With my family, I spent October at the Radio Revolten Festival in Halle (Saale) along with many other Radia artists, and the global radio art community. This extraordinary, elaborate, dignified and vital event broadcast live on FM and MW in the city, and through many other channels. Live art surrounded us, including performances at the festival HQ, and a rich sense of community, built through artistic collaborations, late night conversations, shared food, and care for one another and for those we were broadcasting to. As the outside world felt at danger from the rise of reactive, violent political perspectives, the need to broadcast art, and for that art to be whatever it needed to be, felt increasingly significant.

30 days of Radio Revolten, 30 C15 cassette tapes, 1 tape filled each day. 1 minute of each tape is selected here for you.

These are not a representation of this amazing festival, its artists and broadcasts, but mostly a tuning-in to the moments in between. In the heat of experiencing radio art, I rarely remembered to record anything. The cassette players were awkward to carry around, and sometimes I couldn’t be bothered. Moments of Revolten broadcasts were taped back at the flat we stayed in, and sometimes off the radio set downstairs in the Revolten HQ cafe. These recordings are low quality, irritating, and vague.

Listening to the radio art installations at Rathausstraße 4 brought a new ear to Halle’s city centre, roaring away outside the building. Trams, buskers, church bells, passing conversation and weather kept the festival radiating around the city for anyone who had passed through the building. Choosing to capture my month in Halle on cassette freed me from trying to make beautiful and precise digital recordings. The tape recorder often stayed in my bag, was grabbed by others, or licked by the coypu in the park. Still the sounds shine through the medium – here my memories are not relived, eerily like the original moment, but behave more as memories do in my mind – damaged, deteriorated, remade, rearranged and lost in time.

Thanks, love and apologies to everyone at Revolten, particularly those whose voices have unwittingly appeared here.