This is a project I could not say no to. Being with people who are interested in the same things as oneself and having the chance to concentrate on a single project over an extended period has been a unique experience. Timing it with the spring thaw was a good idea. I thought it might be a bit early, but there was a feeling that it was happening there and then, new birds arriving all the time, everything changing from one day to the next.
This arrival of new life with the spring each year, it surprised me how powerfully it affected the entire experience, along with the sudden snow-melting. There is water running and dripping everywhere. I was particularly fascinated by brooks and running water; one element I have concentrated on in particular is dripping water and the rhythmic structures it creates. It began up on the glaciers and stayed with me through the whole period, almost like a project within the project.

Another point of departure for me was to imagine how the landscape might have sounded 100 years ago. Trying to get away from places where you can hear cultural sounds, but not being too purist. This became very clear to me when I visited an engine museum and began to fantasize about which cultural sounds Grieg might have heard; a ships engine from 1907, for instance, might have been the most modern cultural sound Grieg ever heard. I am interested in the development of cultural sounds. An office today sounds very different from an office just 20 years ago. While natural sounds remain very much the same, cultural sounds are radically different. Listening to an old cultural object is like travelling in time. It’s not that I want to reconstruct a historical soundscape, but I believe that Grieg was one who spent a lot of time outside and was inspired by nature. It was an important aspect of the natural-romantic ideal behind the building of the nation. Some of his pieces are very concrete, while others are more abstract interpretations. I am like a signal processor; I like to knead my sounds after I have recorded them.

I think the participants in the Sleppet – The Sound of Norwegian Spring project have been put together in a single group due to our common awareness of the sounds we are interested in. Usually we would arrive somewhere and everyone would go off and do his or her own thing, but we have also had moments where we have all had the same idea of recording a particular sound. Such as when we came to Utvær and everyone realized that the distinctive sound of the wind in the cable was unique to the place and everyone immediately wanted to record it. The same thing happened up at the lighthouse; everyone wanted to record the sound of the rotating lens.

It doesn’t work in the way that one person can record a sound and give it to the others later. We each have our own method and we listen for different things within the sound with the help of our various pieces of equipment. Nonetheless I half agreed with Jana to let her have some of my dripping sounds in exchange for rumbling from avalanches up on the Brenndal glacier. But I am not sure whether it will really work… If I use somebody else’s sounds in my composition, it feels wrong; I have to know the entire history of each sound. Even though I have previously worked with sounds from archives and CDs, I feel that I am much closer to the sound if I have been involved in the whole process: finding it, recording it with my own equipment, bringing it home, looking after it; it makes me feel humbler and more respectful of that sound. The original location of the sound is also an important element which I bring into the compositional process.

I think of orchestration when I am out hunting sounds. I know that I need knocking sounds, blowing sounds, scraping sounds so that I can orchestrate the music almost like a classical orchestra of percussion, wind and strings. On this particular trip, however, it is a bit of a simplification to say that birds and wind equal wind instruments, dripping becomes percussion and string sounds are made up of ice noise and certain deliberately provoked sounds of ice and stone scraping.

Something I did become very aware of on the trip was the way in which cultural sounds increasingly pollute nature reservations and protected areas. Modern technology and the sounds it produces occupy more and more of our landscape. In Sandane it was quite easy to find places without any cultural sounds, but in Bergen we had to drive up to two hours away from the city. Even then it was difficult to record during the daytime, because there were frequent interruptions from cars, aeroplanes, tractors etc. Finding areas of Norway that are free from cultural sounds is a vital part of a strategy for the preservation of natural sounds, which can improve the quality of our lives. The environmental perspective does not offer this a single thought.

The most memorable experience was a morning trip to Lysekloster; we got up at 3.30 in the morning to hear the dawn chorus out in the forest. The intense birdsong that came with the dawn gradually subsided in the course of the two hours it took to get properly light. Not a car or an aeroplane within earshot – the aeroplanes started up at 6.30 by which time we had finished. It was a very powerful experience. We had been there during the day to do research, and there were cars, tractors and aeroplanes. All you have to do is choose the right time of day and you may still have a chance.