Field Recordings Part 1: Maria Balabas, Manja Ristic

in this episode we’re diving into the complex, layered world of field recordings — not just as a technique, but as a way of thinking, listening, and relating to environments, people, and nonhuman agencies.

Today I’m joined by Maria Balabaș and Manja Ristić, two contributors to The Sonic Turn project and speakers at The Sonic Turn Conference, which took place in November 2025 in Bucharest. Through their articles and lectures, both have opened up rich perspectives on listening as a situated, ethical, and deeply embodied practice.

Maria Balabaș works at the intersection of radio, sound art, and collective listening. In her article “(Un)listened Heritage”, she reflects on how certain sounds, voices, and histories remain unheard — not because they are absent, but because we haven’t learned how to listen to them. Her practice, which often unfolds through soundwalks and radio work, treats the city itself as a field site, where listening becomes a public act, shaped by bodies, movement, and attention. For Maria, field recording is never neutral: it is dialogical, relational, and deeply tied to questions of presence, care, and responsibility.

Manja Ristić approaches field recording from a perspective rooted in sound ecology, memory, and more-than-human worlds. In her article “Mnemosonic Topographies: Sensory Epistemology Between Sound, Space, and Memory”, she explores how sound participates in the making and unmaking of place, and how listening can function as a form of knowledge that exceeds purely visual or textual modes. Her work challenges anthropocentric listening and invites us to consider environments — marine, geological, ecological — as active agents rather than passive backdrops. Here, microphones and recording technologies are not transparent tools, but collaborators that shape how environments are sensed and understood.

Together, these perspectives reveal how field recording contains multiple layers and modes of approach: artistic, ethnographic, ecological, political. As we talk with Maria Balabaș and Manja Ristić, we’re not just discussing recordings of sound — we’re talking about listening as method, ethics as practice, and sound as worldmaking.