Notes on A Record of Fear: On the Threshold of the Audible

Abstract

The author considers the ideas behind her series of temporary audio (and video) installations collectively entitled A Record of Fear, made for the site of Orford Ness on the Suffolk coast. This remote shingle spit was a covert military testing site for much of the 20th century and is now owned and run by the National Trust. The author worked with three sound recordists to capture ambient and “performed” sounds subsequently used in three separate on-site installations. These pieces were a response to both the site's painful history and its current rich soundscape.

Everyday secrecy: Oral history and the social life of a top-secret weapons research establishment during the Cold War

“…In the contemporary mediascape Orford Ness is typically aestheticized in ways that do express the mood of secrecy as sinister and foreboding. The ruins of Orford Ness have today become a kind of Mecca for documentarians, photographers, poets, writers, conspiracy enthusiasts and assorted bunkerologists (Bennett, 2013; Wilson, 2006). In photographs, blog posts, documentaries and other media, Orford Ness is often depicted as a desolate, mysterious place.…”

“…These recollections are an important if imperfect source of public information. Given the scarcity of official documentation about the atomic weapons experiments conducted at Orford (Cocroft and Alexander, 2009: 58), and given that much information remains classified or lost, Wilson (2006: 32) suggests that to date ‘[t]he majority of what is known to the National Trust guardians about the Cold War history [of the site] has been garnered through oral testimony from ex-employees’. In the course of doing fieldwork at the site I was fortunate to be given access to some of this material: a set of recordings with more than 40 former employees carried out mostly between 2013 and 2017 by one NT volunteer.…”

“…Although the main aim of the article is to advance secrecy research, it can also be read as a contribution to knowledge about its case, Orford Ness. Most scholarly writing about Orford Ness examines it from the point of view of aesthetics of military ruins and violent landscapes (Wilson, 2006; Davis, 2006), less so in terms of the social history of Orford Ness during its active life (but see Heazell, 2010 and Kinsey, 1981). The archive of sound recordings of former workers has yet to be used systematically by scholars.…”

Sonic geographies

“…To take one example, artist Louise K Wilson has produced a number of site-specific sound works dealing with secret or hidden spaces. For A Record of Fear (Wilson, 2006) These recordings were then played back in the various spaces of the ness, in some cases using multi-channel sound systems, thereby re-animating and re-interpreting the landscape. Such practices suggest radically different ways of 'doing' geography:…”

Making material memories: Kinmen’s bridging objects and fractured places between China and Taiwan

“…Abandoned underground structures have an especial allure of uncovering the hidden, 55 and defunct military structures also have been noted to be marked by soundscapes that either amplify the dislocation from or make present the past deadly purposes of the sites. 56 After the martial law period and the gradual demilitarisation of the island, the tunnel gained an ideological function of relaying nationalist ideologies to the younger generations of Taiwanese as it was transformed into a site for national education. …”