SEMI SILENT: Recent Episodes
SEMI SILENT
We started in 2016 with sound pieces using field recordings in podcasts for a Bucharest sound ecology: the exploration/recording/transformation/transmission of urban intimate memories. Older pieces here, do just that! Newer sound submissions though, make us want to leave the city and the documentary, get lost in illusion/fiction/drama, based just as well in field recording: forms that stimulate stories that transmit that listening state. Of course, it’s just radio, our only medium to theorize and practice listening for space & story, remotely!
(with folklorist Natalia Țurcan). She leads the collective listening workshops Ciulește Urechile and co-hosts AICI Chișinău, a micro daytime dance party. Sometimes these explorations become conceptual installations (Simultan Festival, Au Gust Fest), other times — collective workshops (Porocity, Timișoara). / Concept, composition and production by Mădălina Ciocanu, mixing and mastering by Alexe Pupăzan.
Liminaria, with the support of Tramandars, in the frame of SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES 2024. Co-financed by AFCN. // Sillyconductor is the artistic moniker of Cătălin Matei, a Romanian sound artist based in Bucharest. He is recognized for his work as a sound designer, composer, performer and educator, with a diverse portfolio that includes music for silent films, games, animations, fashion shows, theatre and dance performances. His works often feature self-built or modified instruments, field recordings, and improvisational techniques that push the boundaries of traditional music-making. His primary focus is sound and its relationship with science or mathematics, creating instruments or installations that simultaneously explore sound, technology, and the environment. In recent years, his attention has shifted to bio linguistic installations and the sonification of inaudible phenomena, from archaeological sites to jars of algae. // Composition and mixing by Sillyconductor for SEMI SILENT. Co-produced by Associazione Culturale Interzona
s rotting! the myth, the foundation, the loop, the repeat, the on repeat, tot așa, tot-ș-aceeași, tot rot, autoritatea epistemică, exprimarea se screme. exprimere – to express, or rather squeeze out (of?). ne scremem. ne scremem să naștem murmurări noi. noi scremem noutăți express. ce mai nou? this is where we express in the crumbles and murmurations of crumbles. crumble ‘til you forget how not to. murmur ‘til you forget words, to world. apoi uită din nou… remember to forget all over in fragments, smaller… smaller… that we can’t measure any longer. shorter… shorter… that we no longer store and hoarder. liquid, back to liquid, then vapour again, always in flight, escaping the lines, the rise, the wise men. but who can? cine poate? cine merită? cine irită. frământări de limbă, firimituri. ții minte când am împins toată firimitura în claritate? am frământat-o... nu s-a lipit. dar am vestit că gata, trăim fără fărămitură (că făcea mizerie). (delete the crumbs) (delete hertory) (delete the mess). acum firimiturile, pixelii, distorsiunile, the crumbles, the murmurations are back (and front and sideways, they’ve never really been away, always allways). when you walk through timișoara, go to that building, or that one, where it says proudly in red – atenție, cade tencuiala – and press, first gently, with your index finger or thumb or key, while clenching your jaw, then relax the jaw and then push and feel the release of a crumbling wall. so fragile, so easy. now take this proven methodology, and crumble away.then (don’t) forgetto clean up(delete the crumbs)(delete hertory)(delete the mess) // The piece is composed with recordings made during SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES organized by SEMI SILENT and hosted by Simultan Festival in Timișoara, October 2024. // Mădălina Ciocanu, un/commonly known as BORȘ (/bôrSH/), is a Moldovan sound artist, DJ, and researcher. Her practice explores Bessarabian relational animism, oral memory, and decolonial ontologies through folklore. She’s released both dance tracks (I’m Going to Chișinău) and sonic testimonies like ‘vers pervers’ (on the 1946 famine) and ‘Leagăn’ (with folklorist Natalia Țurcan). She leads the collective listening workshops Ciulește Urechile and co-hosts AICI Chișinău, a micro daytime dance party. Sometimes these explorations become conceptual installations (Simultan Festival, Au Gust Fest), other times — collective workshops (Porocity, Timișoara). // Recordings, composition and mixing by Mădălina Ciocanu for SEMI SILENT. Co-produced by Simultan.
non-humans, revealing the object-hood of the human essence, and an animate character of the ‘inanimate’ being. In one of her recent installations and performances Machine Equities she explores the sonic landscape of machines as actors and singing collaborators. Previous and ongoing explorations focus on: the relationship we have to the natural world; machine technologies as our collaborators; the role salt has on aquatic life and the activation of micro-worlds such as moss, soil and motorized machines. // Recordings, composition and mixing by Pheobe riley Law for SEMI SILENT. Co-produced by Simultan.
My city roars. Like yours, it is constantly changing, driven by silent, powerful forces. Beneath my feet, an invisible metro line cuts through ruins — neighborhoods, dead ends, streets. Construction sites, machines, bodies in motion. Clatter, tremors, textures: raw, living, untamed sounds. I walk with microphones, gathering these sounds not to freeze them, but to move through them — to hear what, amid the chaos, tries to speak differently. These noises become stories, presences that awaken a numb urban imagination. Reactivating it is a form of situated resistance, rooted in places, cracks, and transformation. By letting these often-dismissed sounds resonate, construction sites stop being mere breaches in the city and become breaths. Giving voice to places in transition, reclaiming through listening a power over what slips away. Trying to bring forth another city — more sensitive, more porous — where even the roar becomes a material for dreaming. A sound piece built entirely from field recordings. It offers a dive into the intimate soundscape of urban change, a renewed listening to emerging landscapes where ecology is found in friction, disorder, and force. Field recordings and composition: Mathias Guilbaud. Produced with the support of SEMI SILENT in the frame of SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES 2024. Photo: Guilhem Hergott *Mathias Guilbaud is a Toulouse-based sound artist working with field recordings and acousmatic composition. His work explores the sonic textures of urban transformation, the poetics of construction sites, and the intimate intersections between public spaces and personal narratives. Through his electroacoustic pieces, he seeks to awaken new ways of listening to cities in flux, revealing the hidden layers beneath everyday noise.As a multidisciplinary artist, Mathias collaborates with performing arts companies, community radios, and film projects.
Gardens of Christiane. The Palestine From Before. A sound piece by Anamaria Pravicencu and Manja Ristić, 2025. * In the shade of Palestinian gardens, memory once bloomed — fragrant with olive groves and the quiet gestures of care. These were spaces of closeness, of which Christiane Dabdoub Nasser recalls inviting us into her childhood and Palestinian culture from another time, where the Mediterranean breathed through shared rituals of tending and living in harmony with the land. Rooted in practices of cultivation, refuge, and sensory proximity, such intimacy has been systematically disrupted by the colonial project of the Israeli state, which reconfigured land into instruments of control and dispossession. Today, the relational fabric of Palestinian landscapes lies fractured — yet the soil remembers. Through powerful storytelling, family history, and enduring friendship, this piece gathers what remains: the rustle of leaves under siege, the echo of footsteps in forbidden groves, the persistence of tenderness in a terrain marked by erasure. It traces how ecological and cultural memory endure despite spatial fragmentation and political violence. Manja Ristić engages with sounds gathered from war-torn landscapes and towns across the former Yugoslavia, from WWII memorial sites to intoxicated rivers — bearing witness to how the land carries its wounds in silence, while the echoes of war still tremble through every pore of the heart. Concept and direction: Anamaria Pravicencu/ Storytelling by Christiane Dabdoub Nasser, with the support of Maya/ Sound design and composition: Manja Ristić/ Presentation text: Manja Ristić/ Mixing: La Plant Studio, Belgrade/ A production of SEMI SILENT and Tranzit/ Bucharest The first version was presented in the frame of To Give a House the Form of an Event, a program by Tranzit/ Bucharest at the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, Silistea Snagovului, Romania, June 2025.* The present form, with the invaluable contribution of Manja Ristić, was premiered at Orizont Sonor festival, in the Botanical Garden of Bucharest, September 2025.
A sound work exploring multiple perspectives on water and rivers, the passage of time and the power of water as a primordial element. We hear from the river police who enforce the law on the waterways, a local archaeologist who explores the liminal intertidal zones picking through the centuries of rubbish and debris to make sense of the past and present, divers talking us through the experience and sensations of being submerged beneath the depths and a chorus of voices sharing their fears of water and dreams of drowning.
Fragment of an audiowalk in The Hague, which explores the connection between sound and commemoration. The composition centers around the interplay of two voices: the vocalist and the witness. The score for the vocalist was created using field recordings of industrial machines, which the voice imitates. These sounds, while not human in origin, evoke "emotionality" and serve as a metaphor for the experience of war. The presence of weapons and technology plays a significant role in war, but it is fundamentally a manifestation of human experience. The voice of the witness describes the experience of war in terms of sound. In the film industry, the sounds of explosions and war have become familiar to everyone. While working on this composition, the challenge was to share the experience without turning the witness's story into entertainment content.
