“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:

Listen to the whole interview for all this and much more (including the raw terror of Bob from Twin Peaks!).

Read more on the recent discoveries from the James Webb Telescope.

“Sound is life for me.”

The latest installment of the Earth.fm podcast, Wind Is the Original Radio, finds curator Melissa Pons in conversation with sound recordist and expedition leader George Vlad. You can listen to and read George’s work elsewhere on the site - and you may already have heard recordings of his in high-profile projects such as Dune: Part Two and Mufasa: The Lion King, as well as various documentaries, TV series, podcasts, and audiobooks.

The love of George’s life, as a recordist and collector of sounds, is to be among wildlife sounds, trying to understand them, and getting to share them. Though he confesses to being initially fastidious about avoiding anthropophony, he explains that he has become more understanding and flexible, given how reductive it is to imagine that nature is separate from humans (and vice versa): “We are moving forward, whether we like it or not; progress happens: people need to travel and use power tools.” However, though he has become more open to recording people, he draws a line at combustion engines.

He also shares about his journey from being a sound designer, when he originally saw field recordings as purely “tools or assets”, with no appreciation for the ecosystems they originated from. However, informed by his experience of growing up in the Romanian countryside - which taught him the value of loving nature and of living with it rather than trying to control it - he subsequently came to appreciate and take enjoyment from their beauty.

Additional topics addressed during the episode include:

Plus! The importance of making jam, playing video games, and reading Jules Verne.

George would be delighted if you’d like to engage with his work, so feel free to follow him on his YouTube channel.

“I prefer to live in the fantasy, not in the desperation of the crisis [...], you know?”

This latest episode of Earth.fm’s Wind Is the Original Radio podcast finds site curator Melissa Pons in conversation with Peruvian sound artist and ‘resilient designer’ Nahun Saldaña. In his work, Nahun explores the intersections between soundscapes and sound ecology, especially in relation to climate change and speculative sound future.

Together, they discuss:

We hope that you enjoy this episode, including Nahun’s irresistible exuberance and enthusiasm! You can follow him on Instagram, and check out the work - writing, photography, video, sound art, and ambient music - on his (Spanish-language) website.

For this March Equinox we have prepared a 60 minute Listening Party with soundscapes recorded in March from the North to the South Hemisphere. We're celebrating the season's transition and we want to invite you to reflect on how we can better accommodate our lives to our surrounding environment.

Tracklist:

01:58 Midnight Forest Frogs - Andy Martin

09:01 Western Capercaillie Makes Vocalizations in Early Spring - Andrus Kannel

12:49 Early Spring Thunderstorm in Beech Forest - Ivo Vicic

25:57 Hippopotamoes Preparing for the Night - Sounding Wild

39:36 Dawn Chorus is Saroluk - Enis Çakar

44:00 RDC Nightwalk in Rainforest - Owl - Gina Lo

47:02 Early Autumn Bushland Dawn near the Coorong - Khristos Nizamis

52:56 Tiny Little River - Verónica Cerrotta

56:24 Between Tree Branches - Melissa Pons

57:22: Here in There - Melissa Pons

You can listen to all of these soundscapes on our free mobile app at https://Earth.FM available for iOS and Android.

“I don't feel like nature is somehow healing me - I feel as if my body is remembering what it's supposed to be like.”

Earth.fm’s Wind Is the Original Radio podcast is pleased to share the second part of curator Melissa Pons’ conversation with sound designer and field recordist Andy Martin. (You can find part one here.)

Here, in another thought-provoking instalment, Andy shares his thoughts about deep listening, questioning (in part because of the varied ways in which it is defined) the difference from just… listening.

In the field, Andy “describe[s] [him]self as a witness”, of anything from “the trickle of water to hummingbirds which are out to kill each other” - but he refutes the idea of there being any “inherent meaning in a soundscape; it just is; it just exists”. Where deep listening often aspires to finding meaning or making a connection - “an intentional beauty or a message within the soundscape” - he asserts his conviction that there are no such intentions, beyond those of individual wildlife. 

“I can listen in wonder and awe”, but “there's nothing there that is a meaningful, special interaction for me; it is just life existing. If we're looking for a deeper connection, a deep meaning within the soundscape [...] we're missing the reality of what's there, and we're trying to put our own feelings, our own belief systems onto that reality - and that's not my job. [...] My job is to listen and bring forth.” What Andy sees as people’s misinterpretations of the natural world overriding the reality means that, “The moment I hear someone describe a dawn chorus as an outpouring of joy, they've lost me. Because that's what it sounds like to us - but that's not necessarily what it is.”

