Released on the wonderful Takuroku Series, Cafe Oto

"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

Thanks to Rian, Olga, Bas, Phil, Yulia, Maï Ly, Roslyn, Paddy, Niall, Joanna, Elena, George and Moose for lending me their voices.

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Mastered by Oliver Barrett

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Words from Cafe Oto

'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.

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Review by Daryl Worthington, The Quietus
thequietus.com/articles/30272-natalia-beylis-invaded-by-fireflies-review

'Surroundings dominate Invaded by Fireflies, the new composition by Ukraine-born, Ireland-based composer Natalia Beylis, and she works around the riddle of how to capture them by mapping the imprints they leave on us. Rather than try to hide the human, it seems rooted in the idea that a place is only really a place when there’s someone to respond to it. The thirty-odd minute piece uses cassette recordings of Beylis’ friends, collaborators, and neighbours, describing beautiful locations they’ve witnessed. Beylis gently starting a conversation rather than composing, gathering fleeting sensations on ephemeral situations to outline a truer sense of our relationship to place.

There’s something magical in the way the speakers grapple with language to describe the elusive. Some pile up adjectives, as though trying to build a wall around what they experienced. Others impersonate wildlife, describe their emotional response, or convey a “black desert” of industrialised peat bogs through allusion to Tarkovsky films. Some focus on what they hear, some on what they see, and others what they did in the place, opening a lid not only on the differences in how we describe, but also what it is that makes a place leave its mark on us.

The snippets of voice are glimpses into people and their worlds, hooked into constellations by the somnambulant soundtrack that surrounds them. Like Beylis’s 2020 album The Steadfast Starry Universe, these textures ebb like soggy flotsam. Specific instruments are hard to discern, something gong-like sits near the surface, but it’s so scumbled it could just as easily be rigging clanging on a metal mast. As it goes on, the piece subtly warps, suggesting the composition is perhaps laid out on a tape loop. An uninterrupted thread fixing these fragments together into a mosaic of perspectives.

In their 1964 radio composition ‘The Dreams’, Delia Derbyshire and Barry Bermange asked members of the public to describe what ran through their heads at night. More recently, Claire Rousay’s A Heavenly Touch had people sharing stories of their last date, while Kate Carr’s Where to Begin assembles texts from love letters shared with the composer. Invaded By Fireflies sits in a similar place, shaped by a fascination with others. The composer decenters themself from the composition and uses their music as a vehicle to bridge the different ways we process our world.'