We are talking with Simina Oprescu, a composer, video and mixed media artist, living in Bucharest.

I have only lived in Bucharest and one year in Brussels.

Where you did acousmatic studies at acousmatic composition and electronics department at Royal Conservatory in Mons, Belgium? 

Yes exactly.

However, in Romania in Bucharest, you studied at the department of photography and dynamic imagery at the national art university. As an artist, you have been focusing on sound and image, but as you said in one of your previous interviews, for you sound is definitely superior to other forms of perception. When did sound take over your life?

Well, it is really simple. The sound took over my life when I was face to face with my video work for my degree in 2015 and I was overwhelmed because I had to do the montage and was trying to find the reason in the filming material that I had. I had all these images, good images, but with no feeling whatsoever in my opinion. I knew I had to do something with it; I can't just have an image and do a montage, this is not enough, I need sound here. I needed to do the sound by myself as it was my work. So, I had to do it, I didn't have any other choice. I started to construct, little by little, sound on the image, and at some point, I had a kind of epiphany that the sound radically changed the whole project. Every image began to have an entirely different story. That moment clicked for me. I said to myself: ok, now it's just sound for me, I cannot go back. It is either sound and trying to make an invisible environment, invisible world through the sound and then maybe I add the image, when necessary.

Artistic practice is always a very individual practice at its core. How did you go about translating sounds that you hear for yourself to sounds that others will also hear? For example, your production work, your compositions are meant for an audience. 

I try to look at the main psychological theme of all human beings. We all get hurt, we all suffer, we all get panic attacks, we all have anxiety. There is no shame in this; we all feel the same feelings! Some of us feel a bit different because the perception is different, but in general, we are all the same. It depends only on the environment, the causes of why you are living it. It is translating the emotions into sounds. It is a very personal approach, but people can still rediscover themselves, maybe hear something that they also feel inside themselves. I don’t know how to explain it clearer, because it is a thing of a feeling and perception. I choose to use electronic sound because it is the sound of our generation. We went clubbing, we liked electronic music and grew up with it. Combining it with field recordings and electro-acoustics is more a process of discovering sound, a process of attention on sound, it's close to meditation as well. All this combined energy of electronic music and the electro-acoustic parts makes these environments and the music that I produce.

Interestingly, you mentioned that you grew up with electronic music or going out clubbing and I do agree it's a kind of rite of passage for most people and either a hedonistic place or a place to hear quality music. But you have-

Yes, and go wild and be yourself! It is that kind of safe space, where you can go wild and not be judged and that’s liberating. 

But you have also studied it through very vigorous theories, acousmatics and music concrete and genres that fall into this historical theoretical context are not exactly light-hearted. Not everybody that goes to clubs knows them or thinks about them.

Yes, exactly! And this is why I find this fascinating. It was like a deal with myself: can I do this? Can I put music concrete in clubs? (Laughter) Is it possible? And it worked! I was surprised that it worked! It was a game for me; it was purely a game, experimenting with human perception. I was like: okay, you want mindfuck? I will give you mindfuck (laughter).  

I remember you were last year you were doing two presentations at Sonica 2019. One you did a live performance at Kino Šiška and then the same evening you also did a DJ club set with Ira Merzlichin in Klub Monokel. And -  

(laughter) Yeah, I remember that night, running all night from one place to another because [the performances were] like twenty minutes apart.

Yes, it was quite a change of scenery and also of sound, but I remember as all sets are kind of build from different tracks, right? You are not a DJ first and foremost. You are someone that plays with what sounds good and interesting and what makes you feel stuff. But in your live performances or in your compositions, you refer to sound elements as sound objects. What and how do you think of sound objects?

Well, a sound object is even a table that I am hitting now (starts hitting on the table). And if I loop it, I will make a techno beat with it. And if I have a glass of water and I hit it and loop it, that's a sound object. Basically, you can make techno just from ordinary objects. That is a sound object for me. Everything that produces sound and you can record it and loop it. And sound design it, so that it maybe sounds different than the original. Is it wood, is it concrete, is it metal? You experiment and you find more and more surfaces that can produce an interesting sound and texture and variation and originality and harmonic timbre. 

The way you're describing the sound objects and how you think about literal objects in the world but also what kind of sound can come from them – how do you categorize it all?

I give names to the techniques of writing, and the sound objects can be on very different chapters. We have percussive rhythm; we play only with resonance. What is resonance? You go and try to find an object that has resonance. So, you use different types of metal: aluminium or really hard metal. Friction is also important: what kind of objects causes an interesting texture on friction? Different objects have different granulations. Aspirin in a glass of water has a certain granulation. And the accumulation of microphenomenon inside that granulations.

Would you then also say that you are thinking in the way how producers were producing sound for commercials or films?

It is kind of a foley action, it is basically the same process. 

