Microreview: Radical Radio

Radical radio Skylark installation
Installation of the Skylark transmitter and antenna in 2020, photo: Philip Furnivall
Radical radio Grimspound
Grimspound, Dartmoor, England, photo: Lucinda Guy
Radical radio Hembury Woods
Hemsbury Woods, Dartmoor, England, photo: Lucinda Guy
Date
2026 January
Subtitle
Sam Richards reviews Lucinda Guy: Skylark.fm, 105.8 or 107.6 FM Dartmoor, Devon, England, since 2020.
Type
microreview
Author / Publisher
Sam Richards for NewsLibrary
Guest Editor

Nienke Terpsma

Reviewer

Sam Richards is a composer, piano improviser, writer and educator. He presents Sam's Listening Room on Soundart Radio - two hours of an eclectic selection of contemporary music or, as he says, non-doctrinal doctrine.

Author

Lucinda Guy is a composer and radio maker who lives between Devon and London. Here you can read her PhD thesis "Artist Designed Systems in Community Radio.

Publication Language

English

Also published here

Newsletter No. 74

@sarn_switzerland

Reviewed Publication

Lucinda Guy: Skylark.fm, 105.8 or 107.6 FM Dartmoor, Devon, England, since 2020.

Take a place. Can be any place. Record sounds there, local people speaking local accents, children, bells and whatever voices can be gathered. Multitrack, fade in/fade out. Allow the sound sources lots of time to speak… Sounds like the way John Cage treated the sounds and music of Ireland in his celebrated "Roaratorio". 

Skylark—the work of Lucinda Guy, co-instigator of the internationally acclaimed Soundart Radio—is a continuous and ever-changing sound installation, rejecting conventional radio schedules of presenters, programmes, music tracks and adverts. As well as an artistic achievement it is a research project into automation, transmission, composition and community. The place is Dartmoor, a wild granite moorland in the Southwest of England full of legends, ghost stories, extraordinary rock formations, bogs and even a forest of stunted oaks. It has always attracted writers, musicians and artists. Guy’s original approach to it broadcasts locally and continually on skylark.fm. I often play it in the car dipping in and out enjoying the soundscapes. Especially when driving across the moor.