Passing the mic out to listen to the voices of others has been a small recurring theme in our Takuroku series. Jean-Luc Guionnet's 'Totality', Nour Mobarak's '3 Performance Works' and claire rousay's 'ilsym' all feature voices of friends or strangers, threading recordings of them to create new layers of intimacy in their work.

Natalia Beylis is another artist in the series to take this approach. Based upon recordings of friends describing beautiful places, 'Invaded by Fireflies' feels like an psychogeographic journey through unidentified terrain. As a bed for her friend's musings, Natalia forms a sound world of resonant percussion and quietly hissing sonorosations. Tipping to early work of the New York minimalists and David Jackman/Organum's multi-textural drone-based aesthetics in 'Veil of Tears' and 'Sphyx', she forms aural content that matches her friends' sense of beguilement.  

"I grew up surrounded by adults who spoke broken English and children who spoke broken Russian. No one quite getting anything 'right'.  English was not my first language and teachers in my school were quick to jump on my linguistic errors.  Though Russian was my first language, I always had a detached shyness that came with trying to master a language in a place removed from where it is locally spoken.  This background gave me a fondness for the English language spoken by people for whom English is not their first language. Then I moved to Ireland and fell in love with the vast variety of accents and the phrasings and slang and twists of Irish melded into the English. Sometimes I can get so lost in the sound of someone speaking (the accent, the lilts, the pauses) that I completely forget to focus on what they are saying.

The recordings used in Invaded by Fireflies were not initially gathered for the uniqueness of the voices. Rather, I asked friends to describe memories of a beautiful place, recorded these memories straight onto cassette and then used the recordings in my live performance. In early 2021, while missing the sounds of humans, I decided to revisit these. It was only when I began to bunch the recordings together for this piece that I was struck by the beauty and variety in the voices themselves." - Natalia Beylis