I think a lot about the sonic profile of important spaces in my life, and how to create things that share that imprint of a place with others. So many of my memories and relational connections are defined by sound. Roxane Métayer, Katya Shirshkova, and Sara Eelen, through Périodique des Chemins Boueux / Herbes Étincelles, create conditions for listeners to explore and connect with Doode Bemde, a nature preserve near Leuven, Belgium. Métayer visited the site for a year, collecting a range of field recordings that helped shape this work. Her violin playing is central to the emotive core of this work, buoyed by Shirshkova’s voicings in the second half, and Eelen’s poetry included with the album’s booklet. The trio has built a soundworld as alive as the environment that inspired it.
Périodique des Chemins Boueux / Herbes Étincelles is OUT NOW on Edições CN.
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
What are your earliest memories of sound and music? Were there particular moments that first made you aware of listening as something active and intentional?
Roxane: Quite ordinarily, music came to me through my family: a few songs sung by my mother, others taught by my father, songs learned at school, songs repeated in very approximate English, and then the music my violin teacher taught me to read and play. There were also the sounds of the forest, the animals in the henhouse, and the sounds of changing weather.
Each of you works across different disciplines (sound, performance, poetry, image). How did you each find your way to the particular intersection of practices you occupy now?
Roxane: I wanted to find a way to combine all my different practices, so that I could continue making visual art while also creating music, without one excluding the other. The experimental music scene allowed that. Moreover, music has allowed me more and more to spend time in natural environments and to speak about flora and fauna through this musical language.
Katya: For me, it happened very naturally. It began with curiosity and a genuine interest in different forms of expression, but I never consciously decided to combine disciplines—they gradually found each other because they complemented one another and served the same artistic intention. My practice is driven by research, and every process generates new questions. Those questions become the starting point for the next work, so the intersection of different media continues to evolve rather than being fixed.
Sara: I’ve always been doing a lot of different creative disciplines, but when I was young I thought I had to choose between one. Now I love to work multidisciplinarily.
How did the three of you come together around this project? Had any of you worked together before, and what did it feel like when this particular collaboration started taking shape?
Roxane: This is my first collaboration with a singer and a poet, Katya and Sara. I’m interested in how this project about the nature reserve brings together their practices with my own. Combining these different mediums allows us to explore the reserve through complementary perspectives.
Katya: I was invited to join this project by Roxane Métayer to work on a series of collaborative pieces dedicated to the Doode Bemde nature reserve. From my side, the process began by sharing a number of audio sketches that I had been developing and felt inspired to explore further together with Roxane. These sketches became one of the starting points for our collaboration. At the same time, Roxane shared a series of field recordings from Doode Bemde, which gradually became central to the conceptual development of the project. Together with Roxane’s violin playing, this dialogue shaped the work as it evolved.
Katya, your voice enters the second half of the record, and part of the collaboration with Roxane happened in the chapel of Ten Puy on the reserve’s edge. What was it like to work in that space? Did the chapel’s acoustic presence influence the music?
Katya: Without a doubt, the chapel is a very special place for working with voice and sound. Its acoustics naturally support singing and shape the way the voice unfolds in space. Grotowski’s work made me attentive to the fact that space is never neutral. I also feel a certain reverence toward the historical and cultural memory that certain spaces carry. The chapel of Ten Puy holds centuries of human presence, ritual, silence, and listening—something that is impossible to ignore and that inevitably creates a particular atmosphere and state of mind.
There’s so much to take in with Périodique des Chemins Boueux / Herbes Étincelles, between the music, the writings, the concept, etc. And it’s been such an absorbing experience, honestly. I feel like I am in the deep end. Roxane, you made these monthly visits to Doode Bemde from July 2025 onward. What did that sustained, cyclical return to the same place do to your listening? Did the reserve start to feel different as the archive grew?
Roxane: At first, each time I went to the natural reserve, I tried to change the route of my walk in order to understand how it extended and took shape. I was trying to discover the different spaces of the reserve and the way life was distributed throughout the site. Then, I started to enjoy returning to the same places and observing how the seasons, the time of day, and the weather transformed the same environment, in terms of sound, visual aspects, and especially the different forms of life present on the site.
As the archive expanded, I became increasingly attached to the reserve. I began to recognize where different families and individuals were living, even if one year is not enough to know everyone in the reserve. The recordings became a way of creating a relationship with the place, allowing me to remember not only specific sounds. Now, each recording in the archive can remind me of a specific part of this place and of a specific moment from a past walk.
The compositions were built around two violins. The notes describe this as echoing bird duets and the orchestras of amphibians and insects, which is so compelling (I have thought for a long time about how so many of the electronic sounds I am drawn to and want to make are really just mimicking bird calls)! How did that structural decision shape the way the pieces developed?
Roxane: Indeed, one part called Périodique des chemins boueux is made of two violin parts, and sometimes even more.
