Silent, invisible.

One of the observations I have made during our research has arisen from the field recordings I have been making. A lot of the things I have been interested in are the different kinds of sound made by water in the environment. This has included:

the sound of of lake water glugging in a storm sewer outflow pipe

rain on the still water surface

water in the falls at Trollhättan

waves underneath the pier at Eriksberg

condensation inside a container falling into the water below near Lille Edet

It’s a very obvious thing, but it took me a while to realise it through making these recordings, that water only makes a sound when it comes into contact with something else: another body of water, an obstacle, a pipe or a rock. Water sounds are very contextual. Water animates or activates other forms. The river itself flows predominantly silently; the way water flows internally is mostly invisible too, something that became obvious when we watched the small pasta-like plastic forms they use in sewage treatment for nitrogen-eating bacteria to grow on swirling in their tank: they are so dense in the water that they show three-dimensionally the water flow patterns, surprising, because it is normally almost undetectable.

Silent and invisible: water has this quality of mysteries and secrets about it. Things are hidden in the water, or thrown in to become psychologically negated, washed away beneath it’s concealing surface. Mythologically, the river acts as a repository of secrets and strangeness - Loki hides from Odin’s wrath in a river beneath a waterfall after having engineered Baldr’s death; Hagen throws the Nibelungen treasure into the Rhine. Orpheus’s disembodied head, still singing mournful songs, floats down the River Hebrus to the Mediterranean. Set fools Osiris into getting into a box, seals it with lead, and throws it into the Nile.

I think it is partly this notion of the river as an eraser or concealer of things that informs our modern relationship with our hydrological environment; the way in which we feel ourselves to be somehow apart from this natural sytem that flows around and through us. Once our waste and rubbish is in the water, it seems as if it is absolutely gone.

Keith