Ep: 01 - Place as Collaborator with Alexey Seliverstov
Alexey Seliverstov is an experimental artist, producer, and field recordist. You may know him from his viral Instagram reels that feature short symphonies of tape recorders, dictaphones, and vinyl records orchestrated into living soundscapes. Alexey works in both short and long form to craft these immersive sonic experiences for his audience. He approaches field recording as compositional material, blending recordings of birds, urban environments, and natural spaces with custom-built software and analog experimentation.
His recent projects include a multi-channel sound installation at Harvard’s Holden Chapel (in collaboration with the Shelemay Sound Lab [https://ssl.fas.harvard.edu/]), an interactive installation at LA Phil [https://www.laphil.com/]’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, and his collaboration with the legendary Pete Townshend from The Who, for a sound installation called The Age of Anxiety [https://alexeyseliverstov.com/works/the-age-of-anxiety/]. Alexey has recorded in abandoned hotels in Japan, forests across California, and the wild edges of Los Angeles, a city he describes as “half city, half wild nature.”
During my conversation with Alexey, we also discuss his ongoing creative partnership with his wife, Tata Vislevskaya [https://www.instagram.com/awomanundertheinfluence/?hl=en], a film director and visual artist whose work shapes the visual language of Alexey’s sonic world.
This is the first recorded conversation for Site & Sound: A Living Atlas, a collaborative project designed to capture how people experience the intersection of place, sound and memory.
For this project, I’m facilitating conversational interviews with artists and practitioners who work at these complex intersections with the intention of creating space for collaborative complexity and discovery. Alexey is a wonderful first guest for this project, as his work explores place as an active collaborator, which is central to what this project is trying to understand.
In our conversation, Alexey talks about field recording not as documentation, but as a technique for both world building and memory-making. He explains that recording something yourself creates a different relationship to a sound than outsourcing these recordings and that there’s an embodied memory that stays with you from this process. As Alexey explained in our conversation:
“When you record something in the fields, in the forests, it records much deeper than in your flashcard. Because it records inside you. Somewhere in your brain, you have this memory. And when you play the sound, either on a file or a tape, you always imagine. You always remember. You keep that feeling you had at the moment you recorded it.”
This idea that sound is as much about inner landscapes as external ones is what I want to explore through this project. I want to understand not just what artists hear, but why, and how the sonic landscape becomes a tool for storytelling, memory, and transformation.
In this interview, we explored:
* The first bird Alexey ever recorded
* Parabolic microphones as portals to a different reality
* Alexey’s own DIY software that extends his analog tape techniques
* Place as collaborator in sound installations
* Memory, experimentation, and the imagined boundaries between digital and analog worlds
Alexey Seliverstov was recently featured in a BBC documentary episode about his practice. You can listen here. [https://bbc.com/audio/play/p0m7nmzf]
You can learn more about Alexey Seliverstov’s work at his website [https://alexeyseliverstov.com/about/], and follow him on Instagram @grayskiesforever [https://www.instagram.com/grayskiesforever/].
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit siteandsound.substack.com [https://siteandsound.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]
