Global A Go-Go

Cornershop across the border

Sun, Mar 2, 2025

This week (Sunday March 2, 1:00-3:00 PM on WRIR, for two weeks afterwards at wrir.org/listen, check your local listings for airing on other radio stations, and any old time at my podcast site), it’s a special edition of Global A Go-Go: two hours of sounds recorded, selected and mixed by Serge Bulat.

Serge is a multimedia artist who was born and grew up in Moldova, right near that country’s border with Ukraine. He immigrated to the USA in 2009, and he’s frequently here in the Central Virginia area.

However, “frequently” is a relative term with Serge. He’s truly peripatetic, and his wanderings have taken him recently to Malta and Greece, to the French Pyrenees to make field recordings, and to Meredith Monk’s Garrison Institute for Voice As Practice. And Serge’s work has traveled recently to Oxford University in England and to Burning Man.

I aired two hours of Serge’s Cornershop Mixes on Global A Go-Go last fall, not long after his latest album Omorphita Cornershop was released, an album that was inspired by the time Serge spent in the divided capital city of Nicosia, Cyprus. The Cornershop Mixes were built around some of the global music that he’s been listening to in his travels.

Serge has now made a second set of mixes for Global A Go-Go listeners. These focus on the music of Moldova, Ukraine, Romania and on Roma or gypsy music in general, and they also have a healthy selection of his own field recordings. Serge calls these the Cornershop Across The Border mixes, and that’s what we’ll be listening to this week.

Podcast: radio4all.net/program/119762
All the podcasts: radio4all.net/series/Global%20A%20Go-Go

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