Born in Kyiv but raised in Baltimore, Natalia Beylis was only accustomed to city and suburban life before moving to the sparsely populated Irish county of Leitrim 15 years ago. Now, her experimental sound work muses on seclusion and her rural surroundings. “Now, I’m alone in nature so much,” says Beylis, speaking to Brian Coney in The Wire 472. “It’s given me such an immersion in minute, individual sounds.”

As well as recent releases on labels such as Nyahh and Artsy, Beylis also works with longform projects, such as 2013's The Sunken Hum, which saw the artist taking a recording of her surroundings every day for that year, and ongoing experiments with a pump organ.

“The Night Of The Games” is part of an ongoing recording project dedicated to a W Doherty & Co pump organ,” Beylis explains over email. “The organ lives in my studio and came to me via my friend Paddy Bloomer. Paddy had gotten it years before when he 'went to a house to pick up a stairlift to make into a roller coaster and got a free organ'. For the past five years, I have been writing and recording songs on the organ, as the instrument continually becomes ever more creaky and the bellows more wheezy. A compilation of these recordings will be coming out early next year on Nyahh Records.”

Read Brian Coney's interview with Natalia Beylis in full in The Wire 472. Wire subscribers can also read the article via the online library.