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 abou...

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 fasci...

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 pedagogic...

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 cult...

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...

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 comm...

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...

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, electroacou...

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, Fel...

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 boun...

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 co...

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...

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...

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 natu...

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 sound...

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 suc...

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 Willia...

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 someth...

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,...

Sound is one of our most powerful senses. But it is just one of our senses. Sight, touch, smell, and taste are powerful too. And even more powerful when they are combined with sound. Today we talk with Melissa Ingaruca Moreno about her work with light, fungi, meditation, and sound. Melissa is an award-winning futurist and researcher in multispecies design based in Berlin. Her project ‘Endarken’ in...

Sound and music are in many ways ethereal and, quite literally, float through the air with no environmental impact. But, especially in the electronic music world, the gear that makes sound, transmits sound, records sound, and drives the dance floor does have an environmental impact. What does that mean for a sustainable electronic music scene? Today we talk with Priscilla Haring-Kuipers of This is...

Sound is an interesting thing. Sounds can evoke emotions like happiness, anxiety, hope, and calmness. But what I find most interesting is how sound can evoke memories. One of my first memories of sound is my Mum playing the organ at church, laying down on the wooden pew and feeling bass in my whole body. Strong memories of family, connection and childhood – all from sound. In the latest episode of...

It sounds simple, but what is noise? Is it unwanted sounds? Is it a set of frequencies? Or is it something that is always around us but something we don’t usually notice? Today we talk with Felipe Vareshi about their compositions and performances that give voice to the quietest and most hidden forms of noise pollution that affect us as individuals and as groups coexisting within urban spaces. We t...

So what is trash really? What is waste? How do we cut down how much we throw away? And what happens when we throw things away? Is that really the end of things? Many groups like Bye Bye Plastic and Clubtopia are thinking about questions like these; how to reduce waste in clubs and festivals, get rid of plastic water bottles and so on. But a different approach is to completely rethink the idea of w...

Today we talk about the intersections of sustainability, health, data and sound in drusnoise’s techno composition ‘We are but dust and shadows’. The composition investigates how sonification of air pollution data can be used for modulation of sound, mirroring the ways that unseen particles in the air affect humans and the environment – usually in ways we do not notice or understand. The live exper...