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. Creation of the Birds by Sami El-Enany is part tone poem and part narrative reimagining of Remedios Varo’s painting of the same name. El-Enany chose to focus on three main aspects for his Creation of the Birds,...

Fifty-five years since the release of The Beatles' album Revolver, their music still casts a long shadow over the people of Liverpool. For many growing up and working in Liverpool during the 50s and 60s, The Beatles have cast a long shadow. They breathed the same air, inhabited the same streets and felt the same promise of a new, postwar culture. The story of the 'Fab Four' has been told and told again. But for a young couple like Gwen and her ex-soldier husband Ken, and young people like...

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....

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...

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...

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...

Alison Lock's dreamlike journey describes her dramatic, near-fatal accident four years ago. One morning, on her regular walk on the Yorkshire moors, she slipped and fell into a millpond, breaking her back in seven places along the way. Alison has no memory of the moment of falling, but every second of clawing her way back to life, from one handhold to the next, is vividly imprinted and distilled into this poetic sequence. Music by Will Gregory (Goldfrapp, The Moog Ensemble), with violin by...

Maria Margaronis surrenders to the life of the hive to explore the ancient folk customs around the telling the bees. The lives of bees and humans have been linked ever since the first hominid tasted a wild hive’s honey. Neither domesticated nor fully wild, honey bees are key to our survival, a barometer of our relationship with nature. Without them, we’d have no fruit, no nuts and seeds, and eventually, no food. No bees; no songbirds. Silent woods. For centuries, we’ve projected stories and...

Although they cover more than 70% of the globe’s surface, most people have little idea about what our oceans sound like. In some traditions of science and storytelling, the sea was a place of deathly quiet - “The Silent World” - but of course there’s anything but silence down there. Sound actually travels further and faster in water than air. Norwegian artist and composer Jana Winderen has been recording and sharing sounds of the deep for nearly two decades, dangling microphones from boats...

A radiophonic sound journey of Parisian brutalism by composer Iain Chambers, composed entirely from recordings of the buildings featured. Paris is well known for its historic architecture: the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomph, and the endless rows of apartment buildings built by Hausmann in the 19th century. But beyond the historic centre lie a series of alternative Parisian cities, built from concrete during the 1960s and 70s. This lesser-known concrete Paris creates a surprising journey...

Bogs have always captured the human imagination, inspiring both fear and fiction. Between the Ears wades into this treacherous netherworld in a search for the lost and found. These liminal spaces have a unique and troubling consistency: neither absolutely water, nor absolutely earth, but a potentially dangerous mix between the two. On an abstract level, their slippery nature makes them difficult to categorise and unsettles us. On practical level, contact with these elements of nature can...

Composer and sound artist Rob Mackay traces the migratory route of the monarch butterfly, from the Great Lakes in Canada to the forests of Mexico, via the shifting coastal landscape of the eastern shores of Virginia. Along the route of this sonic road-movie Rob meets people working to protect this extraordinary species: Darlene Burgess, a conservation specialist monitoring butterfly populations on the shores of Lake Eerie; Nancy Barnhart, coordinating the monarch migration programme for the...

Stories of real life chance encounters, inspired by the 75th anniversary of the much-loved film Brief Encounter. Introduced by Matthew Sweet. Using different recordings of Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 2 - which famously underscores the 1945 film - Between the Ears reflects on how a chance meeting can change our lives forever. In the 1950s two people bump into each other changing trains at Harrow-on-the-Hill station. In 2001, two strangers meet on a train bound for Edinburgh. In 2014...

While we, as a species, grapple with ongoing legacies of racism and violence, and as biodiversity loss and the mass extinction of wildlife on earth accelerates, the call to bear witness becomes ever more necessary. What might it mean - for ourselves and the other beings on this planet - if we were able to sorrow, if we knew how to grieve? As things disintegrate around us, is bearing witness a final act of love we can offer our world? “Loving and grieving are joined at the hip,” says...

The dramatic effects of climate change evoked in words, sounds and a powerful new musical work. Over four movements of rich and evocative music, the listener is transported to the front line of the climate crisis, with stories from coastal Ghana – where entire villages are being swept away by the rising sea – to Norway’s Svalbard archipelago in the high arctic where the ice is melting with alarming speed. The dramatic final movement ponders two contrasting possible outcomes to the crisis. ...

