SEMI SILENT

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.

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.

The piece features interviews with diving instructors at the Plymouth Diving Centre, Archaeologist and Local Historian, John Brown, Inspector Gordon Peters of the Ministry of Defence River Police and dream recollections of staff and patients at Forth Valley Royal Hospital, Larbert.

Fragment of an audiowalk in The Hague, which explores the connection between sound and commemoration. Here, 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.

 

*

 

Originally from Kyiv, Ukraine, Anna Khvyl is a sound artist, composer, and researcher. She investigates the interactions between sound and commemoration, contemplating how music provides space for both social bonding and individual self-exploration. Khvyl graduated from the Royal Conservatory of The Hague at the Institute of Sonology, where she currently continues her work as a research associate. Her work includes releases, sound installations, audio-visual compositions, multichannel live performances, audiowalks, radio shows, film scoring, sonic identity.

annakhvyl.com

 

Composing, recording, editing, and mixing by Anna Khvyl for SEMI SILENT

Mastering by Mihai Balabaș

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.