In this recording, you can listen to the concert of Tonic Train (Sarah Washington and Knut Aufermann) featuring the HAM Radio Orchestra Kosova.

Formed in the year 2000, Tonic Train is the experimental electronics duo of Sarah Washington and Knut Aufermann. It joins two methods of early electronic music practice: the appropriation of electronic circuits (aka circuit bending) and the improper use of electronic equipment (aka no-input mixing desk). They also utilise
radios and ultrasonic devices. Tonic Train’s artistic realm is connected to the electronic music experimentation of David Tudor, and they have toured with sonic
pioneer Alvin Lucier.

For PRISON RADIO, Tonic Train have invited the Ham Radio Association of Kosova to perform with them in a site-specific concert in the prison courtyard, using the grid of its open roof to catch radio signals and bring them into the prison. Ham radios become musical instruments, producing interference and connecting the sounds of the prison courtyard with radio signals from the city and beyond

The Kosova Radio Amateur Association (SHRAK) promotes and develops amateur radio communications in Kosova, focusing on technical knowledge, education, community engagement, and emergency communication. SHRAK organizes training programmes for new radio amateurs, practical workshops, and technical activities around radio communication, HF propagation, antenna systems, radio technology, and operational skills.

For PRISON RADIO, SHRAK turns this practice of transmitting, receiving, and searching across frequencies into part of a live sonic experiment. During the Tonic Train concert, members of the association have formed a radio orchestra on the rooftop of Burgu i Idealit, using their ham radios to catch whatever signals, voices, fragments, noises, and transmissions they can receive from the air around them. These live radio signals will become part of the concert, opening the prison to frequencies travelling across geographical and physical boundaries.

PRISON RADIO Festival

PRISON RADIO is an international, transdisciplinary sound and radio art project that rethinks both prison and radio as social, political and artistic structures. Broadcast and recorded in Prishtina from 10 to 13 September 2026, the festival featured a 72-hour radio programme, comprising approximately 30 hours of live broadcasts and 42 hours of pre-produced content. Taking the Former Prishtina Prison as a resonant site, the festival approaches the prison not only as a historical institution of confinement, but also as a metaphor for wider invisible architectures of limitation: social roles, gender norms, borders, political pressure, economic constraint, trauma, language, surveillance and silence. Through radio art, soundwalks, live broadcasts, performances, concerts, lectures, workshops, a community run, collective listening sessions and the exhibition Sound, Resisting, which extended across four prison blocks, the watchtower and the courtyards, PRISON RADIO transformed a former site of punishment into a temporary space of voice, resistance and public reflection. The festival draws on critical prison studies, the politics of listening, sound studies, the concept of the prison without walls and the carceral continuum. It understands radio as a dissident and participatory medium through which voices, art and sounds travel beyond walls, borders and dominant narratives.

Curation & programme: PRISON RADIO Collective (Alban Beqiraj, Blertë Ismajli, Alexander Vojvoda, Verena Walzl)
Organisation: STRALLI
Radio production: Lumpen Station (CH), commissioned by PRISON RADIO Festival
Live radio direction, technical production & post-production: Andrea Marioni, Lumpen Station
Partners: Lumpen Station (CH), Kolektiv Radio (KS), Molla e Kuqe (KS)
Venues: Burgu i Idealit (Former Prishtina Prison) and Hani i dy Robertëve, Prishtina
Supported by: Embassy of Switzerland in Kosovo, Austrian Embassy in Prishtina, Institut Français du Kosovo / French Embassy in Prishtina