An Emotional Encyclopedia of War is a radio art project launched in the summer of 2022 that investigates the transformation that comes with war via the locus of emotional emergency. Trying to get a grip on the new emotional states she’d undergone, Anna Kravets still questions the imperceptibility of war experience. Having realized how discordant it is with the life beyond its borders, she tries to invent frameworks that would pass under the framing barriers of mass media coverage.In her auto-ethnographic radio piece, Anna describes her feelings of living during war, integrating them in a palette of experiences which belong to others, strangers, foreigners. Called out in a time of war, those experiences are featured in her piece together with her desperate attempts of reflection and composing sound in a post-invasion paralysis. The project was born during SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES program of SEMI SILENT, made possible together with Q-O2 and ASCR in Brussels, and co-financed by AFCN. In 2023, it traveled to CTM festival as part of its Radio Lab with Deutschlandfunk Kultur (winner of the 2022 edition), ORF musikprotokoll im steirischer herbst festival, Ö1 Kunstradio, The Wire magazine, and Goethe Institut. A new iteration of Emergency Rehearsal took place during Sonic Narratives festival in Timișoara (Romania) in 2023, and the Week of Sound in Brussels and Charleroi in 2024. An Emotional Encyclopedia of War was premiered (in German) in February 2024 at Deutschlandradio Klangkunst. Photo: Udo Siegfriedt, 2023 Anna Kravets is a radio and performance artist, journalist and podcast producer. In her work, she uses direct and recorded speech, stages recorded interactions, makes sonic experiments with materials, spaces and soundscape, exploring the experience of the self with its limits and possibilities. Anna studied cultural studies in Kyiv and anthropology in Marseille. In 2017-2022, Anna presented the Art Of Work Talk Show on Radio Ukraine International and Cashmere Radio. In 2017-2018, Anna also produced and organized an experimental media platform called Radio International during the Kyiv Biennial and the Warsaw Under Construction Festival. Anna is based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Voices, contributors, and participants: Aditi Srivastava, Alessandra Prado Soler, Alice Hui-Sheng Chang, Amin Behmanesh, Annu Koetter, Carmelo Ianuzzo, Caroline Profanter, Constanze Aka, Diana Duta, Dimitra Kousteridou, Erika Sirola, Golo Föllmer, Greg Kieser, Hanna Sauer, Joachim Glaude, Julia Eckhardt, Juliette Escudé, Kai-Uwe Reinhold, Laetitia Defendini, Mamoru Watanabe, Michel Ivor, Nir Jacob, Sabri Meddeb, Tanya Ringer, Virgile Loiseau, Wouter Hillaert, and Wynona Ringer.The voices were collected in different places from 2022 onward as part of Emergency Rehearsal series of performative interactions, that became a tool for mutual translation and acknowledgement of complicated experience. Production: SEMI SILENT, Q-O2, ACSR, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, CTM Festival, Goethe-Institut, and ORF.
ANALYTICAL SWIMMING. Left ear under water by Sillyconductor, 2023_____I am floating on one side, one ear submerged, the other relatively dry and pointing to the sky. In my left ear I listen to what’s underneath, underwater, unseen and untouched. My right ear acknowledges the world above. In the midst of it all, there’s me, relatively cold. I am steadily moving downstream, breathing and making involuntary noises. Beneath the surface of the Danube there are mysterious bugs, sizzling crevices, maybe lava, who knows, it’s out of my reach. Above me lies the known world of birds and people and all things visible. And bats, which are something special. I always imagined big ships would generate a lot of low frequencies underwater. I was so wrong. Because now I can finally see it with my right eye and I hear it with my left ear._____*recorded on hydrophones and ultrasonic microphones_____Sound piece composed with recordings made during SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES organized by Asociația Jumătatea plină and SEMI SILENT at Port Cetate, Dolj county, Romania, in September 2022._____Sillyconductor is one of the monikers of Cătălin Matei, a composer and sound artist from Bucharest. His work reflects his different interests, from innovating recording techniques for church organs, creating improvisational instruments and interactive installations to setting up sonic playgrounds for kids or writing music for theatre or games, always trying to blend mathematical rigor with a healthy dose of the absurd. For the past years he has been working with research institutes on different bioart projects looking for means of sonifiying of the unperceivable._____Recordings, composition and mixing by Sillyconductor for SEMI SILENT.
SWINGING DRY WATER. An everlasting ludic space of poetry by Jasmina Al-Qaisi and Veronika Svobodová, 2022_____Using the shore of the Danube as a whole orchestra of sounding and resonating matter, Jasmina Al-Qaisi and Veronika Svobodová make audible an everlasting ludic space of poetry. This geography, where they compose is marked by drought, wetness, scarcity, wealth, silence, noise which in permanent relation with the multiple legends about fountains, ghosts, forests, allows a multi-sensual reading of the space beyond binaries. While ‘swinging dry water’ the two artists played with a blur of polarities of time, space, materiality and perception, verbalized and sounded a multilingual text in the forest, on the water, in empty fountains and in their heads._____Sound piece composed with recordings made during SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES organized by Asociația Jumătatea plină and SEMI SILENT at Port Cetate, Dolj county, Romania, in September 2022, and premiered in R{A}DIO{CUSTICA}, Czech Radio Vltava in November 2022._____Jasmina Al-Qaisi is a writer for voice and paper appearing sometimes in other forms such as a walking scientist, the schnelle musikalische hilfe service, or as the only agent for the self-entitled-self-entitlement-office. Jasmina is as well listening with her hands and makes waves on free, independent, temporary, mobile radios and public radios writing with sound._____Veronika Svobodová is an artist, musician, and scenographer. Her approach to work with sound reveals her relation to stage design, art of installation and performance. In her work she connects the aspects of space, time, and situation, often it is a response to specific places in the landscape or architecture._____Recordings, composition and mixing by Jasmina Al-Qaisi and Veronika Svobodová for SEMI SILENT._____Co-produced by R{A}DIO{CUSTICA}, Czech Radio Vltava.
WE SEE BENEATH. An unfamiliar place by Lloyd Dunn, 2023_____A dry description of the locale will not satisfy the task of describing the place; especially when the experience of it interleaves objective perception, memory, dilated time, and all the other observations that come from being in an unfamiliar place over a period of days. And so we are left with this set of allusions._____Sound piece composed with recordings made during SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES organized by Asociația Jumătatea plină and SEMI SILENT at Port Cetate, Dolj county, Romania, in September 2022.______Lloyd Dunn is a multimedia artist working in machine-based media for 40 years. During the 1980s and 90s he edited and published the graphic arts magazines Photostatic and Retrofuturism, which were circulated worldwide and are collected by many prominent archives. In 1987, Dunn, together with some close friends, co-founded the Tape-beatles, who were among a few early recording experimenters whose work explicitly challenged intellectual property and copyright. Since 2009, Dunn’s main project has been the project nula.cc, the online presence for a series of filecasts initiated to further explore his long-standing interest in machine-based art forms, appropriation and collage, time-based media and design. Dunn currently lives and works in Prague._____Recordings, composition and mixing by Lloyd Dunn for SEMI SILENT.
EBB AND FLOW. Aural encounters in the floodplains by pablo sanz, 2023_____An imaginary day, from dawn to sunset. It meanders through aural spaces based on encounters with human and other-than-human lifeforms and their movements, shaped by the presence of the river._____Sound piece composed with recordings made during SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES organized by Asociația Jumătatea plină and SEMI SILENT at Port Cetate, Dolj county, Romania, in September 2022._____Artist, composer and researcher. The work of pablo sanz includes site-determined and public art projects, immersive spatial audio installations and concerts, and compositions for headphone listening spread through exhibitions, broadcasts and releases. With a focus on the limits and thresholds of perception and attention, his practice investigates listening, sound space, more-than-human vitality, aural energies, and otherness. Listening becomes a political act intended to resist dominant tendencies in contemporary societies, cultivating alternative forms of being and thinking. His work has been experienced internationally in diverse contexts. He has participated in numerous artistic residencies, received commissions and support from multiple organizations, and regularly facilitates talks, seminars and workshops._____Recordings, composition and mixing by pablo sanz for SEMI SILENT.
MAYBE NOTHING. An environmental thriller by Jeanne Debarsy, 2023_____What happened? / We don't know exactly / Of course, there are rumors and echoes / But they are perhaps only reminiscences / Time and space seem out of tune / Behaviors have also changed / But still, the Danube doesn’t stop flowing._____The translation of a precise feeling that cradled the 10-day residency in the small village of Port Cetate, in Romania: a strange feeling of the end of the world, with a historically low water level that prevented navigation on the Danube, a very prevalent animal kingdom, few humans, the impression of evolving either in the past or in the future but certainly not in the present._____Sound piece composed with recordings made during SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES organized by Asociația Jumătatea plină and SEMI SILENT at Port Cetate, Dolj county, Romania, in September 2022._____Jeanne Debarsy (b. 1986) is a sound artist based in Belgium where she studied to become a sound engineer. She works in various domains of sound and collaborates with many artists in cinema, radio, music, and various arts. She is particularly passionate about radio media because it gives her freedom of action and expression precious to her eyes. She continues to develop her own sound language to refine her personal research and to explore the fields of performance and installation._____Recordings, composition and mixing by Jeanne Debarsy for SEMI SILENT._____Voices: Jasmina Al-Qaisi, Lloyd Dunn, Sillyconductor, pablo sanz, Veronika Svobodová._____Co-produced by Babelfish, 2023.