How do you step out of the box of making sounds when you see an object, for example, a phone, it makes a ping! sound when you get a message, but you can't see any other way to make sounds out of it. How do you get away from this preconceived idea of what a phone should sound like?

This actually reminds me of one installation with phones where one the artist used several phones with different soundtracks, and he started playing from all those phones so you got a polyphonic phone symphony. But the phone is a technological, a digital object and we are talking about analogue objects, which cannot be smarter than us.

It is a different principle if you already have something capable of producing sound, like a phone, which could also be a little synth –

Yeah, exactly! The phone, in this case, is a little bit more appropriated as a modular synth or a plug-in.

Talking about digital and analogue. The current theme of this year’s SONICA festival is about the garden that is and could not be a paradise, but also a paradise that could not be a garden –

Yeah, I really like the concept!

-and you will present the work at the festival, called Ludus. Could you tell us something in anticipation of it, how did you think of it and did you put it into the context of the garden.

Yeah, sure, well, Ludus is an experiment that aims to use the game as a mean of research for how form can change the sound and initiate the rhythm. I was thinking of how playing games is a duality, it is the relations between visible and invisible. And I really liked the idea to be in a garden as it is also a game. It's a game you play in nature and you form an environment with that game. The sound [in Ludus] is made with step shoes. Inside the game, rules play an important role in creating the rhythm thus modulating the form and the invisible shape of the sound. So, the secrecy of play gives that aleatoric, unpredictable movement of sound in space in contradiction with its rules, which demand and organise. Somehow, the beauty of the play lays exactly in its contradictions. If the game would be predictable 100%, there would not be any stake of winning. The rules raise the territory ... [unintelligible].

Do you see this work as a continuation of your purely compositional work?

As far as I understand I will have the audio-visual installation at [Equrna] Gallery and [quadrophonic installation] at the Sound Garden as a continuation of the [sound work of the audio-visual installation]. 

But just purely as a way to approach a music piece also, would you say you are playing around in your compositions and this is a continuation of your work or is this specific use of a game- 

No, it's a specific use of a game as it came from the idea that form can change the rhythmicality of the sound and I used a form to prove that in the video. 

Would you say that for someone that hasn't seen your audio-visual work, that a very similar but simple example would be seeing the waveforms of the music piece?

Yeah, let’s say yes.

I would like to get your thoughts on how you think about an artist's work or an artist nowadays when all we see around is a crisis of one sort or the other. You were also taking part in one of the talks at SONICA last year, which is available on YouTube and will be linked. You were following this idea that an artist's being or making art is inherently political and is changing things by doing-

Yeah, because it is a manifestation of the present time, the artist itself is a manifestation of the present time so inherently it is political, you want it or not, it is political. It is a reflection of the present time. So, I would say that the young emerging artists or any artist, it has to remain true to themself and to pay attention to their way of thinking and their way of patterning (patterns of thinking), to be aware that all these thoughts will impact your future work of art. You have to stay true to yourself. You have to try to not be manipulated and super influenced by the times. Paradoxically you are already influenced, you want it or not. You have a bad dream about, for example about Trump. You wake up and you start composing. And you start doing heavy techno or something, you are super angry. You know? You get it? It is this large psychology that we are all in. "The must" psychology and "the must" energy.

As an artist, you have done radio, DJing and a lot of other things, but do you as an artist feel that to do something popular or to be popular, you need to be outspokenly political also outside your art practice?

I don’t think that being involved in politics is more important than your art, honestly. I feel that being more involved in your art and your practice and how to make something valuable and to keep it valuable for a longer period, you have to be focused on your work and your art, not the outside. I am not that kind of artist, you know. It depends on your brand: is your brand political, to talk aloud, go for it. But if not, if you’re a woman and you’re doing music in a music industry, which is so full of men, you are still seen as a minority, you are still perceived as though you cannot programme faster than men, or you cannot learn the technologies faster than the guys. It is redundant to have these headaches of conversations that are not about art and sound and music, about the eternal things. We will all die in the end; we will grow old and our teeth will fall out and we will at the end just want to remain with good art and a good feeling about that. And to be recognised for your art. 

I think this really tells an idea that art should be in the world because it is an existence and that is enough in itself. If you would like to for the end say something or touch on something that we haven’t already talked about, either on the work Ludus or something else in connection with your practice.

Yeah, well, about Ludus I would like to say one word: hopscotch game. (laughter) I will just leave it like this. And you will see. Two words actually (laughter)! Hopscotch and game.

Simina Oprescu, thank you very much for the talk.

Thank you!

The podcast features sound excerpts from Simina Oprescu’s composition LUDUS and from her 2020 release KI.

The podcast was produced with support from SIGIC - Slovenian Information Music Center.
Simina Oprescu is an artist supported by SHAPE Platform which is co-founded by the Creative Europe.