Interview: Serge Bulat

“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’s experience of an immersive exhibition in Kraków, Into the Darkness, which replicates what it’s like to not be able to see, with blind guides providing insights about their lives, and the equivalence of this to animals replying on different senses than our own (such as spiders and vibrations, or snakes using infrared thermal radiation)
• The appeal of twilight, “when everything starts becoming blurry” and takes on the quality of a dream, and “the thrill of [darkness] and [the way that] [Serge’s] imagination sometimes takes [him to other] places”.

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.

If you enjoyed this candid and wide-ranging conversation, you can follow Serge on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, SoundCloud, and Apple Music.