Nest. A day off Author: Abby Lee Tee, 2022
The sounds of privileged life in a small, cosy flat while a crisis after another exacerbating in the outside world. Very close encounters with gurgling stomachs, diligent small critters, dishwashers, washing machines, moka pots, tea kettles and a hailstorm on the other side of the windows.
Sound piece commissioned by SEMI SILENT in the frame of SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES 2022.
Abby Lee Tee is an austrian musician, sound designer & field recordist. His fascination for the divisions and crossovers between noise and music, as well as nature and culture, can be seen in his work with installations, sound-walks, sound design for theatre and audiovisual projects, as well as records on labels such as Shash, Czaszka, Never Anything, Vertical Music, Falt, Dinzu Artefacts and Accidental. Since 2020, he’s researching beavers and their vocalizations, winning the “Sound of the Year” Awards in the category “Best Naturally Occuring Sound” as well as the “Boughton Fieldcraft” Award by the Wildlife Sound Recording Society. https://abbyleetee.com
Recordings and composition by Abby Lee Tee for SEMI SILENT. Mix & Mastering by Christian Ghahremanian
Ceaușescu’s Teeth. A biting collection of sounds from profound Romania (Romanian) Author: Sillyconductor, 2015
“Related to God”: voice memos as a documenting obsession Some years ago, my then very young daughter had a funny but pertinent question: was Ceaușescu’s dentist too scared of the dictator to fix his teeth? At that time I was traveling a lot around the country and, as it happens, when you travel by taxi, bus, train or even elevator, people tend to talk to you. I always had my phone ready to record, since I was ready to sacrifice sound quality for the sake of not missing the moment. I recorded for two years, between 2013 and 2015, whatever I found interesting, overbearing, fun or infuriating. Kids, taxi drivers, radios, friends, birds, toilets, they all somehow melted in a collage that had God and family as recurring themes and tells a story that is just as intrusive and fear-driven as Ceaușescu’s dentist.
Sound composition originally presented during Sâmbăta Sonoră in June 2015 at ODD, Bucharest.
Photo: Nicu Ilfoveanu, 2021
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Sillyconductor is a sound artist from Bucharest. He performs, writes music for theatre, games, or films, builds sound installations or instruments inspired by science and humour. Sometimes he entertains or educates kids with his Sgomot series of sound workshops.
Recording, editing, and mixing by Sillyconductor.
Măr din măr. How I made peace with my garden (Romanian) Author: Maria Balabaș, 2021
I started with a recording made in the garden with our little boy. We were getting ready to go to Bucharest, so we planted a few more things and we said goodbye. “The garden looks like our life: the things are mixed, have their own calendars, there are no 3 rows alike” (Vlad). It is a continuum. While listening to the recording, I made peace with this space filled with different plants, some eatable, others not. Even if this garden asks for more time and soul than I am ready to give, it has a huge contribution not only to our daily food, but to our imaginary. I dedicate this composition to Vlad, my husband, and to Bogdan, our son (both “words creators”!), and to our garden for the delicious things it gave to our stomachs and ears. Maria Balabaș
Producer’s note: Maria Balabaș moved to the countryside a few years ago, though she has the heart of a city person. "Măr din măr" translates as “apple from the apple tree,” but it also recalls the use of metonymy in the folkloric Romanian songs.
Sound piece commissioned by SEMI SILENT in the frame of the 2021 edition of SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES.
Maria Balabaș is a journalist and musician. She is the host of the Dimineața crossover show (Morning Crossover) from Radio România Cultural and has created projects devoted to new forms of radio creation (Generația sonoră/Sound Generation). In 2014 she was nominated for Prix Europa (Berlin) for the documentary Maria Tănase – Urban Soundtrack for a Diva. She initiated musical groups such as Avant’n’Gard and Soare Staniol, inspired by improvisational techniques, electronic music, acoustic music. Creates installations generated by the artistic interest in the form of field-specific auditory memory.
Recording, editing, and mixing by Maria Balabaș for SEMI SILENT.
Applecore. Portrait of an urban garden Author: Cosmin Nicolae, 2021
There's a garden between the buildings where I live. At first it was probably planned and landscaped. Then the plants (largely bushy, ornamental) grew naturally wild. I guess someone threw an apple core out the window one day. A shy apple tree has grown, nothing more than a handful of twigs. This year it bore fruit: four apples. Usually, not much comes out of apple seeds. Apparently this time it has. It usually takes between five and twelve years for the apple tree sprung from seed to bear fruit. 'Applecore' is the story of the apple seed that sprouted in a wild garden between buildings in Berlin.
Sound piece commissioned by SEMI SILENT in the frame of the 2021 edition of SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES.
Cosmin Nicolae is an anti-disciplinary artist working with image, sound, text to produce works of intimate reflection at the intersection of autoethnography, psychogeography and possible futures. Opening the door on Hessle Audio over a decade ago - an outlet that has gone on to become a defining voice within electronic music in the 21st Century, Nicolae’s list of affiliations reads like a who’s who of top tier contemporary music record labels. Cosmin Nicolae’s work glides between music, film, hyperstitional theory fiction and a mix of media that formulate peripheral points of view. Lives and works in Berlin. www.cosminnicolae.com
Recording, editing, and mixing by Cosmin Nicolae for SEMI SILENT.
Authors: Irina Botea Bucan & Jon Dean, 2021. A sonic portrait of Tescani through assembling all of the “da” sounds from our daily conversations and informal interviews facilitated during our residency period. The sound translates indistinctively as both an affirmation (da = yes) and doubt (da’ is the shortcut sound for dar = but). In the context of Tescani (both village and George Enescu residency) two distinct temporalities co-exist: that of the short and temporary visits of invited artists alongside the repetitive working cycles of the local inhabitants; witnessed in the crops growing underneath high voltage electricity poles. All of these actions are situated in the vicinity of Tristan Tzara’s birthplace. Oedaadaao is a title without registered meaning or definition… the choice of these letters represents the ongoing journey through Enescu’s Oedipus and Tzara’s sound poetry both of which have their origins within the local area. Sound piece created during the SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES organized by Asociația Jumătatea plină and SEMI SILENT at the George Enescu National Museum in Tescani Village, Bacău County, Romania in September 2021.
Conservation Conversation. A Sound Essay Author: La Pesch, 2021 (English, German, Romanian, Ukrainian)
How to approach a new place? And what to take home from it? The rural area of Tescani in Romanian Moldavia is characterized by reverberating sounds waving between hills, farming, and plenty of dogs of course. Up the hill on the edge of the village lies a small museum in honor of the Romanian composer George Enescu. A mansion with its own little forest. But the grandeur of the past shows cracks. Humidity sneaks up the walls. Red, aristocratic patterned carpet hosts historic notes, furniture, and instruments. Mice ate the hammer felt of the piano – the piano on which Enescu finished his opera Oedipe. Today it is untouchable. Packs of visitors come in coaches, have a quick look, bath in some mellow notes, and climb their vehicle again to take off. What is conserved along the way? The piece follows, questions, deconstructs, and reconstructs the process of conservation. It starts a conversation with the ghosts of the past. Open exploration, improvisation, and coincidences play a major role in the piece as most of it is composed by movement in space on-location and not by layering tracks. It drifts intuitively between scenes, thoughts, and impressions. Essayistically, it weaves together reoccurring themes in a meandering way that invites listeners to get lost in the imagination of a place.
Sound piece created during the SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES organized by Asociația Jumătatea plină and SEMI SILENT at the George Enescu National Museum in Tescani Village, Bacău County, Romania in September 2021.
Carina Pesch (*1983), aka La Pesch, lives in Leipzig and works as sound and voice artist, author, director, and curator – mainly in the fields of radio, installation, performance, and the walking arts for public broadcasters, museums, international festivals, and cultural institutions. She co-curates the gathered listening event GERÄUSCHKULISSE. Her own art works show a strong sense for the specific characteristics of phenomena, people, and places. They oscillate between narrative and purely sound-based with strong fascination for the thin borderline between fiction and reality. Often she uses spoken word that transcends sentences and syntax and reaches a pure atmosphere or emotional quality. She chooses a subjective approach towards the world and sets in scene encounters creating contact points in dialogue. Her works have been honored with numerous residencies, awards, nominations, and stipends (e.g. Prix Phonurgia Nova, Grand Prix Nova, Prix Europa). www.textbote.de
Recording, editing, and mixing by Carina Pesch for SEMI SILENT.
Animals are good. A cross section of rhythms of matter and meaning. Studium Author: Anna Kravets, 2022
What is the difference between talking with and talking about nonhuman animals?
