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vers pervers by BORȘ, May 2025 / Where did the cows come from? / This track/thing/piece opens a conversation with the 1946 famine in Moldova—a catastrophe often remembered in fragmented, contradictory ways. Some recall it as a famine caused by drought, others as a deliberate act of ethnic cleansing by the ussr. The narrative shifts depending on who you ask, but what remains is the silencing, distortion, absurdity of memory and the chaotic ways it performs. / The track incorporates audio samples from a discussion in Chișinău about the archival work of Larisa Turea, who gathered testimonies of those who lived through the famine. Her voice, central to this piece, carries the weight of remembrance. Yet, even within memory, the cracks of disinformation are visible. The story told here is of a child who survived because her grandfather was a kolkhoz guard, secretly taking milk from the cows at night. But the child, now grown, insists that the cows were ‘imported’ by the USSR—when, in reality, they had been stolen from her very neighbors. / "De unde s-au luat vacile?" (ro. Where did the cows come from?) she is asked. "Наверное из-за границы" (ru. Probably from abroad.) / This also speaks to the dangerous nostalgia surrounding the USSR, the myth that "a fost mai bine" (ro. it used to be better – referring to the USSR). Against this, I juxtapose samples from a 1962 Moldova-Film documentary, which paints Moldova (the soviet republic then) as a land of abundance, a place where "viile absorb cu lăcomie căldura soarelui" (ro. the vineyards greedily absorb the sun’s warmth) and people have copious access to food. The absurdity of this imagery—glorifying productivity and prosperity while erasing the famine—is a reminder of how history has been rewritten, how voices have been muted, how suffering has been reframed as progress shortly after this collective trauma. / This piece is not just about the past but about the present, about resisting the false and perverse memory still propagated through Russian disinformation today. The act of remembering, of unearthing silenced stories, is an act of healing. / 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). / Concept, composition and production by Mădălina Ciocanu, mixing and mastering by Alexe Pupăzan.
The Frogs of Vesuvius
Friday, December 5, 2025 • Duration 09:48
THE FROGS OF VESUVIUS… as if the earth itself sang. Author: Sillyconductor, 2025. Last year, with the generous support of SEMI SILENT, Liminaria, and Tramandars, I spent nearly two weeks in residence exploring the landscapes surrounding Mount Vesuvius. I had been fascinated by volcanoes ever since I first visited Stromboli - Terra di Dio - a divine, destructive force, dominating the other Aeolian Islands yet seemingly still on the Wednesday stage of its creation. During my stay near Naples, I went in search of a hidden underground lake that my friendly guide Tommaso** had mentioned. I had to see it and record it with the hydrophones I always had with me. Along the way, I was “lucky” enough to record what appeared to be a full eruption of Vesuvius – an experience I survived unharmed and am now able to narrate with my very own voice*. //
*Not a single moment of this 8-minute plus montage was captured by any sort of microphone but generated artificially through a series of failed AI prompts. Unusual for someone drawn to field recording, I know – but every sound here is synthetic and hand picked out of other hundreds on account of its approximate aesthetics. Each sound is a 20 second anomaly, a side-effect of a machine that is continuously learning yet still clumsy with irony, facts, and physicality.
That’s what intrigued me – the dualistic nature of these sounds. Lava mimics water, birds resemble frogs, and human voices – though emotive – speak convincing gibberish. The music is evocative, but hollow. Much like the underground volcanic lake itself, the entire piece feels like a myth assembled from unstable materials: church hymns, narrator voices, elemental noise - all imperfect imitations conjured from digital ether.
I’m not interested in AI that faithfully reproduces the sound of chopping wood. I want to hear how it fails - and in failing, invents something strange and exciting. This Vesuvian eruption worthy of a Giulio Verne tale is one such result. //
**Many thanks to Liminaria and Tramandars for their help and hospitality, for real. //
The piece is created during a residency in San Martino Valle Caudina, Italy, hosted by Associazione Culturale Interzona & 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
Murmuration of Crumbles
Tuesday, December 2, 2025 • Duration 08:35
Murmuration of Crumbles. I dissolved it, I let it rot (Romanian) by Mădălina Ciocanu (MD), November 2025. //
am dizolvat, am lăsat să putrezească. look, it'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) forget
to 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.
Sound:run:brea(d)th
Thursday, November 27, 2025 • Duration 30:01
SOUND:RUN:BREA(D)TH by Pheobe riley Law, 2025. Sound:run:brea(d)th had its origins in the sound-runs I embarked on each morning, speed-dating with each locale, listening to their rhythms alongside that of my own breath before returning to them to listen at a slower pace. I filmed also, on an old, low resolution camcorder, moving through open and indoor spaces, connecting with people and occasionally discovering an electronic pulse or a cute sounding object that I knew I wanted to draw attention to.
I think of this piece as a theatre; a space with multiple shifting scenes;
uncovered things covered;
field recordings; public squares / architectural spaces / the inner sounds of locally grown fruit / soil in the apartment garden / plant roots and branches / a milk vending machine along the Bega river / bird deterrent devices.
The sections / scenes become muffled, abstracted yet stay open; unearthed organic matter and micro-worlds, architectural resonance and the ultrasonic attractive and border. Each fragment shaped by or attempting to shape its environment and context. Spending some months with the recordings, and composing musical elements from them, I find links between old and new technologies, a personal and social sense of time, and the use of sound covered and uncovered. //
A piece composed with recordings made during SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES organized by SEMI SILENT and hosted by Simultan Festival in Timișoara, October 2024. //
Pheobe riley Law (1997) is an installation artist with a focus in sound, performance, photography, and sculptural activation. Using a symbiotic approach, she builds dialogues between different bodies, borders and devices, activating, flexible new relationships.
Prevailing interests include sonic mapping, exploring the life of non-human actors / inanimate objects & thinking about aspects of human activity through the lens of division and borders. She sometimes playfully reverses the roles of humans & 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.
Roar
Tuesday, November 18, 2025 • Duration 22:27
ROAR by Mathias Guilbaud, 2025 / A trance beneath the surface. /
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
Wednesday, November 12, 2025 • Duration 26:12
Gardens of Christiane. The Palestine From Before. A sound piece by Anamaria Pravicencu and Manja Ristić, 2025.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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The present form, with the invaluable contribution of Manja Ristić, was premiered at Orizont Sonor festival, in the Botanical Garden of Bucharest, September 2025.
Hydrological Consequences
Thursday, November 7, 2024 • Duration 35:22
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.
KYIV – DEN HAAG – KYIV – DEN HAAG
Saturday, August 24, 2024 • Duration 12:18
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
Monday, April 29, 2024 • Duration
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 had undergone, Anna Kravets still questions the imperceptibility of war experience. Having realized how […]
ANALYTICAL SWIMMING
Thursday, May 11, 2023 • Duration 07:44
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.
