Sonic Trail (Friday - Sunday)

Sonic Trail

Friday - Sunday
Free Entry (12PM - 4PM Daily)

Step off the beaten track and into the Sonic Trail, the imaginative soul of the Ramsgate Festival of Sound. This curated, self-guided journey of site-specific sound installations invites you to explore some of Ramsgate's most unique locations through a single, well-tuned sense: your ears.

Running alongside the first weekend of English Heritage Open Days, this year's trail responds to the theme 'Everyday Histories', celebrating the meeting point of local history and sound art. Every piece is a new work, specially commissioned by the festival, crafted to dialogue with its environment and turn familiar historic corners into extraordinary sensory discoveries.

Grab your map, open your ears to the unexpected, and enjoy the Sonic Trail, open 12 to 4pm daily.

Sonic Trails:

Magz Hall  - Hellfire Radio Relay:

Magz Hall - Hellfire Radio Relay

A Copper Wire: Thanet Ether:

In December 1928, Ramsgate became an experimental zone for Rediffusion. In the early days of wireless, radio sets were costly and the spectrum was volatile, with atmospheric static and constant chatter from RAF Manston's military aircraft drowning out over-the-air signals along the Thanet coast. Rediffusion sidestepped the problem: a high-gain master aerial captured weak waves at a central hub, then cleaned, amplified and re-diffused them over a physical grid of wires into rented household loudspeakers, turning chaos into an affordable, noise-free sanctuary.

Under Siege:

During WWII, Thanet became the frontline known as Hellfire Corner, and this domestic listening network shifted from entertainment into vital civil defence infrastructure, carrying air-raid warnings shielded from enemy radio-direction finding. This era also gave rise to polyethylene, a polymer declassified from top-secret radar research and used to insulate the network's cables. Physical traces remain in older Thanet properties today, though the material's petrochemical legacy, persisting for centuries as toxic microplastic, is now pushing the electronics industry towards bio-based alternatives.

Re-Diffused Warfare Today:

A century on, Rediffusion's architecture still echoes through modern warfare, where jamming and interception have replaced long-range broadcast, and war's sonic fallout spreads globally through smartphones.

In the Gallery: Signals Over Silence:

Inside the gallery, invisible frequencies take on sculptural weight. The room is webbed with recycled polyethylene cables, highlighting petrochemical persistence, these synthetic vines mapping out the 'Thanet Broadcasting System'. A set of red radios relays the work as a looping meditation on transmission and human resistance from the home front. The sonic composition features narrated teen accounts of survival during the Ramsgate bomb strikes of WWII, bridging past and present by weaving modern jamming techniques, sustained drones and electronic textures through electromagnetic frequencies.

Thanks

Produced by Magz Hall, mixed with recordings from her 101 Arts Base Frequency Residency, a Greenham Peace Garden jam, a Pyrenees residency, and material composed at the University of West London's Townsend Studio.

Narrator: Ewart Backhouse-Hall. War accounts based on the written accounts of John Side and Thomas Solly, with thanks to the many contributing artists.

Bio:

Magz Hall at 101

Magz Hall is an award-winning sound artist, radio pioneer and practice-based researcher working in expanded radio and sound art, embedding wireless technology into everyday objects and environments to explore spectrum, climate change and airspace.

Socials:

@hallmagz

https://magzhall.com/

https://magzhall.com/2026/07/23/hellfire-rediffusion-radio-relay-redux/

Carson Parkin-Fairley - Happy Mondays Model Village:

Happy Mondays is an inclusive weekly wellbeing and social lounge on Ramsgate High Street, attended by vulnerable adults, people living with mental and physical health challenges, individuals with SEN, families and local residents. Creative sessions for the Model Village are led by artists Ellen Russell and Elinor Seath.

First exhibited at Arts in Ramsgate in March 2026, the Happy Mondays Model Village is transformed for the Sonic Trail into an interactive sound installation combining sculpture, storytelling and sound. It builds an accessible archive of local memory, celebrating personal connections to everyday places, from beloved local businesses like the Village Grill and the Haberdashery to the ordinary spaces that have shaped community life, stories rarely captured in official histories.

Bio:

Carson Parkin-Fairley is a multidisciplinary artist exploring worship, celebration, care, joy and storytelling, drawing on religious iconography, shrines and popular culture. Her installations, murals and commissions have travelled globally. She studied Art Foundation at Camberwell before returning to art after working across various industries. Carson's passionate about the connectivity art brings, and hopes to share that creativity with others who haven't had the same exposure.