Commonly, the former engages a certain performative speech within discourses of subjugation and/ or affection, and the latter rather involves those of superiority, utility and commodity. Are human languages an ever blooming possibility, or still a strict limitation? Les non-dupes errent? Vocal rhythms caught in the middle of a rescue operation suggest that other purposes mobilize different type of talk.
Tactile, absorbing and memetic, the rhythms that permeate and structure daily lives are those we long to recreate in all the strictness of the human beat. Necessarily though, there is a possibility or an imaginary of their violation. Rhythms extracted by animating non-animate objects discharge each in its proper continuation.
Then also, Homo homini lupus est. Traveling from Hobbes to the Garden of Eden, Emil and I are strolling around what went wrong in the society of humans and the common sense of its relation to nonhuman animals. Animals do not possess knowledge, but have a sense of moderation. What exactly do we attribute to this notion of knowledge, and why are humans deprived of that sense of moderation?
Sound composition created during the SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES organized by Asociația Jumătatea plină and SEMI SILENT at the George Enescu National Museum in Tescani Village, Bacău County, Romania in September 2021.
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Anna Kravets (Kyiv, Ukraine) is a researcher holding a double Master’s in cultural studies and social sciences. Her fields of activity include radio art and radio journalism, podcasting, translation. In her work and research projects, she has addressed linguistic aspects of power relations and mechanisms of collective imaginary, anthropology of voice, work in migration, experimental media. In 2017, she founded the Radio International experimental radio workshop. Her current projects oscillate between work and routine philosophies, conditions of precarity, shifted subjectivity and participative vocalizations. She runs a radio show about the transformations of work and leisure on RUI/ Cashmere Radio.
All sounds (recorded, composed, edited) by Anna Kravets for SEMI SILENT
Outtakes of the project Syntopia:Bega (by Andreea Săsăran & Abby Lee Tee), recorded in July 2021 while collecting material for an audiovisual essay about the widely ramified river and canal system Bega in Timișoara, coming across numerous hidden places where frogs and their vocal expressions were dominating the soundscape – above and below the surface of the water.
A huit clos in the head of a unique character, a confined space for a possible couple during the long days of the first pandemic lock-down of 2020.
The house, the domestic space in which we were constrained to isolation against danger, is throwing us in psychic depths. The place of calmness, silence, and relaxation have become a hostile territory, a stage for grave scenes. With the prolonged confinement and the growing anxiety, the smallest gestures can engage unmanageable angst. The domestic life become extremely fragile, the families and the couples are crumbling. Domestic Hostile explores a small territory of something we called “domestic hostility” – a drama inside an apartment where we try to survive and stay sane.
Closer (Valentina Chiriță)
Light, in those lands, was an advanced synesthesia condensed in sound, movement and vibration, beyond gravity. Source-sorceress, put your finger on the wound, reach the focal point, extract the war, the riot, and the chaos, bring out the peace, the love and the silence. The peace, the love and the silence were the essential universal coordinates. The smoldering horn and the shrieking trumpets, surrounded by discreet harmonies, wavy distinctions: the teguments were all enduring a lack of sentience. To dislodge the melted nuclei of the sun-sisters: how can I get closer? To cherish the pulse in all that separates us, the exhausted salts, after so many recrystallizations to feed them at simultaneous births of twisted galaxies. I look down on you all from my blind spot: frowning Asthenes, keen to burn everything down, Two-faced Makari - slimy, hated by all, bursting of hatred themselves, tormented by bad climate, with stolen sun - on whose planet the dumbest Flyters kept skuttering, destroying what was left of the food chain, then Sloots, marching on their own hair, launching telemantic attacks, Storlings - flocks of Daytinghales collapsed in themselves, appearing on a whim, disappearing without notice - absent Spirrons, arrogant Twitts. Out of these coexisting realities, apathy is the cruelest foe. I see now: they beg to be, waiting for a mysterious love.
Translated from Romanian to English by Bogdan Perdivară, and to Ukrainian by Anna Kravets.
The piece is composed by Anna Kravets with a poem by Valentina Chiriță in the frame of POLYPHONIC ECHOES, a project organized by Jumătatea plină for SEMI SILENT. Partners: Czech Center and the National Museum of Romanian Literature. With the support of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund.
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Anna Kravets (Kyiv, Ukraine) is a researcher holding a double Master’s in cultural studies and social sciences. Her fields of activity include radio art and radio journalism, podcasting, translation. In her work and research projects, she has addressed linguistic aspects of power relations and mechanisms of collective imaginary, anthropology of voice, work in migration, experimental media. In 2017, she founded the Radio International experimental radio workshop. Her current projects oscillate between work and routine philosophies, conditions of precarity, shifted subjectivity and participative vocalizations. She runs a radio show about the transformations of work and leisure on RUI/ Cashmere Radio.
Valentina Chiriță, poet and performer. She published the volume umilirea animalelor (CDPL, 2010) under the pseudonime val chimic, and poetry in the anthologies De ce pisicile n-au coadă (Art, 2017) and Hotel Cosmos (frACTalia, 2019). She was part of the performance groups EGG NO EGO and Local Goddesses, with contributions in street art, installation, invented rituals, asemic writing, and guided meditation, for public spaces or art galleries. In 2001, she coordinated the Bucharest international festival Live Art Platform.
All sounds (recorded, composed, edited) by Anna Kravets for SEMI SILENT Voice: Anna Kravets
How does a severe case of Covid-19 really feel like?
A binaural creation depicting a first-person experience. Trigger warning. Surrender your last wish into the hands of others.
„Covid Experience” is part of the „Pan-Demon" interdisciplinary performative installation, National University of Arts George Enescu, Iaşi, Romania.
about the future (V.Leac)
it is undoubtable that the giant wave will wash through the dryland with an amazing speed. it is difficult to imagine such a speed... the flish are hidden somewhere in the wave, right on the tip of the wave, they are helpless, so they just sit there… the wave crashes into a mountain – boom! and the flish are thrown into the desert. everyone thinks they are dead; it’s just an illusion, a false illusion. now, please, pay attention: - look carefully at this spot. do you notice something very very fast is moving and getting thicker? well, gentlemen, it’s the double-jawed worm. it is born inside the flish and then it eats it from within – did you see? it’s very easy.
then, by scent, the kangaroo-snail comes – you can see it in this picture; it’s got one leg, and this leg was once a tail. life is extremely tough in the desert. everything happens very very fast – and when you least expect it out comes the dragonfly-lizard that runs/flies with over 115 km per hour. it grabs the snail and devours it ultra-rapidly. the dragonfly-lizard is chocked by a trapping flower.
everything happens...life is extremely tough… now we’re entering the giant super-forest: - see how the canopy moves? you’re scared, aren’t you? don’t worry. it’s just an eight-legged mammoth, it’s vegetarian. - see this green spot on the tree? it crawls after the mammoth and makes it so that the mammoth steps in it; it is highly intelligent: it has set up house inside the mammoth. can you believe that this spot currently unknown to us can bring the mammoth on the brink of despair? at first we were also amazed. it all happens very fast. in two million years from now, life will be extremely tough… we have showed you these images to get an idea about how life on earth is going to be. it all happens very very fast.
Translated from Romanian to English by Alexandra M. Păun and to German by Gabriela Fierbințeanu.
The piece is composed by Cristian Fierbințeanu with a poem by V. Leac in the frame of POLYPHONIC ECHOES, a project organized by Jumătatea plină for SEMI SILENT. Partners: Czech Center and the National Museum of Romanian Literature. With the support of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund.
green areas (Gabi Eftimie)
Pretending to be a tourist in my own town, I take the bus to the last stop.
It doesnt take long and all filters disappear
when youre on autopilot.
Soon, I arrive to my destination. My electrified hair is spread in the
same direction as I’m headed to. I pick up crumbs left behind of my fellow passengers and I try to guess: bread, biscuits, falafel? Ahead:” the park, the green lung of the city.”
In the deepest depth, fishes hobble, enduring like uranium.
The crows` croaking doesn’t pierce through anymore.
The black-throated loon spreads out its cry like a fishnet
through the lake´s surface.
I surrender to these inputs. Like in some guided meditation.
The park, now on mute, is lost in space.
Pigeons coo their mantras. Happiness to all humankind! Let us be spared by weakness! May all care for their fellows´ well-being! Don´t let anyone experience gloom and sorrow!
Suddenly, a green, lit water-bus pops up in the surrounding twilight.
Translated from Romanian to English by Gabi Eftimie.
The piece is composed by Ana Teodora Popa with a poem by Gabi Eftimie in the frame of POLYPHONIC ECHOES, a project organized by Jumătatea plină for SEMI SILENT. Partners: Czech Center and the National Museum of Romanian Literature. With the support of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund.
The piece is composed by Ivan Palacký with a poem by Dmitri Miticov in the frame of POLYPHONIC ECHOES, a project organized by Jumătatea plină for SEMI SILENT.
The piece is composed by Manja Ristić with a poem by Cosmina Moroșan in the frame of POLYPHONIC ECHOES, a project organized by Jumătatea plină for SEMI SILENT.
