Show Notes
“I welcome every noise around me. No matter what it is: a duck, a fish, a deer farting. [...] You invite it all. And [...] this is [...] when you realize [that] every inch of this planet is occupied and we are sharing and coexisting with other species - [so] how can you ever be alone?”
In this edition of Earth.fm podcast Wind Is the Original Radio, curator Melissa Pons speaks to
Serge Bulat, a multidisciplinary artist whose work - which spans and hybridizes music, exhibitions, immersive games, radio, field recording, and psychological installations - explores the edges of performance, sound, perception, and identity.
Serge is from a Moldovan town divided from Ukraine by a river, with family hailing from both worlds. For this reason, borders are “a prominent subject in [his] work”, which seeks to question topics around unity, differences and similarities, and the utopian aspiration of finding “ways to live in a borderless world”.
Earlier this year, he released Phonomundi: Selected Recordings of Heritage Sites and Traditions 2017-2024, an album which draws upon years of recording, sharing, and contributing to projects, causes, and stories close to his heart. Phonomundi is also about engaging with “our absolutely disastrous path away from respecting our ears and respecting our culture and respecting our environment”.
Against a backdrop of woozy compositions by Serge, featuring nature soundscape recordings, he and Melissa discuss the trials of having a “noisy” mind, which feels like “war in your head” and means that “it’s hard to stop the thinking process” - but which can also lead recordists to “forget about [them]self and [...] start thinking about communities, people that are affected, and [how] that [can be] such an ego drop”.
Serge also talks about how ‘now’ is illusory, and his “weird relationship with time”: “I guess it might be some form of synesthesia, because I feel time; I feel its thickness and I feel its qualities.” The flow of time is “one of the driving forces behind [him] doing what [he’s] doing”, while field recording can provide “the nowest now that there can ever be”. He describes how, after experiencing difficulties with conventional mediation, he managed to develop his own system of meditation around listening, where “time stops [...] [and] you find that serenity and that absolute calmness and, for me, this is when I stop the noise”.
As he says, “We're all pieces of [...] a bigger body and we're [...] made of the same substance. [...] I always struggle to put anything like that in words [...]. It's easier for me to put it in music. [...] This is what music and sound does [...] and words don't.”
Together, Serge and Melissa also address topics including:
The relevance of creative work in the face of the climate catastrophe and alarming political developments across the world - including how music, as a precursor to language, can be “a shortcut [...] to somebody's mind, heart and soul”. While also acknowledging the necessity of “dig[ging] deeper [to] understand the issues [with which] we're living”
Wanting to make work of significance despite “sonic pollution, [...] over-tourism, over-consumerism, weird politics that make zero sense when it comes to preserving [...] or nurturing stuff that matters and makes us us” - and especially in light of the fact that everything we know is at risk of “disappearing just by [the] pressing [of] one button”
Learning to love silence. As Serge says, “We need to reset our hearing. [...] I feel like [silence] makes the ear function better”
How it is possible to “feel and hear” bees’ moods from the frequencies of their buzzing, and how bee therapy (‘apitherapy’) - known since the time of Ancient Egypt - can improve anxiety, depression, and even respiratory conditions. “What bl[ows] my mind [about them]”, says Serge, is their “self-sufficiency, community, [and the way that they can] solv[e] a crisis [by] relying on each other”
Serge
More from Wind Is the Original Radio
The Earth's orbit around the sound finds itself at the point where we, from our planet, measure the sun's relative location exactly above the Equator's, making its way South. This marks the autumnal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere and the vernal equinox and the beginning of spring in the Southern Hemisphere.
Solstice comes from the Latin solstitium - sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still): the moment when the sun appears to pause in its movement. A brief illusion of stillness. The longest day, the fullest expansion of light, and yet, from this very point, transformation has already begun. The brightest moment already carries the beginning of its own disappearance. Gathering recordings captured during different solstices, across distant places and years, this mix follows movements of appearance, disappearance, and return. Each recording holds a specific moment of listening, a fragment of a landscape that has already changed, a trace of something that cannot happen twice in the same way. Some recordings have been split and reintroduced at different moments, creating small cycles inside the composition. They disappear and resurface, carrying the memory of their previous occurrence while being transformed by their new surroundings. Like seasons, tides, or the movement of light, repetition becomes a way of sensing change rather than sameness. Different environments slowly orbit around each other: distant temporalities briefly aligning, moments of stillness revealing movement, and sounds returning as reminders that nothing ever truly stands still.
Welcome to the wind is the original radio podcast!
This hour long mix comprises of field recordings made on and around Spring Equinoxes of various years. It takes you down through the Northern Hemisphere – from my sitting room in East London to a cottage balcony in the tropical forests of Borneo. Listen for Slovenian jackals, Polish moor frogs, a Himalayan shepherd herding sheep, a hippopotamus getting ready for the night in Sierra Leone and choirs of birds singing across the globe.
We are delighted to share a special set by artist Asa 808, a 2-hour journey ideal to softly immersive oneself in the nature sounds, instruments and spoken word.