bela is an artist and sound producer who has, for several years, been working between Berlin and Seoul, consistently developing a practice centered on dissolving the boundaries between voice, body, and technology. As she emphasizes, sound is not a closed structure for her, but rather “clay” – a material that emerges from relationships, associations, and the conditions in which it is produced.
bela speaks about sound as if it were, from the very beginning, something more than music – a living, malleable substance that shapes the way one thinks, feels, and exists in the world. In conversation, she returns to childhood fascinations, church sonorities, environmental noises, and the voice not as a tool of expression, but as a material that can be stretched, deformed, and placed under tension. From all of this emerges her practice – intense, bodily, and deliberately resistant to simple categorization.
Released in April 2026, Korean Love Sonnets emerges in this conversation as an album built on intersections: between intimacy and rawness, beauty and unease, body and technology, presence and representation. bela speaks about voice, noise, and performance as spaces where fractures are revealed and reshaped into new forms. It is a story about music that does not merely illustrate emotions, but releases them – allowing us to hear what usually remains beneath the surface.
Artur Mieczkowski
Artur Mieczkowski: How did your journey with sound begin—and what was the moment when you realized that it was no longer just an interest in music, but something that was beginning to shape the way you think and perceive reality?
bela: When I was a kid who was obsessed with spirals and planets and chimneys and wheels and fans, basically any round or cylinder things, I loved making FX noises with my mouth until I fell asleep, imagining planetary collisions and cataclysmic events in the formation of earth, and the universe. I would also gesture fans turning with my hands and make noises to that gesture. And then I followed my mom’s friend’s kids over to the catholic church where I felt like sound was a malleable idea between FX and the holy sounds. I went to church for a year, never getting baptized. And then I went to piano lessons where I faintly felt like I preferred the sound of tapping on the wood over the actual piano notes.
A.M.: At what point did your voice cease to be merely a tool for singing or communication, and begin to function as a material—something that can be shaped, stretched, distorted, and treated on par with other elements of a composition?
b: As I said, it was always something like clay rather than a monolith. All sounds. I was keen on sound effects. Meanings arise from connections and associations. More into my adulthood I realized representation matters in contact with the public, and that’s when I got more lost in ideas like identity. But I know now that what brings me joy is the best I can do. Be nonbinary and have a thick deep growl, who cares? In the frequencies lie the juiciness you never thought would bring you joy. There are questions of what would be a bigger and more profound joy, which is a field of struggle for many out there!
A.M.: Your practice is very closely tied to performance. How do you understand the relationship between studio work and live performance—are they two distinct fields, or rather a single continuous form that simply changes context?
b: It’s both. Some tracks I figure out doing live sets, some tracks I hear in my head first and realize I can’t possibly perform this. Also, I work in the perspective of visual performance as well. Having a relationship to sequences of images really makes soundmaking more rich by accumulating context and beauty in multiple dimensions. Korean Love Sonnets was conceived exactly like above.
A.M.: Your performances feature a distinctive vocal style—more physical, at times rough, and devoid of “classical” vocal expression. Was this a conscious decision, or rather something that emerged during the creative process?
b: I do have an iconoclastic side to my visions, but it is not so important that classical voices did not pop up in my work yet. I find validity in all vocal expressions. What you can see in my projects just stems from material conditions, resources, and the lack of imagination that comes from these limits. I have hopes, but not about necessarily favoring any type of expression. I like to think that music is big enough to hold me in its arms in many different positions.
A.M.: You often talk about a certain disconnect between who you are, how you sound, and how others perceive you. Is performance a way for you to address this disconnect—to reveal it, or perhaps to reframe it?
b: This is about how I get lost in identities and representations. I am like a clay, I do not yet know where or what I am, but people project themselves and their worlds onto me. I do not wish to be completely free, and I actually seek pain in drama sometimes because it is what I feel like ought to happen. But this kind of implication means I am having relations with the other, and this brings me a sense of belonging. So I naturally think a lot about holding others. About wanting to feed and contaminate others with my scoop of free-particle cosmos. How do I do it sonically? How do I tell a non-narrative that sorts itself once it enters you, and then acts as a spy to turn you inside out, etc. How do I get you sick in a good way? I’m not a doctor, clearly… I can only make you experience the chaos that I am faced with as someone that I am.