Marseille-Tokyo. It starts almost like a game, I’m looking for plane tickets as I don’t know what else to do. I try other destinations, Taipei, Seoul, but they work less well. Tokyo rhymes with everything, even with a return to Bucharest. Marseille-Tokyo-Osaka-Bucharest is surely a more interesting story to tell than Marseille-Bucharest. By taking this trip, I have, at least, the merit of having chosen a good title for my story.
Bucharest Sketches is the fifth in the series of field recordings albums by Toni Dimitrov dedicated to a city. After the field recordings from Athens (released on Green Field Recordings), Milan and Ioannina (released on Auriculab), and Belgrade (released on Silber Records), this time the sketches are recorded in Bucharest during the stay in Romania for a field recording residency in the Danube Delta, SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES, in the summer of 2019. You can hear the Bucharest streets, parks, the noise from the rain, fountains, interweaving subtly, blurring the line between field recording and sound art. Released on Green Field Recordings.
It was back in 2016, spring, May, 27th, my first and so far only tour in Japan. During some unscheduled days, I went to Hiroshima on the day when Barack Obama was visiting. The timing couldn't have been more perfect, as the train from Tokyo arrived just some minutes before the helicopters appeared. I joined the crowds and start recording. Some hours later, I watched the actual speech from a small gas station on one of the river banks, surrounded by the members of the secret service. The gas station employee made some jokes to me about blowing it up... Perhaps I have this recorded, or not?
At present times I perceive that an ultimate hybridization of living and non living sensory stimuli our daily cognizance has to put up with is only a surface noise of de-personalized (and certainly unfinished) collective morphology we comply to. Opposing that, I choose to create poetry reflecting upon commonplaces of unfading human struggle to understand depths of grief and devaluation of life. And as a field of resonance surrounding those I am driven by hopeless pursuit of the embodiment of love with all of its complexities, that represent my personal psychological blueprint. Poetry is an elevated state, in my case it is an emotionally charged scenery, textural space, always abundant with aural density in almost traditional narrative. As a writer I am searching for the “mirror stress” in which my subconsciousness and my reality are becoming proprioceptive and leaning onto each other. Death and love are deeply embedded in all-pervading existence, unfolding their vigorous discharge of life in profoundly intricate ways. One can only be humble if finds her/himself awake standing in the way of this one – same breath.
Regarding sound, for me the most important transference of energy there is, I intent to overplay with its geometries finding comfort in re-constructed memories (through intervention and accentuation of semi-closed bio-acoustic processes I extract from field recordings, with intention to mutate them into soundscape compositions). With this cognitive personalization of particular space and time mnemotopia as such becomes imaginatively tactile, thus emotionally recognizable. Form of a flow, leans on auralization of inner dynamics rather then any aesthetically confined musical approach.
And last but not the least, by choosing male voice for the final sonification of the words I express a need to abandon binary social constructions of a gender, and push gender “source” in my experiences into its natural form – a gender spectrum with all of its gruesomely hidden complexities that a human nature actually posses.
Înspre. A focus on the inwardness of sound 2/2 Author: Laurențiu Coțac, 2019
Înspre is a musical composition which evolved slowly during the making of Dinspre. It took quite a while to write and perform, but it’s rare to prepare and experiment with a bunch of instruments, all available from a local music high school. It’s about things collapsing around us and then growing back up. An existential piece.
Înspre is the second part of a composition representing an intimate study of the peripheral and the insular, the open and confined, the controlled and the impromptu. The composition has to be played back a little under loud.
Musical composition created during SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES organized by Asociația Jumătatea plină and SEMI SILENT in Iași, Romania in May 2019.
Laurențiu Coțac is a musician and sound recordist living and working in Bucharest.
Recorded, edited, and mixed by Laurențiu Coțac for SEMI SILENT
Dinspre, A focus on the inwardness of sound 1/2 Author: Laurențiu Coțac, 2019
Dinspre is about the harshness and loneliness of these remote locations I’ve visited, it collects a bit of something which most people seem to be running away from at the end of the day. I’ve spend time observing sonic gestures and tonal imprints of various places in the outskirts of Iași, from cellars, yards, highways, open fields, bridges, to construction sites, abandoned warehouses and industrial plants etc. Big cities will always change their limits but they’ll be outlined and fragmented by something mechanistic.
Dinspre is the first part of a composition representing an intimate study of the peripheral and the insular, the open and confined, the controlled and the impromptu. The composition has to be played back a little under loud.
Sound composition created during SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES organized by Asociația Jumătatea plină and SEMI SILENT in Iași, Romania in May 2019.
Laurențiu Coțac is a musician and sound recordist living and working in Bucharest.
Recorded, edited and mixed by Laurențiu Coțac for SEMI SILENT
Tokyo. All the Sounds That I Can Feel. From Deep Surroundings Author: Simina Oprescu, 2019
The diversity of Tokyo’s sounds can make a string of connection about the Japanese noise culture. They seem influenced by it every day, by this constant knitting of different textures and tonic profiles. Mostly it is a mechanical profile, almost nothing organic but the voice of the whole humans gathered in one. Everything is wrapped in and comes through this artificial-synthetic medium, like poor speakers from the street or old radio. It becomes a walk of discovery of sounds and small areas of quietness, and the impact of the noise afterwards, for a short while, and basically a subtle flux, a drone.
Simina Oprescu is composing since 2012, interested in the possibilities of sound’s integration in the visual mediums and the capacity of sound to change radically the understanding of the image: „In the Beginning was the Sound”. Simina studied photography and video art at the Arts University in Bucharest and one year in the electroacoustic composition department at the Royal Conservatory of Mons, Belgium. www.siminaoprescu.com
Recorded, edited and mixed by Simina Oprescu for SEMI SILENT.
Letea Harp. From the Wind Notes Author: Michal Kindernay, 2019
The sound image of the rural surroundings of Letea. Very still and hot days of late June were followed by a sudden strong wind and the sound of the landscape took form of protracted noisy tunes, where the sound of the whole fauna and village life was drown out. Listen closely the wind whistles in the trees and hidden overtones of wind in the strings between the fences.
Sound composition created during the SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES organized by Asociația Jumătatea plină and SEMI SILENT in Letea Village, Tulcea County, Romania in June-July 2019.
Michal Kindernay is an intermedia and sound artist, curator, performer and lecturer. His audio-visual installations interconnect art, technology and science. He reflects ecological issues through various technological approaches in relation to nature environment. His works include video performances, interactive installations or experimental documentary projects or sound compositions. He is one of the founders or yo-yo nonprofit culture organization, RurArtMap project and he was part of Školská 28 gallery collective in Prague. As organizer or artist he was involved in many international projects. He works and lives in Prague. www.yo-yo-yo.org/mk.html
Recording, editing and mixing by Michal Kindernay for SEMI SILENT.
The House of Horses. From “Inverted Houses” Author: Michal Kindernay, 2019
In little poor but picturesque village between canals, the ancient forest and the sea – Letea, the animals are the main and most common inhabitants. Because of constant depopulation, disappearing of traditional living, jobs and consequences of climate change, the village is changing dramatically, many buildings lost their carers and are neglected, abandoned. Now, the animals take over the people's dwellings. Listen to the sound image of a house inhabited by horses.
This composition is part of the series “Inverted Houses” – field recordings from many abandoned sheds, cottages and buildings in Letea.
Sound composition created during the SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES organized by Asociația Jumătatea plină and SEMI SILENT in Letea Village, Tulcea County, Romania in June-July 2019.
Michal Kindernay is an intermedia and sound artist, curator, performer and lecturer. His audio-visual installations interconnect art, technology and science. He reflects ecological issues through various technological approaches in relation to nature environment. His works include video performances, interactive installations or experimental documentary projects or sound compositions. He is one of the founders or yo-yo nonprofit culture organization, RurArtMap project and he was part of Školská 28 gallery collective in Prague. As organizer or artist he was involved in many international projects. He works and lives in Prague. www.yo-yo-yo.org/mk.html
Recording, editing and mixing by Michal Kindernay for SEMI SILENT.
Letea Soundscapes. Ambient trip through Danube Delta Author: Toni Dimitrov, 2019
An ambient/soundscape piece containing field recordings from the whole trip to the Danube Delta and a nice subtle ambient melody. From the rain on the ferry on Danube, the traffic in Tulcea, the birds at Letea mornings, the canals in Sulina, to the forest, the wild horses, frogs, mosquitoes and the rich quietness of the delta. It is a meditative soundscape that compresses whole two-week experience into five minutes.
Sound piece created during the SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES organized by Asociația Jumătatea plină and SEMI SILENT to Letea Village, Tulcea County, Romania in June-July 2019.
