Your Happy Hour - Repurposed & Resound.

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

In this episode, we chat to Egle Pernare on the topic of Repurposed & Resound - and how the the creation of the project: ReSound - which aims to enhance urban spaces through public sound art - has led Egle and Annie towards personal freedom and rebirth in many ways in their own journeys. We also touched on the transformative power of sound and how to go about inspiring deeper connections with sound and the world around us, the importance of slowing down, the impact of AI on music, and the importance of having patience with ourselves in it all.The Feels is all about having those honest conversations, the power of community for personal growth and taking those actionable steps towards being our authentic selves.Thanks for tuning in! Keep it raw and real out there xYHH is produced by swartkat.co - captured via riverside.fm & shared via rss.com.

It's the Friday Feels, and we're back with your first sip of the weekend. You're now tuned in to this week's episode of your happy hour. I'm your host Nicole Carmine, and it's amazing to have you here. joining me this week as we uncover the truths about being a human and a working professional. What are you up to this Friday? Well, whatever it is, this moment is just for you. Welcome back to another episode. We are in episode three of season three. I can't believe another one has kick started and we're swiftly moving into this theme of repurposing purpose this month.

And I'm really excited to have a beautiful guest today joining us on a bit more of a topic of repurposed resound. And she can tell us a little bit more about what that means and means for her personally. But a really big welcome to the Your Happy Hour podcast and the field space, Egle, Pernari. I hope I'm saying it. I'm saying with a French accent because I can. Thank you, Nicole, for having me here. honored and grateful to talk to you and to share my story, our story of resound,

and yeah, and just enjoy the conversation. Yeah, of course. And yeah, tell me a little bit about how you got to starting what you guys have. I mean, I won't spoil the surprise just yet. Yeah. I've got a little bit of insight from your co-founder on what you do. But yeah, what has your journey been to this? point in time. What does this theme mean to you? So maybe a little overview. The theme itself is

about sound, music, listening, and that being the foundation and the core of everything I do creatively and my journey with Annie, my collaborator with whom we founded this project. And it really is about relationship to sound, and through that relationship with sound, our relationship to ourselves, our environments, our communities, and sort of a place in a greater universe as well. So it kind of spans from this, like, the voice into the, from the micro to the macro. And it's very interesting how me and Annie sort of had this ongoing creative journey already for some years and how we both came to this point in time

where both of our lives and narratives of our lives struggles and breakthroughs sort of brought us together to birth this project of public art, public sound and multi-sensory art to the world. So just maybe a few words on both of our backgrounds. Annie is amazing and very talented sound designer and sound artist with classical music background. She studied in golf smith.

She plays violin and flute and other instruments. And she's been working with sound for many years in a commercial field, as well as building multi-channel sound installations. and myself, I'm a slightly different breed because I spent many years in visual arts. Prior, I was training in piano, however, as I was growing up. So my very foundation creatively is actually music. I diverged to visual art and made films, photography, and sort of interdisciplinary work. But it was always with sound somehow, because film comes with sound.

And in the recent, about two years, I sort of really shifted my entire focus to sound from which my love for music and foundations of starting to compose ambient and experimental music came as well as starting to play harp. And I can share a little bit more how listening actually brought me to this place. So me and Annie came to this point about two years ago, one and a half years ago, where we were like, we need to do something and we both want to bring more good sound to urban spaces and sort of birthed this idea of resound. And where it really started actually is in Lithuanian sauna retreat to you. two years ago actually it was autumn october and also it's a month when both me and annie are born so we were celebrating with with microphones and recordings and uh and so i used to live for about three years in a very remote area in Lithuania in what used to be a literally like a sauna retreat and sauna in Lithuanian is it's called Pirtis and it's not really a sauna as we know

