SEMI SILENT

As a three-time freestyle wrestling champion (1989/91/93), Pavel Brăila knows that massage after a competition is essential for muscle recovery, reducing tension, and helping the body regain strength for the next challenge. Built as a fictional radio show, RADIO MASSAGE is addressing the growing interest for the alternative medicine and its representation in today's media. The piece is also inviti...

I dove, completely at ease, into a book that promised to be like a neighborhood swimming pool, but which, breath by breath, took me on a journey around the world to the very ends of history, of exceptional bodies and minds, plunging me into the depths of the psyche and the exhilaration of the open sea. And it’s all true. I asked the swimmers in my life and discovered that they, too, carry, in the...

An improvised football field in Traian Square in Timișoara serves as the backdrop for a neighborhood portrait. The friendly tournament organized by the Casa Jacob Toffler Association in the Fabric neighborhood has, for several years in a row, brought together locals and people from other parts of the city — neighbors, artists, young and old, Nepalese immigrants, a manele singer — for a few days in...

The flow is a mental state of total immersion and maximum concentration on an activity. At that moment, action and consciousness merge, time seems to pass in a distorted way, and the level of focus reaches its peak. The piece THE FLOW speaks of regaining this state upon returning to the ski slope, even though a few years back this seemed impossible due to serious health issues. (SONIC SPORTS, 2025...

Everyone trains—all the amateurs of this sport—for a hypothetical match, for a scenario that everyone who trains imagines. We recorded the gym—the training ground—for these amateurs who will never compete. The idea of recording sports-themed sounds dates back to when I was thinking about the sports-themed anthology „Generația de aur” (the Golden Generation). The recordings are from three different...

Manja Ristić tells the story of growing up in a sports family, with her famous water polo dad and Croatian freestyle swimming champion mom. In the overlapping narrative between two places – Belgrade and the small town of Korčula in the Southern Adriatic – the story tackles the golden times of Yugoslavian water polo, the community-built island’s club KPK, where her parents first met, and the only s...

TOTAL is a sound work about the cultural, social and personal relevance of sports, now and in the past. School practice, competitions, tournaments and social phenomena, all come out of a subjective memory as a rapid succession of sequences in which sport remains the central element. TOTAL starts as a pluri-vocal confession about childhood memories that haunt one's relationship with sport. It devel...

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, disto...

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...

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 murmu...

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 occasional...

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,...

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 Mediterran...

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 an...

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...

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...

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 invo...

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 perma...

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 com...

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 a...

MAYBE NOTHING. An environmental thriller by Jeanne Debarsy, 2023_____What happened? / We don't know exactly / Of course, there are rumors and echoes / But they are perhaps only reminiscences / Time and space seem out of tune / Behaviors have also changed / But still, the Danube doesn’t stop flowing._____The translation of a precise feeling that cradled the 10-day residency in the small village of...

NEST by Abby Lee Tee, 2022 The sounds of privileged life in a small, cosy flat while a crisis after another exacerbating in the outside world. Very close encounters with gurgling stomachs, diligent small critters, dishwashers, washing machines, moka pots, tea kettles and a hailstorm on the other side of the windows. Sound piece commissioned by SEMI SILENT in the frame of SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES 2...

Ceaușescu's Teeth. A biting collection of sounds from profound Romania (Romanian). Author: Sillyconductor, 2015 “Related to God”: voice memos as a documenting obsession Some years ago, my then very young daughter had a funny but pertinent question: was Ceaușescu’s dentist too scared of the dictator to fix his teeth? At that time I was traveling a lot around the country and, as it happens, when you...

I started with a recording made in the garden with our little boy. We were getting ready to go to Bucharest, so we planted a few more things and we said goodbye. “The garden looks like our life: the things are mixed, have their own calendars, there are no 3 rows alike” (Vlad). It is a continuum. While listening to the recording, I made peace with this space filled with different plants, some eatab...

There's a garden between the buildings where I live. At first it was probably planned and landscaped. Then the plants (largely bushy, ornamental) grew naturally wild. I guess someone threw an apple core out the window one day. A shy apple tree has grown, nothing more than a handful of twigs. This year it bore fruit: four apples. Usually, not much comes out of apple seeds. Apparently this time it h...