Category: Audio

What is the etymology of your being?

Axel Kacoutié offers a vivid personal essay reflecting on language, bilingualism and the curated gaps they have to navigate in order to access their culture and sense of self.

“Your language is a spell, an invocation speaking you into existence, rediscovering the contours of your morality, the fabric of your race and gender and how you relate to others and the world…”

Featuring the voices of the poet Raymond Antrobus and performance artist Rachel Cheung, Axel weaves together the thoughts of a number of multilingual people – including Derick Armah, Irina Niculescu, Mauricio Loseto, Olivia Melkonian, Radhika Viswanathan and Rosel Jackson Stern – into a reflection on living between languages and finding yourself in the gaps.

Illustration: Erin Tse
Animation: Luke Dye-Montefiore

Produced by Axel Kacoutié
A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4

Awards:

Prix Marulić Grand Prix Award 2022

Best Factual Producer Audio Production Awards 2022

Produced Episdoes by Axel Kacoutié

Miniatures produced by Axel Kacoutié

Reframing The Black Image – Pioneers of The Past w/ Alayo Akinkugbe; Renata Cherlise; Theo Imani & Osei Bonsu

Made in Partnership with Vibe Called Tech for The North Face and Gucci collaboration, Pioneers of the Past is a celebration of four talents who are remapping and rethinking how the Black image is presented in fine and contemporary art. In this special programme to celebrate Stance’s 4th Birthday, we talk to four curators and visual researchers who are defining new ways of looking and seeing the Black image in visual arts.

Jazz Grant Collage of Osei Bonsu

Get to know the albums that matter. In series one we take a sonic journey into Dave’s award-winning concept album, Psychodrama. Join Dave on the therapy couch for “Psycho”, navigate the alleyways of his hometown “Streatham”, discover the secret sauce of the club favourite “Location”, and take in the epic scope of “Black”.

Hosted by Kayo Chingonyi, Decode gets deep inside an album, track by track, line by line, beat by beat – deconstructing the ingredients which make a masterpiece. A new podcast for 2021, from the hit US show, Dissect. A Reduced Listening Production for Spotify Studios UK.

Awards:

– The ARIAS – Radio Academy 2022

Best New Show: GOLD (Decode S1)

Best Specialist Music Show: GOLD (Decode S1)

– British Podcast Awards 2022

Smartest Podcast: GOLD (Decode S1)

Best Entertainment: GOLD (Decode S1)

Best New Podcast: SILVER (Decode S1)

Artist Nwando Ebizie, presents a new 5-part mini-series reimagining care and healing through art, health and science. With ideas for how to care and connect, the series evolves through conversations, artistic works and healing experiences.

Join us to explore what care means for our bodies, communities, the planet and our futures. A BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and Wellcome Collection collaboration. Presented by Nwando Ebizie. Music by Nkisi. Sound by Axel Kacoutié. A Reduced Listening Production, produced by Katherine Godfrey and Georgia Moodie and exec produced by Alannah Chance.

For All I Care

The Mediated Body

Distant Touch

Earthly Perspectives

Connecting for Change

Our Futures Past

In 2008, 20 year-old Brenda Birungi got into a fight in a nightclub to protect her sister. With no previous convictions, Brenda ended up serving 11 months in prison. It altered the course of her life.

In Unchained we hear from:
Paula, who called the police to her house 9 times to report domestic violence in the year before her arrest;
Amanda, who became a sex worker to support her partner’s drug use;
Krystal, who was arrested after stealing a duvet for her child;
Georgia, who was left to fend for herself at 15 while her single mum served a 3 month sentence.

All statistics in this documentary come from research by Women in Prison.

Producer: Jessie Lawson
Sound Design: Axel Kacoutié
A Prison Radio Association production for BBC Radio 4

Listen Now

A version of a memory where Bram Stoker’s Dracula became medicine for one dark night.

About Night Vision: In new after-hours listening on Radio 4, the team behind the award-winning Wireless Nights present three acoustically rich journeys through three long nights of the soul. Nights that left an indelible mark on the storyteller.

(image: Courbevoie, Factories by Moonlight (ca. 1882–1883) by Georges Seurat)

Five radio producers from around the world hijack The Essay to offer a series of Radio 3’s innovative Between the Ears features in miniature, in response to Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘Hope is the thing with feathers’.

In this edition, Axel Kacoutié offers a story about a man’s journey home, which interweaves with the discovery of a lesser-known truth about hope.

Gold for the Sarah Lawrence Audio Fiction Awards.

Judges comments:
This piece broke the judges to tears – with its subtle sound design that make you feel the vibration of the trains, and the tunnels that comes and goes and pushes the mind of the listeners into this world of metaphors that transforms you; with its rhythmisation of expansion and closeness. Paradise shows what you can expect from audio fiction; that you can experience the world as if for the first time.

We are wrong to look for uniformity and objectivity. We have all mapped associations to what our subjective experience is like.

My experience of the colour red is different from yours. Our brains light up the same way when hearing water but our relationship to its sounds will never be the same.

Because of this, I wanted to illustrate how I’ve mapped mine using abstract terms like solitude, sunbathing, patricide etc. All as an attempt to say, “you don’t have to understand, I just want to connect and have you see (listen) how I relate to the world.”

Designed to listen to audio from around the world and explore ideas of intimacy and distance, the Soundhouse ‘listening rooms’ was curated by audio artists, Ariana Martinez, Axel Kacoutié and Arlie Adlington.

Soundhouse: Intimacy and Distance took place from 28 October 2020 until 28 February 2021

Room OneTranscript

And Again by Axel Kacoutié

Room One – “Art isn’t made to experience only once…this curation is an invitation to pause.”

 

About Soundhouse

Soundhouse is a platform for creative radio and podcasting, and a space for reflections on audio culture.

In 2018 it took the form of a pop-up venue at the Barbican, with a focus on communal listening and experimental events in a sensory environment for sound. This year, Soundhouse exists here online, and we explore ideas of Intimacy and Distance through three ‘listening rooms’, and four specially commissioned pieces of writing.

Co-creators Eleanor McDowall and Nina Garthwaite write here about why this theme felt apt for the ‘socially distanced world’ many of us are living in, and how ideas of intimacy and distance have always been intertwined with the way we experience radio.

Read about Soundhouse: Intimacy and Distance