Arctic Auditories was a collaborative research project funded by Norges forskningsråd from 2022 – 2025. Our team comprised myself, Paula Ryggvik Mikalsen (literary scholar, UiT, the Arctic University of Norway), Za Barron (human geographer, Norwegian University of Science and Technology), Britta Sweers (cultural anthropologist, Bern University) and was led by Katrin Losleben (feminist researcher, UiT, the Arctic University). Silje Gaupseth and Lena Aarekol from the Polar Museum were also involved with different phases of the project.
Arctic Auditories sought to listen to “hydrospheres” (water environments) of the High North through local, migrant and indigenous ears, aiming to discover whether shifting sensory emphasis to an aural register could reveal more about changing environments that have historically tended to be visualised. According to our academic statement, “through engaging in diverse listening processes, we seek to understand collectively non-hegemonic knowledges about how humans and more-than-humans live by, with, and in changing Arctic waters. On this basis, we aim to provide additional layers to the cartography of the High North. The findings will be conveyed to the wider public with an exhibition at the Polar Museum in Tromsø”.
Fundamental to the project were a series of collaborations that adapted soundwalking methodology and I was involved in the development of this; with Losleben, I conducted a number of research interviews with sound artists who had deep connections to northern hydrospheres; I also researched representations of sound and environmental conditions in Arctic fiction and non-fiction; and I produced an online soundmap for Radio Aporee that was inspired by the ‘conductors’ who created our soundwalks.
Under the auspices of Arctic Auditories, an ‘audio zine’ called “Flowing, Flushing, Freezing, Streaming: Listening at the Intersection of Human Interference,” was created and broadcast on ResonanceFM. Derived from a workshop developed by the inspirational Polina Medvedeva and Andreas Kühne and hosted at the Tromsø Kunstforening / Tromsø Center for Contemporary Art / Romssa Dáiddasiida.
In 2024, I created the CD Powerlines (Loavgavvári), a 55 minute composition in which a series of sound devices were deployed on the slopes below Loavgavvári / Fløya near the city of Romssa / Tromsø some 350 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle to generate field recordings that are left largely unprocessed (apart occasional EQ and layering one recording over another). The composition was distributed on a CD released by Rural Situationism. The impetus for reading deeper into the theoretical, historical and technical aspects of the electrosphere, for bringing the array of different sensors on successive trips to Sápmi / North Norway, for taking these out fishing for electromagnetic emissions and infrastructural came from two comments elicited from participants on two of the Arctic Auditories project’s soundwalks.
Selected as one of best of Bandcamp field recordings for 2024, the LP got a great review from Matthew Blackwell. Focusing on Powerlines, I wrote the essay ‘Arctic Anti-Radio’ in Urbanomic’s book Sonic Faction: Audio Essay as Medium and Method, edited by Justin Barton, Steve Goodman and Maya B. Kronik.
Imagine the Arctic and you likely envision vast, snow-covered ranges, pure white and silent. Angus Carlyle knows that’s not the case. On Powerlines, he documents what he calls the “electro-magnetic north” by recording the power lines strung outside of Tromsø, Norway with electromagnetic microphones. To do so, he has to battle the elements (“I am completely unprepared for the sleet, hail, slush and gusting winds: the sheer wetness of things,” he writes). This is a single, hour-long track, but it plays out like a record full of incongruous songs: we hear his laborious trek, the electrical hum and buzz of the lines, an interrupting group of Norwegians, and seemingly all the snow, wind, and water in the region. At times it’s difficult to believe that all these sounds exist on the same album, not to mention the same walk—one of the most dynamic and varied soundwalks of this or any year. You’ll never imagine the Arctic in quite the same way again.”
In 2025, I travelled to Svalbard to record the last shifts of the Gruve 7 coal mine before its decommissioning. The Svalbard Museum facilitated access to some of the 6.5 km of conveyor belts, the coal face being worked, the various transport vehicles and conversations with miners. The conditions were intensely loud and tested my ability to record without red-lining my equipment but led to a set of recordings being acquired by the Museum archives.
Developing the material is going to be a longer term proposition but initial surveys produced two radio broadcasts: the day after my second day in the mine trip, Mort Drew played a 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 at Big Pit National Coal Mining Museum, Blaenavon, Wales; a shorter sample of the same material was transmitted on the I.A. show on Resonance Extra, produced by Zain Bador and Ed Baxter.
These “straight off the SD card” broadcasts begin at ground level as we struggle to get my headphones over the hard hat, before descending through the tunnel network to the increasingly harsh sounds of a ventilator surging at level one (the less intense setting), a section of conveyor belts 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.