Artist Graeme Miller captures the poetry of the landline. In this half hour, we follow the arc of a single call from dialling to hanging up, taking in the sweep across the global landscape of the 20th century. He draws out the private habits and distinctive speech as well as the collective dreams and nightmares of the landlines art and culture. While collaging the mores and cadences of telephone behaviour and speech the piece also lands in the physical space of the landline - the actual line...

Artist and musician Rhiannon Armstrong revisits a formative friendship from her childhood in a new light, with the help of some of the bus drivers and passengers from the W12 route in east London. We follow a journey of the W12 recorded in the summer of 2019, as it crosses from Walthamstow to Wanstead in East London. Two long term drivers on the route, Godfrey Stewart and Mohammed Shabir, share stories from their working life as it was then and as it is now, in spring/summer 2020 amid the...

There comes a time in one’s life when you lose something truly important. A feeling someone once gave you. And on one of those endless, sleepless nights you find yourself thinking, surely I can get it back? In the wake of a painful relationship breakup, fllmmaker Anastasia Kirillova finds herself in Tokyo. By chance she stumbles upon Bar Answer, an out-of-the-way cocktail bar that serves as the front-office for a love detective agency. Sipping on drinks named ‘Jealousy’ and ‘Obsession’,...

On 2 August 2015, the great Russian freediver Natalia Molchanova disappeared in Spanish territorial waters. Through sound, text and music, “Jump Blue” takes us to extraordinary depths in this immersive re-imagining of her final descent. Apnea, or freediving without breathing apparatus, requires the few who practise it to encounter a profound stillness as their heart rate slows and their lungs contract. In the darkness of the abyss, on a single breath, they truly meet themselves. In Hannah...

Angry bulls, furious penguins, enraged seals! In the shadow of the volcano 'Between the Ears' gets a microphone close up to enjoy the action, as veterinarian Jonathan Hollins, gives us a taste of life with the remote animals and sea life of Tristan Da Cunha. On an island of a population of around 250 people, a thousand sheep and many more penguins, Joe also gets a flavour of what happened to the islanders when the volcano last erupted and they were forced to leave their homes, sixty years...

Second Side Up is the longest-running radio show that never was - the story of a life recorded to tape and edited into weekly radio show instalments. For over four decades, Mark Talbot recorded scenes from his life and used them to create a cassette radio show, which he called Second Side Up. Complete with music, interviews and phone-ins, Second Side Up sounded like professional work, but not a single episode was ever broadcast. The tapes were distributed to a tiny network of friends and...

A collaboration with Natalie Diaz, celebrated Mojave American poet and language activist. Her award-winning poetry collection, When My Brother Was An Aztec, draws on her experiences growing up on the Fort Mojave Indian reservation, a 40,000 acre stretch of desert spanning California, Arizona and Nevada. Her hotly anticipated second collection, Post Colonial Love Poem, will be released in June. Natalie brings us to Mojave Valley, to the home of her uncle Hubert McCord. At 91, Hubert is the...

The Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson grew up in the theatre with an actress-mother who attuned him to what he calls "the realness of fakeness." The story goes that Ragnar was conceived during the filming of a sex scene involving his actor-parents, quaint footage of which was part of an installation during his acclaimed retrospective at the Barbican in 2016. And Kjartansson's mother has been central to his work, in a series of films recorded every five years, called 'Me and...

An ear floats off to the galaxies, listening in on Earth from a cosmic vantage. An audio-collage written and composed by Heather Phillipson, summoning the listener into a deranged sonic landscape, addressing the Earth as an eruption, on the verge of termination. Mixing bucolic lyric poem, music-sampling, the cut-up, weather forecasts, psychedelic literature and astronomic travelogue with the tone of a pre-recorded message from the beyond, Heather Phillipson’s feature proposes the ear as an...

Frenchman Louis Daguerre is known primarily as one of the inventors of photography - but before the magic of light fixed on paper there was the Diorama, which some call the precursor to the moving image, and cinema. The Diorama offered its audience a glimpse into other worlds… where volcanos would erupt on the hour, Roman ruins could be explored, mountain peaks ascended… not unlike a modern Las Vegas but in the 1820s. Using light, moving apertures, smoke and mirrors, sound and music, to...