Jacob Kirkegaard — 4 Rooms

As a child growing up in the late 70’s to early 80’s, the nuclear fear was very clear in my mind. I often wondered too, what it would feel like to walk into a place that had high radiation: would you smell, hear or sense anything different?. I often wondered too, what it would be like to walk through the areas left mainly peopeless by the Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion in 1986. There was something very strange and deeply sad about the pictures, I had seen of the rural town's and city scapes overgrown by vegetation, there once busy thoroughfares eerily quiet.

Jacob Kirkegaard has produced four drone/ sound works that were recorded with in the zone of Alienation, in Chernobyl. He picked four rooms, that would have been places, where people would have gathered in large numbers; A church, an Auditorium, a swimming pool and gymnasium. Kirkegaard recorded ten minutes of what ever sound the rooms emitted, then played the sound back into the room, repeating the process up to as many, as ten times. The resulting sound works are attempts to trying and capture what radiation does to the atmosphere, and how it resonates from within the four rooms. The resulting drone scapes have a strange haunted feel to them, there are no pictures of the rooms with the packing; but the sound makes the rooms very clear within ones mind.

Swimming pool has the eerier underwater feeling about it.  Among the sound elements, theres a  haunting sound of what could be  something pushing it's self off from the side  of a  decaying pool filled with stagnate, rubble-filled water . The track starts off quietly, but slowly  builds up its layers of eerier harmonics. The sound seems to really weigh down heavy on you, as it builds up. It almost feels like the air it’s self is  pressing down on you, leaving a sour taste in your mouth. Each track has its own interesting and different element and tone, but each is heavy with the same strange cold weight feeling. It never erupts into any thing really going towards noise, it’s just deeply hypnotic patterns of sound.

One of the more interesting drone/ sound albums I’ve come across, which is both compelling  in its concept and its execution. It’s also a  chilling reminder of what we have done to our planet. You can see detail of how the project was recorded, including  pictures of the four rooms here