A.M.: The title Korean Love Sonnets suggests something very intimate, even classical, yet the album itself often leans toward raw, deconstructed forms, at times bordering on noise. To what extent was this contrast your starting point, and to what extent did it emerge during the creative process?
b: The first track that I made was Union Valley LI4 – Tiger’s Mouth, and this is the track that convinced Subtext Recordings to release it. So it was meant to be raw. I don’t know if it is necessarily a deconstruction of an existing structure, though. I initially thought about the soothing nature of noise. I used to fall asleep while trying to study up late, while listening to noisy industrial metal music. Turns out I was just tired, but nevertheless the idea stuck with me. But then during performances I embraced the subwoofer bass sound that at the same time unnerves and achieves a full sound in your ears.
A.M.: Behind this album lies a very specific experience—working nights at a karaoke bar, observing other people’s emotions through a screen, and silently repeating the sutra of the heart. How has this influenced the way you think about the voice, presence, and the relationship between the internal and the external?
b: Some understandings you develop behind the veil, and once you reach the surface of the water, you suddenly know. This was a decade ago. I saw my life fail in front of me. When I left Korea and a weird situation in Berlin in 2023, I finally had a headroom to breathe, and this is when it caught up. It was an exercise of voyeurism in libidinal snapshots of hypercapitalist structures. I couldn’t see emotions, I just saw their expression of joy, and struggle for joy, and struggle against sadness. All 16 rooms with the tacky LED spinning disco ball lights. And then I have to clean after their spits on the floor, dirty mics, shit and piss in the bathroom, drunk people and horny people, and cockroaches. It’s like working in clubs but with such bad music, and I had a 16-credit semester going along with this 7 hour per day shift, and a lunchtime ramen shop shift. It’s not a flat image to deal with. There is depth to it. But the depth can be reached only with enough breathing room. I think it eventually taught me to move on from worrying too much about ego and effort and sandcastles. Anything you worry about will melt away and reappear in different shapes. These apparitions and aesthetic semblances resemble each other. You can catch them off the surface of the pond with a stick, and there’s clear water underneath. This concerns inside and outside. And then you forget about this as well, and life rolls on, you roll down the hill like a lonely piece of pebble again!
A.M.: In Korean Love Sonnets, electronics don’t function as a backdrop or support, but rather as something that splits and transforms the voice. How do you build this relationship between the body and technology in your work? Tracks like Palaces in the Air and Union Valley have a very distinct, almost physical weight and intensity. Is it important to you that the music affects the listener on a physical level as well, not just through sound perception?
b: Union Valley doesn’t have recordings of electronics. Palaces in the Air uses floorboard creaks that I recorded in a very rich person’s flat in Berlin, granulated with GRM Tools. I jokingly call this physical sensation “juicy.” It should be tasty… sometimes. I am going to explore more bitter tastes later on. But so far it’s been juicy. Voice is also technology! I hate technology also. It’s a bit of a confusing answer, I know, but I try to mix and mash these veils and semblances of reading because I am always referring to the malleable clay state. When the mimetic brain takes over, bodily knowledge seeps out and un-governs the language that rules over things with definite borders.
A.M.: How do you see the relationship between Korean Love Sonnets and your earlier work, Noise and Cries 굉음과 울음—do you see it as a continuation of your earlier explorations, or rather as an attempt to take them in a different direction?
b: Noise and Cries was crying in the room when Korean Love Sonnets entered the room and kicked her in the knees!
A.M.: The theme of beauty keeps coming up in your comments, but more as something problematic than as something self-evident. Has working on this album changed your understanding of what “beauty” might actually be?
b: Have you ever felt so ugly, but called beautiful by many kind friends? Beauty is not only subjective but is also unruly and unsightly. Language has its own agenda, and I have a deep need to decouple it from established forms. This album is purely a manifestation of this need.
A.M.: What are you currently working on—and following Korean Love Sonnets, do you feel that your practice is moving further toward intensification and deconstruction, or is there a growing need for simplification and a different kind of focus?
b: I was in a place where “making a sound first and deciding later” kind of mindset didn’t work financially. I am now entering a phase with the upcoming La Becque residency and the new handy recorder and just a natural buildup of various “stuff” in my life to be able to decide from the sounds I can actually make rather than rely on imaginations and heavy productions. I will let this situation guide me.