Live in the studio:
Sandy Sigala & Joe Coghill
Monday, 14 September⋅5:00 – 5:30pm
At 5pm today we have research-led artist and educator Sandy Sigala and multi-disciplinary artist, journalist, and experimental publisher Joe Coghill live in the Radiophrenia studio to perform ‘A Dragon with Iron Legs’.
In 1885, a steam train passed through the city for the first time. For the children of the Elefsina, the locomotive was a dragon with iron legs. A preserved testimony from the day recalls:
‘…when we saw it coming, it was as if an earthquake had happened. And when it let out a whistle, we all clung to the teacher’s trousers. It was a black beast. With big glass eyes. It released black smoke from its head and white smoke from its nostrils and its mouth… it seemed to us that it was rabid and wanted to bite us, to eat us all.’
Elefsina is a site of both ancient and industrial significance. The city was the endpoint of the Sacred Way, a ritual procession walked from Athens by initiates of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Then came the factories, the oil refinery, the shipbreaking yard; industry building itself on top of the antiquities. The railway was part of this wave, the dragon that carried modernity into sacred ground. Then industry, too, withdrew. The railway fell silent in 2001. DIY gardens appeared along the abandoned track and ruderal plants pushed through the ballast. Ancient stone surfaced beside corroding metal. The site was reclaimed as a space of resistance the tracks an assemblage of temporalities, multispecies entanglements, and creative possibility. In January 2026, we discovered that the cycle had turned again. The gardens are gone, the plants removed and the ground has been cleared, ready for redevelopment. The dragon returned with new iron legs.
‘A Dragon with Iron Legs’ is an immersive sonic collage designed for live radio broadcast combining site-specific field recordings from Elefsina, Greece (binaural, stereo, mono; hi-fi and lo-fi; digital and analogue), excavated sound fragments from various archival sources, and live electroacoustic performance using found objects (from the site and elsewhere), voice, lo-fi electronics, real-time digital signal processing, sampling, and spatial mixing. The sonic range moves between ambient binaural drifts and gentle aleatoric musings, through to harsh industrial interventions, sharp punctuations of activity, and juxtaposed sound clashes- shaped through dynamic interplay between both artists and the site itself, with Elefsina treated not as backdrop but as a third voice. Past and present build and collapse into a single unrepeatable broadcast.
www.sandy-sigala.com
https://www.discogs.com/artist/6359908-Joe-Coghill
https://www.discogs.com/artist/7856626-Free-Magic-Show