Program podcast

We get ourselves in Motion with talks about the elegance and precision of the ballet and the design of the propeller.

Recorded live in an off-Broadway theatre in New York City, Darian Dauchan’s award-winning work chronicles the period of Barack Obama’s candidacy, to presidency, to the present day – at the time of his second inauguration. The piece is a rhetorical conversation between African-American performance poet, Darian Dauchan, and Barack Obama, now the 45th President of the United States. This solo show consists of live-looped songs, beat-boxing and a collage of satirical poems and presidential soundbites.

Sun Ra's visionary Afro Futurist project, begun in the 1940s, provided fuel for many strands of musical culture: he stood with one foot in rhythm and blues, one foot in free jazz and two hands stretched out into space.

These days it's like products, and even humans have their own 'refresh' buttons. The latest model is always on offer. Happy, shiny people everywhere. But permanent 'nowness' can't last - the cracks start to show, eventually nature subsumes culture and everything falls to bits. The Night Air searches for the 'melancholic beauty in the impermanence of all things', what the Japanese might call 'wabi sabi'. It's the pleasure of the imperfect, impermanent, incomplete. It's when the new gets, if not worn out, then thoroughly worn in...

Everything - including you and me - has a resonant frequency!

Can we gain an insight into people living in remote parts of this country by aiming a shot-gun microphone and collecting audio snapshots? Is media an extension of the human nervous system, or is it a type of 'amputation'?

We’re in Jamaica to celebrate 50 years of independence from British rule. The Caribbean island may have the world's highest rate of public debt and plenty of problems with corruption and crime but it also has the fastest runners on earth, untold cultural riches and the indomitable will to survive.

Walk the separation wall in what was Palestine and take a train trip through long-contested Eastern Europe.

A program that takes the creative collaborative energy from ABC Pool contributors and weaves it into an audio adventure.

This evening things get hot and languid as James Vyver takes you on a tour of the tropics.

Plunge into the ocean's depths where the fabled Mermaid may or may not swim.  Real or imagined, fabled or fact, there she is – alive in urban myth and ancient folklore, her tale as old as religion. She's beautiful, dangerous, sexy, beastly and alluring and just perhaps she really exists.

To just pack your bags and fly-in, fly-out to the remotest corners of this dry continent is today’s version of the Gold Rush. Caught in the crossfire of this mad bonanza, Melbourne-based artist Moses Iten took cover by watching dozens of European Westerns from the late 1960s, the mood of which felt like a strange parallel to the push and pull of the current economic climate.  He also dug deep in the archives of Radio National to unearth ancient stories and hyped up myths of this great land of ours.

A shuffling beneath your feet and a rustling of leaves as small beasts scurry about. On the forest floor there's a myriad of wondrous small worlds: mushrooms, tussocks, twines and whipsticks. Tune in, go under.

A program that takes the creative collaborative energy from ABC Pool contributors and weaves it into an audio adventure.

A bunch of critters that slither and slide and get out of your grasp including eel fishing, jellyfish and snakes.

The bell tolls for thee! This edition of the Night Air climbs the belfry to ring the victory bells; we investigate this ancient way of communicating, celebrating, worshipping, keeping time and making music. The Night Air’s resident campanologist James Vyver rings in the audio changes. And we unveil a combination vase, paper-weight and mirror in a glass art mix here on your 'glass half-full' network.

In a world of the ocular and photopic we go eye-spying on visual perception in art and arcana: realms of the unseen, the partly-perceived and the imagined.

A program that takes the creative collaborative energy from ABC Pool contributors and weaves it into an audio adventure.

Come bush, into rural Australia, with a cast of characters from down the pub, out in the shearing shed, around the paddock and over at the school yard.

Krautrock was a pulse, a spontaneous eruption from the depths of the post-war German psyche, a seminal moment in the birth of electronic music. Bands like Can, Neu, Harmonia, Amon Düül, Faust and of course Kraftwerk coalesced around a common desire to take rock music beyond the blues into a realm of pure improvisation and experimentation. In the process they became sonic prophets, messengers from the future. Tom Morton and Timothy Nicastri take to the autobahn.