a Finnish sauna but it's it's a very ancient and archaic tradition over here where basically there is a full-day ritual of infusing this space with heat and herbs and even prayers sometimes for people to come and heal to cleanse themselves spiritually, emotionally, mentally and of course physically and sort of get to the place of rebirth. So I was really always fascinated about that process and it being such an ancient tradition which used to be actually the very core of community in the past because people when it was the only place where that was truly like sterile so women went there to give birth and it was a place for sick people to get better and people would have the final wash before death so it's like a very it's it has this like cosmic significance

and I was also learning a lot from the shaman that was living there and I liked how he told the story about what is the spiritis or sauna it's like mimicking the cosmic forces in a condensed form so you collect all this nature elements the smell the steam the sun rays that are stored in plants and you use fire, wood, earth, stones. So all these like elements they play and you kind of live through this cosmic play

of life and death in there. So we were both very fascinated with this idea and we started to record because the whole sonnet itself, it rumbles. When you make fire, it's an incredible sound. It has this like, it has this like, I could hear music in it and that's where

it started like with this fire element so we were recording a lot steam and the whole process field recordings of the river of birds of earth itself with these like geomikes that Annie designed

and underwater mics so we really were collecting sound as if we're collecting and foraging for sauna and we decided to you know, just to see where this material take us. And so we went on the journey and sort of this idea of resound and our launch project, which is called Acoustic Sona,

sort of came out from us exploring that process and kind of mimicking the process of making a sauna by collecting foraging and then building, catalyzing or alchemizing something out of it into art. So this is how it all started. And from that, we realize that we can turn this into an ongoing practice where we will continuously generate ideas and installation projects to infuse the world or like public spaces with these sonic interventions where people can, which people can encounter be. sort of stopped by and have moments of wonder, awe, pause and rest and catharsis because we both really believe and I think we both really long for more of that

just in our everyday environments because one of the also main inspirations for me is that I think our contemporary cultures in the West especially are so impoverished from sensorial significance in every day like rituals, not just going to some remote retreat for like thousands of dollars, you know, to fix yourself. But it's about daily, it's about bringing back this magic into our daily. lives. So this is maybe like the pivotal intention as a public good for well-being that we want to give through this project. Gosh, I could listen to you talk about it forever and ever. Great. I'm kind of improvising really because there's so much, you know, so much

strings and like different themes that come into our process and i mean sound is it's like an infinite kind of rectalic subject that can take so many forms and they're similar to each other but then there's something else each time you talk about it so yeah yeah i love that and i i think you know i had a conversation with my mom recently and we were talking about this power of sound and And I had a beautiful moment where I was kind of singing, improvising with someone at the piano at San Lazar Station. There's a piano and people go and sit and play and we were improvising and singing. And he was singing in Hindi.

I didn't understand a word, but I was kind of singing on top. And between the pianist and him and I, we were creating our own sound. And I just felt so incredible walking away from that. And my mom said, you know, the world was created from sound. And I sometimes forget that. I sometimes forget like when you talk about how you were capturing the cosmic world within that, you know, it reminds me of how we don't, we underestimate sound. We kind of just, it's there. And, you know, obviously for people who can't hear, it's much more powerful experience to honder on.

But it's more than that. It's the vibration, the frequencies. It's, you know, like you say, sound has so many elements to it. where do you unpack it from? And I think it's incredible what you guys are doing to put this together. So, first of all, kudos to you. And, yeah, I mean, I always ask people on the podcast 10 years ago, did you think that you'd be doing this kind of thing?

But it sounds to me like it's morphed into this for you. Yeah, that's a very interesting question, actually, about timeline. And like, sort of coming to this point, for me personally, I'd like to say something about how sound itself has brought me to my most, what I believe, my most natural expression that it took time, it took years, it took 39 years. It feels so like, or like 38. And I want to tell about how I discovered that I want to play harp. It came from also that period when I lived in that remote countryside place

where we captured sounds or part of large part of sounds for acoustic sauna. I was recording and filming this very beautiful river place nearby. I was kind of in love with it. It felt like a corner of the paradise. There were a lot of sea, like not sorry, not seaweed, river weeds and blue, dragonflies, these little blue dragonflies, and there are many, many of them, and I was standing in the water sort of naked with camera and microphone, and I was just spending my days there. I was obsessed. It was like I was making love over this river. I was just so engaged and I started to hear

