Stefan Helmreich on 'The Disrupted World':
:08
A hydrophonic recording of underwater pile driving, a construction sound that can greatly disturb sea animals. The sound here is of the rhythmic thump of a pile driving project that is being undertaken to build the foundations of the Block Island Wind Farm, off the coast of Rhode Island, on the Atlantic Ocean. The recording, provided to me by an oceanographer, is from a hydrophone close to the sea floor at 26 meters deep, and 500 meters away (horizontally) from the pile driving itself. I’ve left this rhythm to persist throughout the mix.
:16
A passage from Virginia Woolf’s 1931 novel, The Waves, recorded and read by ocean theorist Eva Hayward. The melancholy message of Woolf, about an ambivalent dissolution of the self in water and waves, feels like it resonates with Lindgren’s voice samples on WOMB at the same time that it might take us into the darker territories that also suffuse the underwater.
:42
A transduced sonar ping, captured in 2014 by the Australian vessel Ocean Shield and suspected to be a signal from Air Malaysia flight 370, which disappeared on March 8, 2014, and is believed to have crashed into the Indian Ocean. This sound speaks to the deep as a space of drowning…
:46
A November 6, 2017 radio communication between the rescue ship Sea-Watch 3 and a Libyan Coast Guard boat. Sea-Watch 3 was called to a rescue mission in the central Mediterranean (30 nautical miles north of Tripoli) by the Italian Maritime Rescue Coordination Center, to answer a distress call from a boat hosting 58 migrants from North Africa. Sea-Watch 3 and the Libyan Coast Guard had a conflict about who and how the migrants should be rescued, which led to a delay and the loss, perhaps, of 3 lives.
:56
Seismic airgun blasting, a technique used by petroleum companies to blast compressed air underwater in order to gather, by remote, reflective sensing, information about oil deposited beneath the ocean floor, but disruptive — sometimes fatally — to fish as well as to marine mammals that use echolocation. Audio by Cornell University marine scientist Christopher Clark. From:
www.southernenvironment.org/news-and-press/news-feed/protecting-atlantic-waters-from-seismic-blastings-storm-of-noise
>thinking now of the title of WOMB, it occurred to me — particularly because of this political moment — that wombs are not just comforting surrounds, but are also complex biopolitical objects and symbols, particularly at a time when women’s health is under threat in the US … and elsewhere … So, the next sound is
1:18
A segment from the 2017 song “Pro-Choice” by the Swedish feminist punk rock band Radium Grrris:
Pro rights
Pro choice
My body
My voice
I’ve treated it so that it’s muffled, underwater. then, at
1:30
A sample of a chant from the Women’s March in Washington DC, September 21, 2017:
My body
My choice