Further topics discussed in this episode include:

We hope that you enjoy this episode. If you’d like to connect with Andy, you can do so on LinkedIn and Instagram and listen to various recordings and other interviews here.

In this episode of Earth.fm’s Earth Is the Original Radio podcast - the first of a two-parter! - the site’s curator, Melissa Pons has a wide-ranging conversation with sound designer and field recordist Andy Martin.

The insightful and granular conversation explored the following topics:

Listen out for part two of the conversation, which will be released soon!

Also, below are all of the references mentioned during this episode:

And you can connect with Andy on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/andymartinnaturesound/ and Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andymartinnaturesound/.

A new turn around the sun and a new episode, this month’s guest being Chris Treviño, a field recordist and sound designer from Michigan with a background in anthropology and currently pursuing a Masters in Industrial Heritage and Archaeology, focusing on ways of knowing his own town through its sound across its history. 

We’re talking about some aspects of sound as heritage and memory as well as its cultural value in which Chris conceptualizes the notion of sonic time capsule, how we humans relate to sound in different contexts and throughout time, and we also talk about his more recent project in the Isle Royale National Park in Michigan, where Chris spent almost two weeks recording while traversing the island by foot.

Please find below all the references mentioned during our conversation:

Video games composers: Yasunori Mitsuda and Nobuo Uematsu (the Chrono Cross and Final Fantasy series)

Steven Feld - Voices From the Rainforest; the Kaluli people

UNESCO heritage designations: https://www.unesco.org/en/lists-designations

The Greek practice of the memory palace: https://artofmemory.com/blog/how-to-build-a-memory-palace/

Antônio Bispo dos Santos: https://futuress.org/community/antonio/

The Tonebenders Podcast episode with Chris: https://tonebenderspodcast.com/277-field-recording-for-the-national-parks-service-with-chris-trevino/

Isle Royale NP: https://www.nps.gov/isro/index.htm

Chris Treviño SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/chrisatrevino

Listen to the full recording of ‘Old Man and Grandson Watch Trains’: https://soundcloud.com/chrisatrevino/old-man-and-grandson-watch-trains

Chris’ official website: https://www.chrisatrevino.com/Connect with Chris on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisatrevino and on X https://x.com/ChrisATrevino

Say hello to December with this month's episode, in which we welcome creative sound artist Jo Kennedy, co-director of Yorkshire Sound Women Network and co-producer of the Nature Tripping podcast!.

Jo is a field recordist, sound designer, and audio producer who focuses on environmental and ecological projects. Together, we discuss Jo's path between environment and sound;, what listening - whether to anthropogenic sounds or predominantly natural ones - can potentially reveal; the power of novelty and curiosity in sound; rewilded soundscapes; graveyards; and more.

It isn’t necessary to experience pristine natural environments in order to fulfil our potential for connecting with other living beings, whatever they may be, and we might find small patches of land near us which are very special.

In addition, Jo and Cathy's podcast, - Nature Tripping - https://www.jokennedysound.com/naturetripping -, is wholeheartedly recommended, as is the article mentioned in the episode: ‘"Initiating Ecological Change Through Sound Art – a Review and Short Manifesto" - https://www.jokennedysound.com/blog/initiating-ecological-change-through-sound-art.

And see what the Yorkshire Sound Women Network is all about and how you can get involved - https://yorkshiresoundwomen.com/

Thank you, Jo, for the wonderful conversation!

Hello and welcome back to the Wind Is the Original Radio podcast! We have been longing to return and are so happy to kick-start this new phase with David de la Haye, an award-winning ecological sound artist focusing on underwater aquatic environments.

This episode is a fun conversation - both uncanny and down-to-earth - about listening to underwater sounds and the fascinating experience of recording them. Plus, collaborating to create music from his field recordings and some necessary gear talk.

David’s work is informed by his experience as a bassist, composer, and music technician, and by the process of cooperation with other musicians. He shares about how these processes go for some of his latest projects, and about the value of gathering people to make music.Learn more about David and his work on his website, https://daviddelahaye.co.uk/, and consider supporting him on bandcamp: https://daviddelahaye.bandcamp.com/.

Recorded in the misty montane rainforest of Gunung Halimun National Park, this recording features subtle birdsong and the sounds of a distant mountain river. This location is one of the last truly wild places on the island of Java and home to a host of unique wildlife.

Recorded by Marc Anderson at the Gunung Halimun National Park, Java, Indonesia