Toni Dimitrov is sound artist, field recordist and radio activist based in Skopje, Macedonia. Working in the field of sound have been curving his way into the new experimental music scene with his solo engagement, but also with lots of collaborative releases with various projects and under various names such as post global trio, post global duo, Sound_00/Lefterna (with Boban Ristevski), Hunter/Gatherer (with Ingman Wannerberg), Private Mountain (with Dimitar Dodovski), also many collaborations with artists like DR, Dmitri Zherbin, Jared Sagar, Rhucle, releasing countless releases on many labels around the world like Sonospace, Lagersaette, Winter light, Attenuation circuit, AOsmosis, Auriculab, Green Field... Exploring the dynamics of minimum vs. maximum, in terms and meanings of noise vs. drone, he is searching his own way of merging electronic sound and pure field recordings in certain styles of music, such as ambient and long-form drone explorations. His sound art and radio art productions have been broadcasted at various radios around the world and presented live or as sound installations. His radio programs on radio Kanal 103 are dedicated to contemporary electronic music and political discourse. The program 'post global: conceptual program for new music’ broadcasts for 18 years, is dedicated to contemporary electronic music, soundscape and field recordings. He is participating in RADIA network and AMARC international network. He curates the label post global recordings and élan vital recordings releasing ambient soundscape sound and organizing sound/art events. He curates and organizes Soundscape workshops. Aside from many other activities during the years, his recent professional engagements are on projects related to political analysis of media in the Institute of Communications and the Agency for Audio and Audio-Visual Services.
Recording, editing and mixing by Toni Dimitrov for SEMI SILENT
Lush Dusk. Field Resilience Author: George Vlad, 2019
Lush Dusk is an exploration of equanimity in the face of setbacks, disappointment and adversity. Negative emotions are detrimental to creativity for me, but in this situation I managed to channel these and ended up using them as fuel for my listening and composition. The lush setting and feral life of Letea village made my job easier by offering an escape from conflict.
Sound piece created during the SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES organized by Asociația Jumătatea plină and SEMI SILENT to Letea Village, Tulcea County, Romania in June-July 2019.
George Vlad: I’ve been working with sound in one form or another since the late 90s. Music composition, sound design, audio programming and field recording are integral parts to my day to day work. On top of my work in sound, I support and collaborate with a number of conservation initiatives in Africa and South America. My field recording expeditions take me to remote places where humans haven’t yet wreaked havoc. I’ve been privileged enough to record in the Congo and Amazon rain forests, Ethiopian Highlands and Erta Ale volcano, South African savanna and Eastern Senegal forests and many others. In the field I like to focus on intact ecosystems, disappearing languages and cultures, endangered wildlife, natural silence or non-obvious sounds. My sound recording work is released through Mindful Audio and Wild Aesthesia.
Recording, editing and mixing by George Vlad for SEMI SILENT
Safe Place. The Time of Wind and Waters Author: beepblip, 2019
"Terrans tend to feel they've got to get ahead, make progress. The people of Winter, who always live in the Year One, feel that progress is less important than presence." — Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness They say time stretches out in a place where the pace of technological progress has not caught up with the people's ambitions. For a newcomer, the village of Letea, on the brink of the ancient Letea Forest connected to the vast wetland of Danube Delta, may be the place for quiet contemplation, the time to reconnect with the wild and find one's inner peace. It is peculiar how this imaginary safe unspoiled place full of wildlife is contrasted with the harsh infertile land, cruel and violent for human and non-human animals alike. The voyage to these lands was much deeper than expected. The piece is a psycho-geographical memory of the safe place of wind and waters.
Sound piece created during the SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES organized by Asociația Jumătatea plină and SEMI SILENT to Letea Village, Tulcea County, Romania in June-July 2019.
beepblip [Ida Hiršenfelder] makes immersive bleepy psycho-geographical soundscapes by use of analogue electronics, DIY and modular synths, field recordings and computer manipulations. She is interested in bioacoustics, experimental and microtonal music. She was a member of Theremidi Orchestra (2011–2017) DIY sound collective, performing at over 30 international venues for media art such as Piksel (Bergen), LiWoLi (Linz), Spektrum (Berlin), Radiona (Zagreb), Eyebeam (New York), Zagorje Noise Fest International (Trbovlje), Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (Ljubljana), Artos (Nicosia), KSEVT (Vitanje), Kino Šiška (Ljubljana). She collaborates with media artist Robertina Šebjanič and sound artist Aleš Hieng – Zergon on a series of chemical sound installations (Time Displacement / Chemobrionic Garden; Sound Disposition / Crystal Garden). She is a member of radioCona bioacoustics collective (Steklenik Gallery for Sound, Bioacustics and Art). Her solo album Noise for Strings, Vol. 1 (2019) was published by Kamizdat label. www.beepblip.org
Recording, editing and mixing by beepblip for SEMI SILENT
Nobody Asked. Stories from Letea Village, Danube Delta (Romanian) Author: Ana Teodora Popa, 2019
Isolation people experience in a village this small is deafening, if you dare to listen. Talking about feelings is considered a sign of weakness, and mental health is the last concern when survival is the main priority in a small, poor village, during drought season. Daria and her neighbor are widows. This means horses will most likely occupy their houses after they pass away. This is the natural course in Letea. This is the silent pain you hear if you stop and listen.
Sound piece created during the SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES organized by Asociația Jumătatea plină and SEMI SILENT to Letea Village, Tulcea County, Romania in June-July 2019.
Ana Teodora Popa is a sound engineer and composer, passionate about theater, radio and innovation. She lives in Iași, Romania.
Recording, editing and mixing by Ana Teodora Popa for SEMI SILENT
Transcript translated in English:
Daria: Take it, ma'am, buy something from me so I can feed the kids. See how we ended up in our own country? Not good. Who gets to decide our faith?
Voices.
Daria: I'm an old lady and I've got two dogs. My husband lies in the ground but I still roam the Earth.
Insects.
Daria: I am the way I am. A widow on Earth, but I still want to talk to anyone because I've got no one... I lay between four walls...
Crickets.
Daria: I had three children, one sits in the ground, God rest her soul. I don't know what she had. She had the "children's disease". I don't know the name for it. Four and a half months old. I was outside, washing. When I came in from washing di... the... clothes, she had... she was laying like this, and her eyes were... like this... under... here... up. I wasn't supposed to bother her, because she had the "children's disease". So I panicked, since it never happened to me before, grabbed her and ran outside, yelling, found this woman, my neighbor... A woman: You were supposed to throw a black cloth over her. Daria: Well, I didn't know... "Leave the child here, go find Todorania (she was our neighbor, there was Marenca too, and others) to cast a spell over her. I ran, left the baby there. I was still young, I didn't know any better. Well, what else can I say? She didn't live. Two-three days, then she died. I took her to Tulcea. And the doctor told me, Ms. Munteanu: "Ms. Daria, I see you suffer for every child here, but listen, tomorrow morning I'm letting you go home, because your daughter won't make it." I instantly fell to the ground.
Birds. Voices. Engine.
Daria: It's my yard, and I'm helping anyone, but when it comes to me, there's no mercy. A woman: We're old now, nobody sees us. Daria: They take everything, it's never enough, and... Nobody wants a Mother. They all want billions now. Nobody sees the Mother, because I'm not a Mother anymore... I'm... A woman: She drinks all night, she screams... she yells all day, God help us. There's no woman like her in the whole village.
Daria sings.
Daria: You have no idea how many mosquito bites I had to endure. My dad used to beat me across the hands and head because he was saying "right" and I was making left. Because I was little... ten years old, and couldn't hold the damn paddle. Paddle, you know what that is? That big oar? It was three times my size and I was supposed to paddle with it. And Father would beat me as hard as he could. Upon arriving at Sulina I was all swollen. Head, hands, everywhere, because I didn't know how to hold the paddle, yes. But at the age of ten, to make fun of me like that... Well, he was mean, my dad. He taught me well. A woman: Those were the times. Daria: Yes.
Daria: But what I say it's the truth. The truth, дочка. Well, I don't want to cry or sing anymore.
A woman: It's nobody's fault. Who? No. But whose fault could it be? Nobody has done anything to deserve this, this is coming from God. This is what He gave us,
The piece deals with an embodied dematerialization of a grid, a structure. Through a hypnotic process the listener is guided to embody the struggles of Ailanthus Altissima, The Tree of Heaven entangled in the fences of Bucharest and to exit this limitation mentally.
One of my favorite objectives in my short trip to Paris was to record the sound of TGVs. I was always fascinated by the idea of being a train-spotter and in my recording-visit to the Gare de l’Est, I had the chance to catch three TGVs and two “regular” trains that sounded and looked like TGVs… I recorded some of the train station’s ambiance, but mostly the trains. Have a good listening at precisely 12.55 pm!
The poetry of V. Leac seems suspended somewhere in between humor, absurdity, and a light and tender perplexity in the face of those minuscule exceptional instances in one’s life. Every next step is a trustworthy transgression toward an uncertain, promising and yet deluded future. In the shape of a musical/sonic performance, we take upon ourselves to read his poetry, with warm loudness and other means tangible while standing on our toes: a performance in the guise of a duo of voices for a spoken-choir simulacrum, using drawing as percussion, some recordings from inside a piano, and a double bass.
This sonic poem – in the absence of words – could be a participatory review for the abundance of dating apps rooted relationships with short expiration date. It contains reactions to matches on such apps, reflections to the essay The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han, memory exhumations and sharp intimacy technicalities. The voice-voices disclose fragility as virtue and pain as spectacle as much as criticism and joy and pleasure as heart fitness.
