In August 2021, the week before I moved to The Hague to begin this master’s degree program, I spent a week in rural Kentucky as part of a residency with New York City-based ensemble Longleash. We spent this week developing, rehearsing, and recording a new work together,1 but this week also left me a significant amount of time to explore the place we were staying. This residency was hosted at the Loretto Motherhouse, a spiritual center for the Sisters of Loretto,2 tucked away in a very small central-Kentucky community with a long-standing interest in hosting artist residencies — making curious, wandering musicians not that unexpected even on a property otherwise populated solely by nuns. The property has been in use since 1796 and still has buildings in use from as early as 1816. This, of course, means that not all of the property is optimal for modern use, with a handful of buildings maintained only for the purpose of historical preservation, including one building that houses a coal pit. One of the Sisters of the community noted to me that the coal pit hadn’t been in use since the 1950s, at which point the community was connected to the regional power grid and gradually did not have to rely on coal for its energy needs; but even still, the pit remained almost full, a bridge between the modern and the antiquated — and, as the same Sister noted, always ready to be relied on once again in the event of major power outages during winter.
Shortly after I discovered the coal pit and learned more about it, I was walking on the property making field recordings with a handheld Zoom recorder. Displeased with the experience, I switched from the recorder’s built-in microphone to the only other microphone I had: A small telephone pickup microphone, to be used as a cheap, low-power electromagnetic field microphone. Coal actually emits electromagnetic radiation,3 and though it certainly does not do so at the strength to be picked up by such a small electromagnetic coil as the one I was using, I said What’s to lose? and left the device in the coal pit for a short recording session.
This recording did not teach me anything about coal — I seriously doubt that its presence had any impact on the recording whatsoever, much as I would have wanted it to. However, its placement told me everything about the place itself. This recording taken in a static, seemingly silent environment was in fact full of energy and change. The power grid hummed constantly: Passing cars outside brought huge bursts of interference; workers and community members going by with cell phones brought slow, gradual change. In a place where modernity had passed by with time, the world remained in quiet, constant motion just outside, the past and future deeply intertwined. Each sound raised questions that could not easily be answered: What was its source? Who or what was responsible?
This is just one field recording in a whole universe full of them and full of places, but that’s somewhat the point. An unused coal pit was revealed as the hotbed of activity it always was, a living relic — with an emphasis on living. In this recording, place is heard and felt, not just seen, as the world vibrates, hums, and crackles in ways that we find only when we’re willing to search.