the sounds of the wings of these blue dragonflies. I could really hear this like crystal-like, high vibrational frequency and the water and I started to hear harp sounds in it and melodies and I started to dream about it and have a certain kind of calling through my dreams and I started to really listen and through that deep focused listening I you know it sort of it was like hearing this voice that that was telling me you know harp harp and yeah and i i felt that i need to just try it out and i went to the class and i literally cried when i touched an instrument and it was like coming home it's so important to learn to listen because i think we are so over cluttered with noise of information thoughts what should we

become and you know this constant pursuit of something and we forget who we are and listening and sound can tell so much but we need to learn how to listen and it's a process of kind of deconstructing and shattering all this thick layers of false noise but not noises like sound but what's like superimposed on us. So it's very dear to me this way of looking at sound and listening because it sort of really helped me to be born again, you know, in a way in the past two years. And I'm really grateful for that.

And also working with Annie and learning from her and how she approaches sound has also taught me, to see it in a much more broader spectrum because I used to be very judgmental what is good sound, what is bad sound, I'm super sensitive and sometimes we can't escape a noisy road, you know, and actually you can't listen and hear symphony even in the noisy street if you just kind of switch your mode of attunement to environment to something that is more harmonized and I kind of sometimes perceive these overtones in any sound and it's like a state of consciousness that by listening and recognizing these

overtones it sort of starts to change and bring so much clarity. And on that note, deep listening by Polino Rivera is something that I've been studying a lot recently and she's one of these mentors in my temple that I carry close to to the heart. I learned a lot from her. I never met her in person, but it's really influenced how I try to build a more intimate relationship with sound and music. A beautiful journey, and I'm also just grateful with you that you could be born. again in that way and I agree with you I think that I really really believe how we perceive the

world is very much about how we perceive ourselves inside and how we kind of project that onto the world you know we can call it manifestation or you know the lenses you put on and maybe it's not just the lenses but like the I don't know what the right word is but the ears as you put on like what are you hearing you know in the world and you can shape that in your own way and if you choose to hear the beauty in it and the interesting sounds and yeah i love that and um i was getting really tearful when you were talking about reuniting with the harp because uh i get that feeling you know when you kind of come back to self it's yeah it's like you just you're like how how was i living without this piece of me you know and it's beautiful when you can so that's really

amazing and uh i am curious and it's really just been coming into my mind because it's so much in the world right now. AI music and sound is becoming such a thing. And I'm just curious what you feel of that is and what you're kind of hearing and seeing in your realm. Oh boy, AI subject. Yeah, I have a lot to say about it. We can skip it if you are.

No, no. I think it's important to talk about it because it's not going away. You know, it's here and it's about how we shape it. So we should talk about it. I think it's important. I, a bit of like also interesting background, I worked with AI a lot. I had a part-time job that funded my harp, you know, in design.

And it was like in a startup, and I was sort of art director, designer. I was just doing visual things there. And I was sort of really pushed to use AI in the ways that felt violating to me even as a designer. because it removed humanity from the process like prompting and not actually like just just even creating a shape even if it's just an icon there is this duration which has a lot of meaning to me even if it's something it's not art as design but there is something about in the process of making that takes time and that is being perpetually eliminated and it's a big problem because it fragments our experience of time and duration and it creates a sort of sense

that everything is speeding up. Do you get that sense that everyone seems to be talking about the speed of things? And it's creating this strange kind of unorganic, I would say, distortion or mutation maybe. I don't know if it's a bad thing per se, but it's just what it seems to be. And in my personal experience, it just started to create a lot of cognitive stress and feeling a bit like a factory worker and just like doing things super fast and like not to my standards as well and just the speeding up in the industry. And I'm like, what are we doing here? Like, what's the point of this? So I had like a very close relationship through that work that I've done for a couple of years. I'm not doing it anymore.