Socials:

@carsonparkinfairley

https://www.carsonparkinfairley.com/

Sadie Hennessy - Museum of Unrealistic Beauty Standards:

“I only have to open my phone to be bombarded with posts, ads and reels suggesting ways I could improve my unruly face and body. The procedures on offer grow more extreme, yet increasingly mainstream: Botox, fillers, liposuction, dermaplaning, Brazilian butt-lift, a whole new vocabulary to be learnt in the quest to defy time. THE MUSEUM OF UNREALISTIC BEAUTY STANDARDS reflects, literally, on the absurdity of this. Visitors wander through a hall of mirrors, perusing beauty equipment as though it were artefacts from a distant, less evolved age.”

Bio:

Sadie Hennessy is a multidisciplinary artist whose roots lie in collage, expanded into immersive environments and events reflecting the zeitgeist and everyday life, approached through metaphor and melancholic humour. A former Royal Academy Screen Print Fellow, her Sonic Trail history includes the now-legendary Fat Balls installation in Vale Square (2020).

Socials:

@memphishennessy

https://sadiehennessy.co.uk/

Rod Stewart Bird Table (Fat Balls): https://sadiehennessy.co.uk/projects/5803134#17

Andrew Dennis - The Postal Museum:

Taking inspiration from the 'Everyday Histories' theme, The Postal Museum dives into the stories we once sent by letter and postcard to friends and family.

In 1876, a young, still-unknown Vincent van Gogh lived and worked in Ramsgate for three months. His letters home describe everyday life: walks to the coast, children collected from school, the night sky. Inspired by these, the exhibition invites visitors to record their own everyday thoughts, building towards a 35-minute cassette-taped soundtrack.

Among the prompts on display: a 1985 letter giving clues to a family member a daughter never met, postcards diarising a 1995 cycle trip from Calais to Avignon, and an unopened letter from 1989. Visitors can bring their own correspondence to share aloud over a specially composed instrumental piece, premiered at the Sunday closing celebration, alongside photographs of Ramsgate's more unusual post boxes and bespoke festival stationery.

Bio:

Andrew Dennis co-created the Mixtape 88/00 exhibition for the 2024 Festival of Sound, also shown at Hold Creative Spaces and Medway Open Studios. He co-designed Teenage Kicks, a one-day music festival for 13-19 year old musicians and photographers held in Ramsgate in 2024 and 2025, and delivered the Vincent in Ramsgate arts and history project in 2026. Andrew moved to Ramsgate in early 2025 and works as a self-employed Careers Adviser across Kent schools, alongside delivering the award-winning Love Where You Live photography project for young people across Kent and the South East.

Socials:

@TeenageKicks88 @Mixtape88_00 @LoveWhereYouLive2026

Michael Isaacs - SEEN Presents BAHA:

An immersive sonic trail installation by deaf slam poet Michael Isaacs, located inside the historic Ramsgate Train Station. This listening piece explores Michael's personal journey with progressive hearing loss and his Bone Anchored Hearing Aid (BAHA), navigating the world through vibration using the station's natural acoustics and reverberation.

Katie Blythe & Henry Collins - Montefiore: Within Earshot:

Henry Collins

Presented inside the Italianate Greenhouse once owned by Sir Moses and Lady Judith Montefiore, this sound installation explores the sounds that may have shaped their travels, faith and relationship with Ramsgate. It draws on a perhaps apocryphal story that Sir Moses, whose hearing declined in later life, considered a listening tube connecting East Cliff Lodge to the nearby Montefiore Synagogue; real or not, the idea becomes the starting point for imagining what may have existed within his earshot.

Visitors listen through sculptural tubes inspired by Victorian ear trumpets, each carrying a fragment of sound: a Sephardi synagogue service, the Montefiore windmill in Jerusalem, the seaside bustle of Ramsgate, and traces of Jaffa, Marrakesh and Odesa. Combining archival research, field recordings, oral history and imagination, the work creates a layered portrait of Jewish life, memory, travel and listening.

Katie Blythe

Ren - Spore Listening:

A continuous, drop-in sound work built from field recordings of the Margate Mushrooms Farm: a 20-minute loop you can join at any point and stay with as long as you like. What you hear is a living system most of us never pause for: the hum of growing rooms, moisture in the air, substrate settling and the barely perceptible sound of fungal growth. Not all everyday histories are human.

Bio:

Ren Kainth is a climate sound artist based in Margate, working at the intersection of ecology, deep listening and the more-than-human world. Recording only with contact, induction and hydrophone microphones, Ren listens through surfaces and into liquid rather than across a room, making audible what usually sits beneath hearing: substrate settling, water moving, fungal growth. Trained with the Center for Deep Listening and School of Machines.

Socials

@renizhii

Matthew Smyth - Process & Reality:

The geometry of Ramsgate under a microscope, dubbed up and spaced out under the watchful eye of mathematician/philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (born in Ramsgate, 1861).