A personal and slightly emotional reading of the past, present and a possible future of the National Center of Dance in Bucharest.
Apophenia. A surreal walk in a haunted? forest (binaural) Author: dyslex, 2018
The material you are about to hear is an immersive acoustic experience containing footage from and around HOIA BACIU forest. It focuses on the POIANA ROTUNDĂ area, labelled as the nexus for series of events, often depicted as peculiar. Six audio segments carefully selected: details of all sorts; tactile illusions; collages; arrangements or unprocessed sound, mixed together. Some brutal, some seamless, blending the raw with the subjective.
We track. We follow movement, note the progress or existence of something, we signal through sonar and bio sonar, radio and Morse, radar and scanners, heart monitors and surveillance. In so doing, we listen but also compose an acoustic space of our trailing, create sonic debris of our pursuit, a spontaneous audible record.
During a thunderstorm that never happened, 5 people meet by fireside to discuss how power structures play a part in how we interpret and hear different voices. Together they converse and examine how we listen to each other's voices, how we experience our own voices and how we think our voices might relate to our personalities and identities. In reality, the 5 of them actually met individually with the artist in the sticky heat of Toronto's humid summer days, surrounded by cicadas singing in the trees. Five separate conversations and four and a half hours of recordings were edited together into one conversation – because isn't it so much nicer to imagine them all sitting around a fire together as the rain gently fades away?
A non-verbal sound design piece that translates the struggle of living a normal life, while dealing with the memory of a past trauma and its triggers.
I visited gate 3 of the Constanța shipyard on a Friday afternoon, taking on as „stalker” the local poet Yigru Zeltil, hence the abundance of steps on the recording. I did not catch a lot of interesting sounds with my DR-05 Tascam equipped with wind protection, except for a freight train that most likely carried cocaine, several types of trucks loading and unloading, plus a special crane sorting and otherwise handling scrap metal. When I approached the crane in order to better record the metal sound on metal, Kraftwerk style, there came some sort of guard who explained to me, in English, that „this is private property”, „please delete”... even though I tried to tell him I do not do industrial espionage. Following, come the other gates, even if access is difficult and you are asked for ID at the entrance. I see this trip soundtrack as a form of escape into industrial sounds, which you hear a lot of in my musical project, Nava Spațială. Over and out.
Twin Sounds. One sound can hide another Author: Sara Lana, 2018
Cars pass at high speed through a village and overlap with lives lived alongside the roads of Romania. Like waves, the noise of engines invades the sound space and transports us from one house to another. At each passage, a previously imperceptible sound is revealed. This sound experience prompts a listening proposition: One sound can hide another; but could a sound contain, in itself, another sound? Can completely different objects and actions generate identical sounds? The search for twin sounds and the discovery of spontaneous "morphings" in the recordings made during my road trips are the threads of this sound creation.
Sound piece created during the SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES organized by Asociația Jumătatea plină and SEMI SILENT to Conacul Otetelișanu, Vâlcea County, Romania in July 2018.
Sara Lana, sound artist from Brazil, had her academic career traced in mathematics, coding and engineering schools. Since 2007 she develops projects permeated by sound, art and technology. Her work is oriented to the research and development of gadgets for technological empowerment, experimenting with different approaches to digital interfaces and analog devices. She lives in Sao Paulo and participated, as a resident artist, in several programs, among them Tsonami sound art festival residency. „Matilha”, one of her recent works, is a multi-channel radio using walkies-talkies to transmit, in real time, sounds captured by street dogs. Her binaural piece „Mutt Dogs” created together with Félix Blume and produced by Arte Radio was nominated to Phonurgia Nova Award in 2018. www.touca.ninja
Recording, editing and mixing by Sara Lana for SEMI SILENT
Early morning walk with Maria in Benești village, Vâlcea county. An exercise in finding the right morning ambience. A reflection on the recording process. The dogs are our friends.
Basement Overture. A ghost story Author: Anamaria Pravicencu, 2018
The stories that were told, the stories that were made, the ghosts that we heard and those that we imagined. A composition using invited and created sounds, a play with the acoustics of a generous basement, mixing prerecorded, diffused and rerecorded sounds in a dynamic dialog between faraway nature sounds, a voice imitating natural sounds and also being a voice, and the evidence of the architectural properties of the building through its acoustics and “mobile parts".
Sound piece created during the SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES organized by Asociația Jumătatea plină and SEMI SILENT to Conacul Otetelișanu, Vâlcea County, Romania in July 2018.
Anamaria Pravicencu studied drawing and sculpture, with an interest for sound installation. Since 2006 she’s in charge with the artistic direction of Jumătatea plină, promoting author comics, and sonic and musical experiment (Sâmbăta sonoră) through constant and distinct programs. She is the curator of the SEMI SILENT portfolio and she keeps producing sound work.
Recording, editing, and mixing by Anamaria Pravicencu for SEMI SILENT
Hundreds of poultry, ducks of all ages, from hatchlings right out of their egg to noisy males, several varieties of geese, some very large with red cheeks like a cock’s comb, turkeys, chickens and hens, delicate decorative cocks like knick-knacks, peacocks in full bloom, some varieties of pigeons with hideous heads and a discussion about ostriches. A binaural immersion that smells of bird droppings.
In the small village of Benești, a few hours' drive West of Bucharest, locals use horse-drawn carts to go to the fields. They return with freshly cut hay or sand from the riverbed. Coachmen talk to their horses in order to indicate which directions to follow and the appropriate speed. “Dii” to move forward, “Hai” to go faster, “O” to stop. I've invited myself with the microphones on board for a ride. Communication runs through sounds and gestures, which in my lack of understanding Romanian language turn horse talk into universal language. Each in their own manner, man and animal, seem to understand each other. Voice speaks beyond words, inviting us to listen to timbre, rhythms and melodies that intertwine as they are spoken.
Sound piece created by tweaking recordings containing the Romanian countryside’ sounds around the Conacul Otetelișanu, a skylark, some other birds, a pheasant, dogs, geese, sounds of my steps, the wind in the trees by the lake, the bell next to the church and me whistling a song written by Istvan Sky. There’s a glitch in/for every idyll.
7am. Driving Mara to the bus stop in Bălcești. She starts a binaural recording. I continue and develop the exercise. The piece follows our movements and reactions to the surroundings, the story of a dream I had, the immediate encounters.
An art acustica experiment with two characters dialoguing on themes like revolution, consumerism, making the world a better place, progressive politics, subversive strategies, the future of mankind.
The piano is an anti-nomadic instrument. It is often sitting in the same room for decades surviving several generations of a family, silently (or not) witnessing their histories. In interaction with the room-climate the piano is slowly changing over the decades. It is a kind of time-travel-instrument shaped by time and space. Sound artists Eva Poepplein and Janko Hanushevsky (aka Merzouga) played and recorded three aged pianos inside their rooms. They are not pianists and used the pianos as sound-generators. In interviews they unearthed as much of the pianos’ histories and made field-recordings of the rooms and the immediate space around them (the garden, the street). The stories they collected inspired the composition’s three movements, one dedicated to each of the pianos.
Maria Balabaş propune un show conceput ca o emisiune de radio live, cu publicul alături. Tema aleasă este muzica pentru ansambluri vocale compusă şi interpretată în România. Este un teritoriu destul de ascuns, accesul fiind oprit de lipsa înregistrărilor şi a informaţiilor prea numeroase vizavi de activitatea compozitorilor, dar şi de o anumită percepţie nefavorabilă care include prezumţia de festivism sau un naţionalism prea explicit. Maria Balabaş face o selecţie personală şi propune spre ascultare piese emoţionale, care uimesc prin modernitatea limbajului sau a tematicii sau, care, dezvăluie pur şi simplu frumuseţea şi necesitatea cântului împreună. Choirs and other voices a fost realizat în cadrul proiectului HER VOICE și prezentat publicului pe 20 octombrie 2017 la Teatrul Apollo 111.
Azi, 25 ianuarie 2018, a încetat din viață istoricul și filosoful Neagu Djuvara. Avea 101 ani. Fotograful Cornel Brad, într-o ședință foto din toamna anului trecut, l-a făcut să cânte.
Ulysses chose to „listen” to the sirens, therefore creating the possibility of being simultaneously active and attentive. A monstrous, overwhelming nature promised him the voices of all women past and those to come, the voices of mothers and daughters, voices of killers, women enemies hiding in the darkness of the unknown. The song of the sirens over the sea was meant to accompany Ulysses towards his death, and he wanted to hear it all. Voice understood as a medium for profound communication, as an expressive instrument, and as possibility for common resonance.
SONG OF THE SIRENS is part of the project HER VOICE, a project exploring women’s voice through sound, sound art, performance and artist status inquiries. HER VOICE is initiated by Anamaria Pravicencu (Jumătatea plină, Sâmbăta sonoră, SEMI SILENT) has received the support of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund.
LIVE at Euroradio Ars Acustica on the 17th of January 2018, powered by the European Broadcasting Union and Radio România Cultural.
