Two different broadcasts.
The first broadcast was a rough and ready collection of audio recordings from Gruve 7 mine in Svalbard. The day after my second day in the mine trip, Mort Drew played a longer selection of my recordings on “Signals Radio – transnational forms of resistance in mining communities” as part of the celebrations to launch Sadia Pineda Hameed “Signals” show Big Pit National Coal Mining Museum, Blaenavon, Wales. “Signals Radio” broadcast from the former mining complex (you can see the pithead gear winding gear behind Mort in the image above.
My “straight of the SD card” recordings begin at ground level as we struggle to get my headphones over the hard hat, before we descend through the tunnel network to the increasingly harsh sounds of a ventilator surging at level one (the less intense setting), a section of the six km of conveyor belt rattling past and the continuous miner machine tearing into the coalface, alarm signals flaring, wheels crunching, shouts against the racket. Then a quieter moment during a shift break as we try and hear the mountain itself amid my fearful breath, groans of exertion and ice crystals falling onto that hard hat. A shorter selection of the same material was played on on I.A. show on Resonance Extra, produced by Zain Bador and Ed Baxter.
The second broadcast was a collaborative work, an ‘audio zine’ called “Flowing, Flushing, Freezing, Streaming: Listening at the Intersection of Human Interference,” this time on ResonanceFM. Derived from a workshop developed by the inspirational Polina Medvedeva and Andreas Kühne for the Arctic Auditories project and hosted at the Tromsø Kunstforening / Tromsø Center for Contemporary Art / Romssa Dáiddasiida. The audio zine brings together recorded sounds, compositions, and live performances by myself and Anna, Nathalia, Lars, Karolin, Anna, Femi, Lea, Sofía, Sindre, Mattin, Grisha, Anders, Johanna, Gwen, Martha, Eimear, Enrique, Lio, Steve, Ylva, Florentine, Polina and the anthropogenic waters of Tromsø, Romsa in northern Norway, Sápmi.