Welcome to Radio Insomnia.

Bounce, nothing holds. Split. Kick. The night is wide. Bounce.
Bounce with strength. Enter the night. Sustain.
The pleasure of a night without rest. Resilience, but also energy. Bouncing back is recovery, not escape. Recharge for political fights, bounce back.
Release from the normativity of sleep, and productivity.
Share our night. To bounce back; to build trust.

Radio Insomnia returns to Gadigal lands for a new edition featuring new commissions and contributions by Australian artists and open mics for an all-night program, live to air.

From the cavernous space of a downtown’s electrical substation to a secret tiny warehouse, we’ll explore the intricacies of night-time listening, we’ll be led by voices, dragged by time, and by King, with or without sleep. We may be diverted by inner voices, led by eerie textural sounds and open to deprogramming ourselves.

Acousmata are non-verbal auditory hallucinations of a simple nature, such as the hissing and ringing often associated with tinnitus. In this performance, Gail will sculpt shifting tides made from the sounds that haunt us in the middle of the night—the hums, buzzes, ticks and zings, that leave us wondering if they are emanating from within or from the night itself. Sound from the performance will continue as a flow using generative techniques, a stream that will continue throughout the night, to be tapped into and channelled when desired.

Gail’s exploratory music uses voice, microsounds of objects, field recordings, and electronics as inputs into a system of transformation. The difference between organic and synthetic sounds dissolves, cycles and rhythms emerge and dissolve. Her compositions often create a push and pull between sensuality and brutality, figuration and abstraction, with an overarching ambience that draws you into the caverns of the unconscious. Gail Priest lives on Dharug and Gundungurra land (Katoomba), and has been performing and exhibiting nationally and internationally for over 20 years. She has several CD releases on her own label, Metal Bitch, as well as other labels including Flaming Pines, Endgame Records and room40.

https://gailpriest.bandcamp.com

Moss Hopkins’ radio works involve a spectral deconstruction of vocal apparatuses; audio recording equipment, transmission technologies, and text are put through cycles of receiving, decoding, distorting, erasure, and re-encoding. Morse code, short wave, EVP, and cut-up text experiments stirred with a nocturnal spoon.

Moss Hopkins is a Sydney-based sound artist and musician who explores the interplay of sound, voice, text and film in varied acoustic settings. His work is characterised by the use of feedback, magnetic tape textures, field recording and found objects forming spectral sonic landscapes. His work has been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Artspace and has performed at events locally internationally. In 2024, he performed at Penrith Regional Gallery, Woollahra Gallery and Artbank among others. He also runs the art-music concert series Humming Grotto.
https://readinggroupcompany.bandcamp.com/album/radio-carrion

A performance that will take us through a ‘dark night of the soul’, from a sleepless night of isolation with its existential crisis to a desire to be seen, to be in the spotlight in a nightclub. At times, a lost soul, a dissatisfied lover and an everyday person Boy Michael will transform into a Drag icon. Marry The Night explores the many masks we wear to cope with reality and endure our lives in an increasingly physically disconnected world.

Boy Michael is the Drag alter-ego of Eora/Sydney-based video editor Rae Brown. They have performed in various Sydney Clubs and Events over the last few years including, The Bearded Tit, Birdcage and for the Opening Ceremony of Sydney World Pride. Their entertaining performances are a space in which the artist enjoys disrupting traditional narratives around gender and identity.
@boymichaellovesyou

For Radio Insomnia, Corin will offer a short ambient set using the kulintang, a precolonial gong-chime instrument from the Southern Philippines. The set incorporates live improvisations on a kulintang, digitally processed in real time. Corin is interested in harmonic and rhythmic systems of non-Western musical ecologies, their modes of thinking, and the sound palette that emerges from combining Filipino harmonies and rhythms with synthesizer and sample-based electronic music production.

Corin Ileto is a Filipina-Australian electronic music producer, performer and composer working across experimental electronic music, sound art and sound design. In her compositions, traditional forms merge with hyper-digital sounds to create new imaginary realms. Her releases are speculative mythologies drawing from science fiction, western classical music, and her Filipino ancestral heritage.
https://co-rin.com/

A disembodied voice - the dark of night — wired for sound. Quiet now. Hush. Close your eyes, imagine —driving through a seemingly endless soundscape, a desert in the mind's eye, textures shifting ever so subtly— like a river you can never step in twice, like watching paint dry.

Oh, boredom - dear, sweet, precious boredom. The mind, starved of distraction, reels — stutters — short circuits. Let it go. Let it wander through spaces and places. Don't fight it. Cherish it.
Shhhhhhhhhhhh.

Lenaerts is fascinated by sounds that don’t scream for attention. Sound without ego. Lenaerts’ sound practice unfolds in the margins of perception, composing with what is often overlooked, using the faint acoustics of room tones, residual noises, or by performing for sleepers during all-night concerts. Sounds quietly inhabits the ear, attentive to absence as much as presence. In a culture saturated by visuals, nothing is as intense and rewarding as simply listening.

