Sound Art
Melanie creates sound art collages, utilizing her own field recordings, poetry, musicscapes, and sampling.
Everywhere You Go You Hit the Wall
Aired on WFMU’s program “Radio Ravioli” Dec, 2023
Featured on Transom, a Peabody Award-winning platform for new works in radio
With a title borrowed from Wim Wender’s classic German film Wings of Desire, the radio art piece “Everywhere You Go You Hit the Wall” transports the listener to a strange world of language barriers, time slips, and cultural alienation. Incorporating poetry and field recordings from her many years spent as a radio reporter in Berlin, journalist and poet Melanie Sevcenko delivers a sonic collage about transmuting "the news" while being a linguistic outsider in your hometown... and yet falling in love with it anyway.
What This Means for Your Life is Nothing
Decades ago, while traveling extensively in her mid-twenties, Melanie Sevcenko visited with two “psychic” practitioners on a whim of curiosity: one in Austin, TX, who used crystal and light therapy to gather past life information, and the other a clairvoyant tea leaf reader on the Bruce Peninsula in rural Ontario, Canada. Remixing the original recordings of these psychic tapes, “What This Means for Your life is Nothing” is a dizzying collage of parallels, contradictions, and ethereal guidance from two outsiders on one young life, playfully commenting on the insolubility of mysticism.
Prizen Prayer
A remix of field recordings from Prizren, Kosovo, while attending a Dokufest International Documentary and Short Film Festival in 2011. This sound sketch layers the Call to Prayer (with respect), street ambience, and an outdoor cinema.
Instructions for Finding Me on the Radio
"Instructions for Finding Me on the Radio" is a piece of sound art based on a poem of the same name, penned by Melanie Sevcenko. The poem is part of a forthcoming poetry collection and accompanying audio project, where themes of memory, archiving, capturing and interpreting beauty, and the art of listening are explored.