volker Lankow, Christopher and Erika Lehmpfuhl, Charlotte Neidhardt, Philip Oltermann, Sascha Penshorn, Tina Roeske, David Rothenberg and Cymin Samawatie. Featuring music from David Rothenberg’s 'Nightingale Cities' project and 'Berlin Bülbül by David Rothenberg and Korhan Erel. Location recordings in Berlin by Martyna Poznańska and Monika Dorniak. Producer: Jeremy Grange Photograph courtesy of Kim Mortega