upon this journey with Annie, like, also kind of got fired and I was a bit shocked but like really happy about it too. It's kind of interesting how, yeah, how something, when something doesn't work, it like naturally ends, but that's like another subject. So having worked with AI and kind of seeing the also mentality behind, let's say, let's say power structures which inform these workflows, to me it seems very dominating and sort of, composing a certain kind of way of doing based on one profession that is like a developer engineer. And suddenly everyone needs to think as a developer through prompting and giving commands. And it's very problematic on so many levels. And in terms of music, I don't know that

much what's really happening in terms of workflows because I'm quite new to like composing and releasing in this way, which I think it's a good thing to be new and a bit like naive and just like a baby with tabula rasa. I think I see it as a advantage that gives me a lot of courage to just go for it. And there are fake artists on Spotify, just songs appear. And my friend who's a singer musician was telling that artists feel like they need to compete with AI to produce faster and I don't know my feeling is that it's just a hype that will pass through and just as I don't know just as synthetic fabrics used to be like valuable and really highly looked upon and that's something my mother spoke about at some point when we had conversation

about innovation and all of that and eventually you can still feel that it's a synthetic it smells weird no matter how high quality it is you know it and you will I mean I will always go for silk over like acrylic maybe it's like a very sort of gross comparison but I see same with whatever is artificial

we as humans have like a nose to sense what's what's artificial and what is not artificial. And I think it comes back to the same point of duration and evolution that has its own pace and has its own kind of aura. So I think that, or my hope is that things that are real, things that are sensed, things that are soulful and embodied in all the senses like a life, performance, a life song, you know, when you would sing to people in the space, in the church, in the room, in a concert, that sort of direct experience will be so valuable that, and if it's going to become rare amongst all these AI flops out there. And yeah, and I think that, well, my hope is that maybe this will bring us to appreciate

what we really are in terms of relating to each other through self-expression and realness of it and the struggle of it too. And I think that I'm hoping also that industries across all spheres will realize that AI should be used as a way to help our creativity to flourish, but not to be replaced. I'm a little bit sometimes what's going on why like these AI videos I mean what's the point doesn't impress me at all like higher engines and that you can now make look real what's not real and I can still tell usually what's AI what's not but like what's I'm a bit like why why are we doing this it's a bit strange to me so yeah these these are like many many thoughts and opinions about what's happening and what I'm sensing Yeah, but I personally don't feel threatened by it because it can be very useful and powerful tool.

It's just like anything, you can create a lot of goodness with it and you can destroy a lot of stuff if you misuse it, just like fire, going back to the same fire as a tool. In a way, AI is fire. It comes from this evolution of how humans use tools. and you know some people say AI is evil or AI is like it's not it's just how how humans collectively choose to use it so my wish is that we use it well I'm very much on the same page as you about it and I feel like it will help us be more authentically artistic and creative and

yeah let it do the the stuff that's not fun to do you know help it automate our lives And what came to mind for me when you were saying about capturing sounds in the river and everything was, you know, AI can make a lot of electronic music and all of that and use and reuse certain things, but it can never really mimic nature. It can't really go and create that experience of being in the sound of nature and Earth and ourselves as humans. So I believe more experiences and in real life living is where we'll go to as well. And that's exciting. I think that's wonderful. But thank you for sharing your thoughts on that. And on the topic of tools and how we share sound in the world,

I just quickly want to say a big thank you to our partners, firstly RSS.com, who helps us distribute this podcast into the world. And so without them, we wouldn't be able to have us chatting and our conversations and sound in your ears as an audience. So thank you to them. And they've also gifted our audience some discounts. So if you're interested in putting your podcast live with them, you can reach out to us on the DMs and the socials and we'll give you the discount code. As well as bomb company, Blender Bombs, who are this nutritious snack. We've partnered with them.

