FRONTIERS OF SOLITUDE

Movement meets stillness and noise meets quiet in the composition. We can hear the rhythm of footsteps of a walker roaming through the landscape permeated with the noise of the machines. However, to make a good recording it is sometimes necessary to stop and listen to the surrounding sounds motionlessly. We chose extracts from many hours of recordings, hoping that they capture the mood of the melancholic country where the traces of industry can be found as far as the ear can hear. The documentary is also meant as a commemoration ceremony for, hopefully, the past of that country, which used to be called “the Black Triangle.”  

The composition contains mostly recordings of the environment and interviews made as part of a sound art workshop during which we walked through the countryside around Most, Duchcov, Záluží, Mariánské Radčice, Libkovice, the monastery in Osek and Jezeří Chateau. The workshop was led by Peter Cusack, who pursues sound journalism and has recorded in such places as the vicinity of Pripyat in the district of Chernobyl, Ukraine, or the drying Aral Sea on the border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. 

If you find yourself in the countryside around Most, you quickly realise that there is one prevailing sound: the legato of the machines and the staccato of the stones falling onto the conveyor belts. The deep rumble can be heard many kilometres afar. How far it is carried depends on the weather, humidity and wind direction. The mining work as such does not appear very interesting to a person standing on the edge of the mines –the slow motion of the huge machines and mechanisms removing the overburden is mechanical and distant and the landscape down there is almost deserted. The stripping and removal of coal and its change into energy sound impassioned.  

The geological and mechanical clash of the machine and the landscape and of metallurgy and rocks is pervaded with the sounds of water, wind and an occasional intermezzo of conversation. Water refers to prehistory – to the time when there were large lakes all around the place – while the sound of water reminds us of the time when the sediments on the bottom were being created. The ocean resonance in a certain part of the composition is made up of recordings from the area of a large near-by petrochemical complex, into which one of the many pipes intersecting the countryside empties. Inside the pipe, dark, greasy, carbon or sulphurous sludge keeps flowing. In contrast, in other pipes there are light kaolin solutions. All of the liquids flow from refineries and power plants and are collected in settling tanks, from which the water goes to treatment plants. From the treatment plants the water flows back to the mining areas or is directed into the Bílina River, whose bed has been moved due to the mining work many times in the past sixty years. In the Most region, the water flowing out of the slopes of the Ore Mountains is drained by means of water pipes because otherwise it would flood the mining areas. Another sound of water comes from the bottom of an overgrown fountain which used to adorn the square of the vanished town of Libkovice. In fact, the fountain is the only relic of Libkovice.