Listening Balcony
Sound Art Department

July-August 2024

Cicely Fell
Call Signs (2022, 27’30”)
A Falling Tree production for Lights Out, BBC Radio 4.
Original music composed by Ollie Chubb.
First broadcast December 2022, BBC Radio 4 

Man, Mouse and Morse: the story of a radio amateur in Kyiv as the Russian invasion unfolds. When his family flees to Poland, Volodymyr Gurtovy stays in their apartment with only his radios and his hamster for company. Before the war, he used to wander through the pine forests, weaving networks of wire antennas in the treetops with a fishing rod, to pick up signals from faraway countries. When martial law bans amateur radio transmissions, he becomes a listener, intercepting the conversations of Russian pilots and warning his neighbours to hide in shelters long before the sirens sound. After three months of silence, he begins transmitting again. During air raids, he hides behind the thickest wall in his hallway, close to his radios. A story of sending and receiving signals from within the Kyiv blackout. 

“A wonderful long-distance dialogue between a man in Kyiv who is crazy about radio and Cicely Fell, who finds him through shortwave listening. She sends him a recorder by means of a humanitarian convoy. He records himself; she is on the phone with him. He tells her how he lives; his family exiled in Poland, his life with the hamster that remains the only member of his family to talk to… He picks up messages from Russian soldiers and warns his neighbours of imminent attacks. He fixes other people's radios, watches the skies over Kyiv and talks to Cicely.”
Pascale Tison, member of the jury

With Call Signs, Cicely Fell won the 'Archives de la Parole' Award at the last Phonurgia Nova festival, held in Paris at the Centre Wallonie Bruxelles last November.