You get 20% discount when you order with the code. the feels and feel free to ask us anything more about that on the socials. We want to hear all your feels. And then, I'm going to ask you about, something we do every time is something called the gems. So it's something that we think about what's been good in your week or, you know, that you've learned. For me, it's been to face some truth that, you know, I'm okay to be seen in the world. It's been a really big realization of that and kind of seeing where I've let myself be less than I needed to. So I watched this beautiful series called Love Life. It's on Amazon Prime via Lionsgate. And I don't know. I was just crying all the way through it. So obviously

there was a lot of things to release. But it was just a wonderful experience to let that go. And yeah, it was a big game for me this week. How about for you? I think the word that comes is patient. and I'm just breathing through difficult and turbulent times. I've been having a lot of things happening, a lot of transitions, changes, and endings, troubulances, and it's, yeah, just being patient with things you can't control and just staying in the eye of the storm and trusting the voice within and coming back to again listening listening to that

and being very patient sometimes so yeah that's been I think that's been my gem my teacher I think patience is a difficult thing to do but when when you're getting right it really helps a lot and trusting trusting is the hard part and then I really want to give a quick a shout-out to a person, place or space that we call our PPS, people, places and spaces around the world. And that's the space that we feel has the feels. And this week's shout-out goes to an organization that sells sneakers. Now, these sneakers are made completely by biodegradable material from top to toe. Beja is very well known. I didn't know about them at all, but I watched three short films at Le Grand Rix here in Paris and it was just incredible. And the way they used sound,

the way they used music in these films was just amazing to tell the story and to show everyday living of creating these products. So highly recommended to anyone. And a beautiful purpose behind it, you know, empowering people, helping the world. So yeah, a big shout out to them. We love your feels, guys. And in a very last segment, Igler, is just to ask, what is in your story? stack. So that's our reading list. I know you mentioned something earlier, but if you have a book that you'd love to recommend to the audience, yeah. I have a few. Can I recommend a few? Yes, absolutely. So the first, I would say the spell of the sensual is by David Abram. It really touched me already some years ago and it informed a lot of how I try to relate to the world and

environment. And it's really about that being a human is about being in touch with the non-human worlds. That is non-human made. And that's what makes us human. So I've really recommended. It's very beautifully written. And the way the language flows, it's very musical and very sensual. And also a soundscape by Moray Schaffer. That's something that informed Annie's process a lot. so I would like to put that forward. I only started reading it, but it's something that also influences our work a lot. And another, just one last book, it's more philosophical and harder to read, but I feel like it's a very important book for our times in terms of AI and because we spoke

about it, and I spoke about time and duration and the importance of slowing down and reshaping how we relate to pacing to the rhythm and it's it's very it's a very powerful book in that regard so it's called the scent of time gosh his name is a bit difficult it's asian by young charlhan by young chal han yes perfect these are amazing recommendations thank you we're going to add them to the stack and I, some of those sound like I really want to read them, especially the first one. And for our listeners out there, if you're looking for book recommendations, head over to the website, the recommendations from this podcast will be on there.

Yeah, and if you're keen to reach out and get in touch with Igla and Annie, we'll make sure everyone knows how to find you guys in the socials and, yeah, just thank you so much for coming on and sharing what you're doing, your inspiration. and just such a open heart that you give to the world. It really means a lot. Thank you. Like I said, it's such an honor to be here and to, yeah, to be able to voice what we're doing and share it with a wider audience.

It's really an honor. And thank you for your beautiful presence and conversation. And generally, what you do in this podcast and growing community, it's significant and much needed. If you haven't just yet follow Friday Feels on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and LinkedIn, you can share with us all your feels this week by tagging us at Fridayfeels.com. And you can also find the website at that handle. And now as you ease into this weekend, take a moment. Celebrate who you've become, what you've overcome and what is yet to come. And what is yet to come as you do the crazy and cool things that you do, as the authentic you.

You know, the truth about life and workers that it's hard, but the beauty is this global working experience that you're in while we're in it together. So keep connecting, empowering and inspiring this week. And of course, keep it raw and real. Until next time.