In duets, one violin is always revealing the other one by creating sound harmonies between them. I also wanted to explore disharmonies and atonal compositions. I was also inspired by something I once heard inside the natural reserve: two great tits singing from two different but close places, almost following the same melody, but with slightly different pitches and rhythms. It was strange and beautiful.
Following the idea that dozens of frogs or crickets can create an orchestra, their position within the environment becomes important: they create a space through their presence, sometimes moving while singing. On the tracks of this album, I designed the movement of the sounds in order to enlarge the musical space.
Roxane, I’m really curious about this line from the description about using imitation to create fictional fauna and flora. Can you talk a little bit about that technique and how you approach this idea? And also, how do these fictional sounds sit alongside the documentary quality of field recording?
Roxane: The imitation of a bird or an insect is the starting point for creating a melody and then a piece of music. I first work through my voice, and then move to the violin. The idea is not to produce the perfect imitation, but to retain just enough of the original sound for the listener to understand the intention to imitate.
Imitation is one of the approaches that allows me to get to know a species a little better and to memorize its song or call. In the end, it is my instrument that allows me to feel closer to the species by trying, in a way, to behave like it. Its song stays imprinted in my memory for a long time: I have been able to observe this over the past several years.
Birds imitate each other; they imitate us, and they imitate their parents in order to learn how to sing themselves; it is a widespread practice. What I love about imitation is the changing parameters that emerge from it. Ultimately, imitation is a very fertile ground for creating new sounds.
I like to keep the original sound alongside its imitation, because the archive, combined with the violin that imitates it, can create a more or less abstract narrative scenes.
Sara, the poem follows the glossy ibis, a bird that was once a rare vagrant here and is now finding its way north as its southern habitat contracts. That’s a very specific choice. How did you arrive at this bird as the poem’s subject, and what did tracking its perspective open up for you?
Sara: In 2023, I made a short movie, ‘Laat alles hier aarden (let everything be grounded here). Let everything here be grounded is a poetic short film that wants to give a voice to nature, as it has been endangered by humans. Every season, I went to a different nature setting with a different group of people. Together, we formed a word in the landscape using various natural materials, and this was filmed with a drone.The first location for this short movie was De Doode Bemde, so that is how I got to know the place and Wim got to know me. When he asked me to do something new for De Doode Bemde, I was very honoured. It seemed logic to me to continue were I left the place: looking at it trough a birds eye (the drone). As a climate poet one of my new focusses is to try to come as close to non-human live and how they view the world. Through this research I stumbled on to the glossy ibis, on waarnemingen.be, and new that this special migrating bird could bring a very special story. Because he comes from very far I could also talk about mountains and the sea. Bringing all this places together is something I love to do in poetry. Also it allowed me to talk about climate change in a very subtle manner.
Also for you Sara, your work connects poetry to climate activism in pretty direct ways (like the Klimaatdichters). How does that political dimension sit alongside something as intimate and attentive as this project? Do those registers feel in tension, or do they reinforce each other?
Sara: I define politics as very wide and so for me there are very different ways of activism that can also be very intimate and attentive. I think as soon as you make art that is attentive, you touch the world and you can call that political.
The booklet brings together poem, prose, photographs, and additional material into something that feels genuinely unified. How did the three of you think about the relationship between what’s heard and what’s read? Did the different elements develop in parallel, or did one lead the others?
Roxane: In a very concrete way, I appreciate having a physical object that brings together our different approaches and contributions. It contextualizes the work, while also creating a connection between Sara’s poem and the music.
Working with a specific, named landscape carries a kind of responsibility. How did each of you think about representing a place that exists independently of what you were making about it?
Roxane: As the project unfolded, another aspect of the reserve gradually came into view: the relationship that local people have with it : the regular visitors, the neighbours, and those who take care of the site.
Throughout the creative process, this human dimension remained in the background, as my attention was primarily focused on the flora and fauna. During the performance, this dimension became more visible : not as something separate from the reserve, but as an integral part of it.
Seeing the neighbours who came to experience our work, I was struck by their attentiveness and by the way it reflected their connection to the reserve. I imagine that many of them know one another, and that some relationships may even have begun there. It was meaningful to witness how their attachment to the place resonated with the project.
Katya: I was interested in what connects this landscape to other places and to my own experience, especially because I don’t have a local relationship to it. These connections don’t erase the local character of a place—they grow from it. Roxane’s field recordings, for example, are deeply rooted in very specific locations within the reserve, carrying their own textures and rhythms. At the same time, they evoke something more familiar and widely shared: patterns of birdsong, insects, water, and wind—forms of listening that resonate across many different landscapes.
Because of that, I don’t think of my contribution as a representation of this particular landscape. I understand it more as a dedication to it—an act of attention rather than a description. I’m not trying to translate a place into sound or to fix it within a music piece. Instead, I’m interested in creating the conditions for a relationship with that landscape to emerge.
And as always, to close… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
Sara: The morning chorus.
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
