I arrived in Tromsø a couple of days ahead of our Arctic Auditories schedule so that I could spend the weekend recording, trying to test an idea that has been gestating ever since my ears were pricked by a comment from Annabelle’s March 2022 soundwalk. Just a casual remark during the debriefing, but the idea of the ‘electrical sounds of the countryside’ has been gnawing away at me ever since, sharpened by visiting the cable car later in the same year and connected to occasional previous forays into electro-magnetic recordings, including my contribution to 2021’s Clouds and Tracks project, the track “Il Vertice” on 2016’s Silent Mountain and the 2015 film with Chiara Caterina Into the Outside.
Although our collaborator Paula Ryggvik Mikalsen had predicted precisely these weather conditions, somehow her words had not sunk in and I am completely unprepared for the sleet, hail, slush and gusting winds: the sheer wetness of things. It is not just that the downpours threaten my equipment (and all-the-more feasible fear since I ruined my lovely LOM stereo mics in Ersfjordbotn) or that I’m having to spent a lot of unexpected time drying out, but I believe that the moisture-laden air is charging the microphones with a stronger sense of traffic, overflights and construction rumble – admittedly all acoustic atmospheres I’ve previously sought out but not what I want for an ‘electro-magnetic north’ that connects to themes emerging in some of my reading over the last 12 months.
One advantage of the damp weather is that as well as a better sonic propagator, the air becomes a better electrical conductor and the high voltage pylons on the hill above Solligården strip electrons out of the air molecules and start to form currents that create intense heat and the characteristic crackles and spitting sounds. On my first trip very little of this made its way down to my recorder; returning with a pre-amp, a monopod and patience, I did better, pulling in a potential narrative of birdsong, skiers breaking the snow, my breath and the electrical effervescence.
Although tempted to spend the next morning staring at the grey-blue sea and listening to Röyksopp’s Profound Mysteries Vol. 1 – 3, I determined to head out into the sleet and slush and after a trudge through knee-deep snow that had been softened by rain, I found an electricity pole in the woods near a small stream. The pole had a guy-line that had slackened, its wooden anchor rotten, but, holding a contact mic that Rory Salter gifted me as tightly as I could, the wire could be heard picking up gusting wind and the tinkle of sleet that might work with the sound of hail falling on the the windshield covering the mono mic hanging over the neighbouring stream..
ersfjordbotn 