Maria Balabas is a Romanian radio maker and sound artist. She performs a sound study she and her brother Mihai made about Brussels during her residency at Q-O2, a series of soundscapes dedicated to Brussels, trying to capture the aural specificity of the city. Those are dedicated to the traditional meaningful moments of the day – morning, midday, evening, night – each being a metaphor for the richness or poorness of our imagination and trying to depict the influence the big urban spaces have upon the human condition.
The four soundscapes will go from intimate feelings to large sonorities, will feature voices and fragmented stories merged into industrial and mechanical atmospheres. They will use field recordings made in Brussels during the time of the residency; the artistic process took them to processing the recordings, giving them musical narrative. The sound-structure will be completed with voices (text and melodic lines) and musical-instrumental layers.

Julia Eckhardt will present a listening session with fragments from the blog of the Sounds of Europe website, which travelled through 18 countries, exploring their soundscapes by the hands of local correspondents. Sounds of Europe is a project by Q-O2 workspace about the use of field recording in a larger sense, meaning an artistic practice working with the accidental sounds of our environment. It  acknowledges  and follows the increase of field recording activity in music, art and sciences in recent years and tries to draw up an overall picture of the many different ways of using field recordings, and to explore their signification and effect.