“It was odd, but really fun,” said Adam Cooper about his time spent helping to record the sound of an empty coalmine. “To put it in one word, I’d say it sounds cavernous. But it also has its own complexities and depth to it.”
Cooper and his colleagues spent time down an old drift mine to capture the “sound of carbon” for a new musical commission that will premiere this weekend.
The piece includes the reverb of the mine as well as music played by colliery pit bands and interviews with former miners and their families.
Titled Ancestral Reverb, it was commissioned by Durham Miners’ Association and will be heard for the first time at Durham book festival on Saturday.
The recording, in a mine shaft at Beamish Museum, involved blasting out different sound waves into the space and recording what came back.
“You subtract the original waveform from what comes back so you’re left with the sound of the space,” said Cooper. “But you need to blast out lots of different kinds of sounds to get the full effect.”
Those sounds included white noise and jazz drumming. “It was a weird experience because you are standing there listening to the drip and the dredgey sounds of the mine and then you have a jazz standard blasting out.”
Cooper, the director of a climate hope organisation called Threads in the Ground, said the interviews with retired miners had been a humbling experience.
All the transcripts went to the poet Jacob Polley, who has written a spoken word piece that goes with the music.
“There is a complexity because the stories are different depending on who you talk to,” said Cooper. “For some it is danger and the terribleness of the work and the lifestyle. Other people just tell stories about the lads they worked with – the solidarity and the pranks.”
The work features, from 1903, some of the oldest known recordings of colliery pit bands combined with music played by the current Durham Miners’ Association brass band.
They have been weaved into the piece by the musician, producer and DJ Bert Verso. “The composition is a bit like Moby meets Brassed Off,” said Cooper.
After the premiere there are plans for an exhibition about the project as well as the release of a vinyl record, embedded with coal dust.
Cooper is aware that the project comes in the same year that the last coal-powered power station, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, was closed and at the beginning of different energy policies from the new Labour government.
“It feels like a flux moment, an inception moment. We’re marking that with this unique music that is drawing on more than a century of history.
“I think a lot about the deep time nature of the work.”
He is optimistic about the future and believes we are in a renaissance moment. “We are reinventing what it means to be human in this new climate reality. That’s why this piece is important, it’s giving people permission to exert their creativity in climate thinking and climate change work.”
One copy of the vinyl release will go to the British Library, which means future generations – perhaps intrigued or horrified or both – will be able to hear for themselves what carbon sounds like.
If there are people.
“I believe there will be,” said Cooper. “You and I, our generation … the changes we set in motion by 2030 will shape the future that all humans inherit and inhabit.
“There is an argument that we are the most powerful generation of humans that will ever exist which is this incredible privilege and power that we hold.
“I genuinely believe future generations will look back on us and call us carbon reformers.”