Peter Lenaerts is a Belgian sound artist active in the fields of performance, contemporary dance, radio & film. He has created sonic compositions for choreographers such as Mette Ingvartsen, Rhiannon Newton, Wayson Poon, Andros Zinsbrowne, Salva Sanchis, Daniel Linehan, Eszter Salamon, ao. and released several albums of his own.
https://linktr.ee/peterlenaerts_radioinsomnia

Szem creates immersive sonic environments that seek to decode and conjure the unseen - divining transmutation and harnessing sound as a spell. Szem means eye; It speaks to the ways in which we see, through the body, through the third eye, through memory, and through one another. Atmospheric water and glass sculptures are sonified through hydrophone microphones. Her compositions weave together analogue hardware and digital processes, at times embedding subliminal frequencies that invite expanded consciousness and heart awareness.

Szem is the electronic project of visual and sound artist Laura Hunt, combining hardware synthesis and electronic sampling with percussive sculptures, cut-up vocals and poetry. Szem’s work has been presented at Dark Mofo, PROP Gallery and 4A Centre for Contemporary, among others, and performed as part of WDK, a duo with Jannah Quill.
https://on.soundcloud.com/R4dEwEObsYlLbWLObi

For Radio Insomnia, Sachin de Silva will explore the liminal hyper-reality of the hypnagogic state, the threshold between sleep and wakefulness. His work will unfold as a series of crystalline sonic objects — surreal and tactile artefacts, pulsing with the inevitable rhythmic logic of a dream-state in formation. Dream State will take us on a journey by navigating the friction between biological fatigue and digital lucidity with sounds created from custom-coded Supercollider environments.

Sachin de Silva is an experimental electronic musician based in Naarm/Melbourne. His sounds fall anywhere between drone, noise, minimalism, and defragmented club music.
Rooted in computational complexity, his sonic materials reach for avant-garde listening states. Delicate and essential, nothing here is stable. Every fragile texture and tone emerges from the mangled convergence of synthetic and organic sound.
https://soundcloud.com/sachin_desilva

Akil Ahamat is an artist that makes us move carefully, and collectively, within the dark. His work explores darkness not as absence, but as a method of orientation, as a rich cultural terrain that draws from diasporic histories in South East Asia, Islamic theology, and fictional interspecies dialogues.

In his immersive, multi-screen environments, darkness becomes a shared condition through which vision falters under other modes of knowing—listening, memory, faith, and relation.

"Stories past down from the oldests stars"

Sky Chariot operates through the galactic traversing capacity of organ and synthesizer keys with occasional percussion.

Often the instrumentation is rather complex, yet quite minimal, intended for life-enhancing contemplation, or perhaps even a mystical embarkment; a performance can range from very calm winding narratives that seem to never end to an intricate layering of progressive timing & harmony with maximal cosmic cacophonies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUTchxu7ccU

. Night of 11th to 12th, Eora/Sydney (UTC+10)
. Open to the public, bookings essential.
. 7:30pm - 11pm at Machine Hall, 183-185 Clarence Street, Sydney.
. Midnight - 4 am at a secret venue in Alexandria (address sent to ticket holders), BYO, venue not accessible, with stairs.

Radio Relays:
. Π-node Mulhouse-Paris / FR

Presented in partnership with Liquid Architecture.

Supported by the City of Sydney, the French-Australian Cultural Exchange Foundation, and Machine Hall, as part of M.PWR series.

Radio Insomnia is an invitation to listen with insomnia, rather than against it, for productivity. Drawing on radio as a medium with its qualities for fostering social relations, and night-time as an intimate space for listening, we aim at developing radiophonic devices for night communities.

Radio Insomnia is interested in the political and poetic forces of waking at night, whether by constraint or by choice. Our starting point is that in the extractivist model of our late capitalist society, sleep is depoliticised: unproblematized as a resource for productivity, which is part of a very normative and synchronized schedule driven by labour and moral values.

Whereas periods of wakefulness at night, were not always considered to be an illness and deficiency. Listening and other activities in the middle of the night were practised as part of day-to-day life prior to the industrial revolution. with two periods of sleep, with a first and second sleep, punctuated by wake. Across cultures, night-time is also a time for orality, for talking and listening. Commonly understood as an alarm bell, insomnia is a signal that something is wrong. With Radio Insomnia this is the signal that we want to follow and also broadcast.

Contact:

With Radio Insomnia, we ask -- What is the potential of listening at night when wakefulness is embraced rather than endured? In other words, what does it mean to listen “with” insomnia, rather than against it, for productivity?

Radio Insomnia unfolds through live broadcasts, sound installations, and the creation of social spaces and. Night-time broadcasts are shaped by roundtable discussions, performances, artist commissions, and listening sessions, or include a live transmission from the public space.

Created by and for sleepless bodies, Radio Insomnia was born of the collaboration between curator Anabelle Lacroix and artist Nicolas Montgermont.

This project is supported by the University of New South Wales, MITACS, and the Consulate General of France in Montréal as part of the research project The Sociability of Sleep by McGill University and the Université de Montréal.

. Graphic design by Aline Schneider, based on Avara font by Raphael Bastide
. Radio Infrastructure by ∏node
. Website by Nicolas Montgermont