I'm a follower of odd human artifacts in wild, empty places. I don't care much about history per se, nor do I advocate for human anything being left/littered in those few remaining wild spaces (or being taken from them), but coming across some rusted over, half-buried railroad part from a 19th century logging operation or a coil of dirt-red cable above an overgrown timber skid is a peculiar feeling. Some small part of it is plain eeriness in the presence of what one might interpret in death terms, or at least some presence otherwise of a void or extra emptiness. It's the thrill of a ruin, but one that manages to magnify the ruin just by virtue of being so far away from anything else built/synthesized by technology.Here's something: if you spend enough time in the woods or wild places generally (even real small ones, which are everywhere, if harder to find) you start to forget that as a human person you're supposed to think of those places as empty. That's a good thing because of course these places aren't empty and one might imagine the argument that they're less empty than, say, a city streetscape with all of its dead, blank surfaces. What finding rusty human junk in the woods does is put wildness into relief. That preternaturally flat (level) and open spot in the thick of the forest is very likely the ghost of a hunting cabin, an artifact, and it has the effect of maybe not so much calling attention to its own out-of-placeness as calling attention to the much larger human vacancy that makes that out-of-placeness feel almost more than real.I think that makes sense: an piece of old junk lonely in the wilderness has the power of calling attention to all of the junk that isn't there. It's a presence that conjures deep absence in one powerful bolt. (There's probably a good word for that.) You might consider London-based sound-artist Eric Holm a connoisseur of these voids. His album Andøya was born on an island of the same name, located 300 kilometers above the Arctic Circle in Norway. People are scarce on the island, with most of its few thousand residents living in one village, and ruins are plentiful. The island also features a NATO air base and a commercial rocket testing range, with the focal point of the prior being surveillance.Indeed, the island of Andøya boasts an array of listening stations. Holm's record is based on contact mic recordings made from a telegraph pole supporting a high-voltage line connecting two of the island's stations. The recordings are expanded and reconstructed into an overall pretty amazing album of something like songs or at least soundscapes of industrial ambiance. It's great and just-uncomfortable, a sonic distillation and magnification of technological void as presented by technology itself. Listening to the album, it's not the electricity you're consumed by, but the empty island that it cuts through. Wilderness.Stream the whole thing at FACT, enjoy the videos above.
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