A special radio series inspired by the music of John Giorno was broadcast on 11 October 2021. John Giorno has been played on NTS shows including Shanghai, with Grasping At Emptiness first played on 16 May 2014.

John Giorno (1936-2019) was an American poet and performance artist. He founded the artist collective Giorno Poetry Systems and coined its mass communication experiment Dial-A-Poem. He became prominent as the subject of Andy Warhol's film "Sleep". He was also an AIDS activist and fundraiser.

Giorno was born in New York. In 1962, while in his early 20s and working in New York as a stockbroker, he met Andy Warhol….