INPC creates unnerving textures with drum machines pulsing alongside local seagulls, reverberation and heavy bass, cut and paste to create an unsettling yet hypnotic atmosphere. Process and Reality sees Ramsgate in a state of tension, magnified and distorted, rendered in vivid colour: the beautiful becomes the absurd, encapsulated in a sea of paranoid noise.

Bio:

Matthew Smyth, aka INPC, began using turntables to manipulate sound in 1990, performing in numerous bands and ensembles in forms ranging from hip hop to dub to free jazz. He was also one of the original team that set up Ramsgate’s own Pie Factory Music in 2001.

Primarily working with electronics, computers, and found sounds, he produces music as INPC and as one half of the Folktronica duo Liotia. He is also the engineer/programmer at the long-established indie label On U Sound.

Recently, Matthew has begun distributing his own music via the RSS protocol (a digital technology that underpins much of the internet) in an effort to promote a more independent way of distributing music.

Matthew shuns corporate social media in favour of the Indie Web, self-hosting his own tech stack on a tiny computer. He uses infrastructure that bypasses the vampires of Big Tech, taking the DIY ethic of punk back to the internet.
www.inpc.cat/

Sonic Trails - Sunday Specials:

Sunday only

Talks: 13:00, 14:00 & 15:00

Julia Jane Heckles - The Tea Break: A British everyday history (One-off Sonic Trail):

Step into the Tea Break! Britain's daily ritual comes to life through a one-off sound and visual art installation. Join art historian Julia Jane Heckles for a journey down tea-break memory lane, exploring the design history and political story behind the British workplace tea break, set to a soundscape of tea-inspired music, remembered voices and familiar tea-time sounds. Share your own workplace memories on the community story wall and slow down over a cup of tea: a celebration of shared history as much as an art talk.

Bio:

Julia Jane is a Ramsgate-based fine artist and art historian originally from East London, whose multidisciplinary practice spans installation, conceptual art, sound and audience engagement, with a research background in Victorian to Modern art history (1848-1939). She holds a BA in History of Art and an MA in Fine Art by Research, and is the creator and speaker behind the VOICES on ART talks.

Socials:
@VOICES_on_ART

Chase Coley - The Long Stringed Instrument:

Performance times 12:30, 13:30 & 14:30

Chase Coley is a musician, sound artist and Museum Director at Crab Museum, working across sculpture, sound art, improvisation and experimental luthiery to create new acoustic instruments. He will set up the Long Stringed Instrument in Vale Square, with three performances alongside a guest musician. Visitors can play the instrument after the last performance.

Bob & Roberta Smith visits Vincent van Gogh:

150 years ago, Vincent van Gogh made Ramsgate his home, and we are delighted to have access to the house and the room he lodged in. Ramsgate-based Bob and Roberta Smith OBE RA, a devoted van Gogh admirer, brings his own artwork 'Van Gogh's View of Ramsgate' to the artist's former bedroom, a rare chance to connect with two artists who found inspiration in Ramsgate's skies and seas 150 years apart.

Please note that the bedroom is on the 4th floor of a private home.

Only 6 people at a time will be able to be in the room so if its busy please be patient while you wait to enter.

Locations:

Accessibility:

SEEN Presents BAHA - A Sonic Trail by Michael Isaacs

Artist Presence:

Michael aims to be present throughout the Sonic Trail, though due to his health conditions specific hours with the artist cannot be guaranteed. The installation remains fully active and accessible throughout opening hours.

The Listening Experience:

• Format: a focused, headphone-based listening experience; headphones provided on site.
• Duration: approximately 15 minutes.
• Movement & comfort: sit on the station seats to relax while listening, or wander to feel how sound interacts with the building.
• Staffing: looked after by Festival of Sound staff at all times.

Venue & Transport:

•  Step-free access: Ramsgate is a Category A accessible station, with level access into the booking hall, and lifts/ramps to all platforms.
• Station audio: induction loop systems throughout.
• Parking & taxis: 3 accessible parking spaces, plus a taxi rank and bus connections directly outside.

Toilets & Amenities:

• Toilets: fully accessible, stoma-friendly toilets in the main Booking Hall.
• Food & drink: an on-site buffet/cafe kiosk and Selecta vending machines.
• Water: bring your own refillable bottle, free accessible drinking water fountains available across the station.

Sensory & Digital Accessibility:

• Hearing aid integration: compatible hearing aids or cochlear implants can stream the audio directly, with an on-site guide.
• British Sign Language: a dedicated BSL performance of the poem ECHO alongside the audio.
• Tactile experience: replicas of the hearing aid headbands Michael wore before his BAHA operation are available to handle.
• Printed matter: RNID leaflets, a Sonic Trail zine, and Michael's poetry anthology are available for purchase.