Între înregistrările audio făcute pe parcursul timpului, aceasta are o semnificaţie anume. Poartă cu sine ultimul drum al unui om pe care l-am respectat. Când am început să înregistrez, a fost mai mult sub un impuls emoţional. Acum, înregistrarea aceasta o să-mi amintească mereu de tristeţea pe care am simţit-o conducând cortegiul regal.
Doina Patega, 96 ani, străiește într-un sătuc la vest de Târgu Jiu. Această piesă sau salată de cuvinte, cum îmi place să-i spun, traduce percepția mea de străin a unei femei care m-a emoționat profund. Am descoperit în vocea ei o frumoasă expresie a energiei sale : uneori cântată, tristă, râzând, cu un timbru marcat de timp, dar care lasă uneori să se întrevadă extraordinara tinerețe a acestei domnișoare. * Doina Patega, 96, lives in a small village west of Targu-Jiu. This mix, or "salad of words" as I like to call it, translates my perception as a stranger of a woman who moved me deeply. I found in her voice a beautiful expression of her energy: sometimes singing, sad, laughing, with a vocal timbre marked by time, but which allows at times the perception of the astonishing youth that resides in this young lady.
Doamna Sina are 63 de ani, n-a locuit niciodată la oraș, a învățat 8 clase, în schimb a avut câteva case, vaci nenumărate, un magazin, un tractor și trei copii – dintre care unul de care a trebuit să aibă grijă în mod special.
Am stat de vorbă cu Svetlana Cârstean într-o cafenea și ne-am luptat cu vocile din jur. Pentru că are o voce la fel de delicată precum statura, dar mult mai puternică în scris. După cum i s-a și spus la lansarea primului volum de poezii, "Floarea de Menghină" (editura Cartea Românească, 2008). De la jurnalism, la scriitură de jurnal, la poezii, la moderarea "Intersecțiilor" de miercuri, Svetlana Cârstean a schimbat numeroase voci și continuă să le schimbe.
Poetă, doctorandă, fană trap, artist vizual. Cosmina Moroșan. / Poet, PhD candidate, trap fan, visual artist. Cosmina Moroşan.
Angela Marinescu are 76 de ani și încă scrie. Vrea să-și reia numele inițial de familie – Marcovici și e la zi cu poezia nouă. ”Să știi că eu nu știu să vorbesc, nu sunt deloc fermecătoare”.
Definiri ale feminității și ale rolului feminin înăuntrul și în afara familiei/ Defining femininity and the female role within and outside the family
An employee from the castle said: „Hurry up, they are coming! Gather all your belongings and run!” By the time they exit the door, they were caught on the stairs by the communists. It was a scam. They took all their suitcases with valuable things and given a part of their amusement two bags, 1 kg of rotten tomatoes and 1 kg of rotten potatoes. Countesse Mocioni and her son, Bubi. They were dragged and forced to work in Sântuhalm, Hunedoara Department, Romania. It was February 1949. Bubi was beaten drastically only in his head, and went to a coma. He learnt to speak again one year later, at the age of 29.
Composition for piano (Luca), violins (a choir), flute (a piano), double bass (electrical wires), trumpet (some tape) and a solitary violin.
Absența e o piesă sonoră autobiografică, o reflecție asupra trecutului înregistrat, despre relația mea cu părinții mei, în absența temporară a unuia dintre ei. / Absence is an autobiographical sound piece, a reflection on the recorded past and my relationship with my parents, while one of them is away from home.
Five women artists living in Brussels; all raised in several languages; each one from a different cultural background. They tell, in their mother tongue, a vital moment, an intense sensorial experience, that left a physical imprint. One of them is not telling the truth though. How to transmit those experiences only through language when their words are translated, albeit ‘properly’ by another woman?
It was a winter day in Madrid. I took the express train “Puerta del Sol” to Brussels. At that time, Hendeva was the last station for our trains. The Spanish tracks and the French tracks were not the same width. A little defensive measure taken by Franco’s government. We got out of the train, suitcase in one hand, the other gripping our passport. In the middle of the night we crossed this space, open to the sky, fenced in with barbed wire, ‘tierra de nadie’ (“no man’s land”). On the other side, was waiting for me at least 26 years of another life and I thought that I could already make it out. That day, I was only 26. But before that day, there had been other days, thousands of days, that I can still hear…
She lives with her violent man in a gas station situated in a provincial road. It is a summer day. As usual she cooks and cleans and listen to her husband small talk and to the cars passing by. In the mean time, her thoughts take flight out of that painful routine, a way of surviving. By the time a storm breaks, she does not feel anymore the difference between reality and fantasy, till her husband punch to the face brings her back to normal.
În ianuarie 2017, Patrick Tubin McGinley, creatorul platformei Framewok Radio, a fost invitatul Radiodifuziunea Română și Maria Balabaș pentru contribuția românească la Art’s Birthday (17 ianuarie), program organizat de European Brodcasting Union. SEMI / SILENT l-a invitat să susțină un atelier de creație sonoră narativă non-verbală pentru un grup de 12 artiști sonori, muzicieni, performeri, ingineri de sunet, realizatori de film și jurnaliști. Rezultatul atelierului a fost montat în formatul Framework Radio și poate fi ascultat pe ambele platforme.
00:00 Mara Mărăcinescu, Maria Balabaș / Framework Radio intro 03:39 Delia Puștea, Dorin Moldoveanu, Mara Mărăcinescu / memory melody malady 12:27 Octav Avramescu / door alarm train winter 15:21 Carmen Coțofană / indoor slow motion 20:14 Octavian Coman / patience 22:28 Maria Balabaș, Cristian Vieriu / active remembrance 30:03 Anamaria Pravicencu / domestic sounds/familiar gestures 37:40 Andrei Tănăsescu / canary dream 39:15 Dan Michiu Dinescu / public transport clutter and sound bugs 46:55 Patrick Tubin McGinley / Art's Birthday, recorded at National Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation
De vorbă cu Kázmér Kovács, arhitect, autorul cărții „Peisaje cu grădină și casă”, Simetria, 2012
Românului i-a plăcut dintotdeuna să stea pe iarbă, să mănânce, să bea apă, să pescuiască și să petreacă. De vorbă cu prof. dr. Dolores Toma, autoarea cărții „Despre grădini și modurile lor de folosire”, Polirom, 2001
Odată ajunși "copiii" în vacanță, unele lucruri încep să nu mai fie la locul lor. Dar situația trebuie redresată, căci ce pentru ceilalți nu e foarte important, pentru bunica e un ritual.
În timpul unei excursii în Bucovina am vizitat Salina Cacica, iar într-una dintre sălile de sare, am descoperit acest leagăn și sunetul său care cuprindea tot spațiul.
Vorbele-s nemuritoare cu un reportofon în mâna. Visele, la fel. Înregistrez poveşti născocite ad-hoc seara, înainte de culcare, pentru fetiţa mea. Urmăresc cântăreţi stradali şi imami inimoşi, dansatoare nocturne şi cerşetori metalici. Uneori ajung la politicieni cu agendă, alteori doar la shaormisti cudetoate. Îs chestii care ştiu că pleacă asap, altele de care ştiu că nu m-aş despărţi never. Cu reportofonul mi-am păstrat ultima discuţie cu un unchi drag, care mi-a înflorit viaţa cu matematica sufletului său. Şi am sunete uitate, parcă neauzite încă, pitite undeva, pe o bandă mică de casetofon, cu bunica mea, cea de demult, cea nemaivăzută.
Într-o sâmbătă am stat la povești cu bunica, care împlinește în curând 95 de ani. Spre finalul întânirii, mi-a povestit cum a ratat potul cel mare pentru că nu a cumpărat un loz în plic în ziua aceea.
În tinda casei, într-un sat din Oltenia din care tinerii au plecat de mult, Lina îi povestește cu nostalgie și căldură nepoatei ei de care o despart 55 de ani, despre vremurile de altă dată: petrecerile din sat (nedei), obiecte prețioase și rare, intimitatea feminină. Pudoarea și dulceața glasului i-au rămas nealterate, chiar dacă toate sunt diferite acum.
*
Horia Baldea e un entuziast al sunetului în toate formele lui – sound recording, sound design, sound engineering, music production, dj-ing – cam orice circulă pe calea undelor cu destinația urechi ii poate trece prin mâini, microfoane, softuri și synthuri.
Printr-o întorsătură ironică, în peisajul sonor al străzilor Bucureștiului, vânzătorul ambulant a fost înlocuit de cei care nu mai vând nimic, ci colectează fier vechi, pe care îl vând apoi altora ca să îl ducă la topit. Chemarea pe care și-au perfecționat-o iaurgii sau geamgii de odinioară este însă la fel de stilizată și acum, iar vocile care anunță această ocupație folosesc strada ca pe o scenă, pe care intră efemer pentru un maxim de impact dramatic. Libretul este simplu, iar această piesă le este dedicată. Ea se prezintă fără o formă finală; există doar un punct fix, locul din care e facută înregistrarea.