BJ Nilsen – Ore [LP]

"A geological field project by BJ Nilsen.His work primarily focuses on the sounds of nature and how they affect humans. Recent work has explored the urban acoustic realm and industrial geography in the Arctic region of Norway and Russia.

For Ore he made field recordings made in a variety of mining areas exploring a wide range of elements and processes involved. The 12" picture disc comes with a poster which delas with BJ Nilsen his fascination and the process of working he developed for this project. In Ore different layers of time are overlapping, from the deep time of geology to the superfast time of our current economy and the future.

'We dig deep into the earth to get to layers of deep time, extract it and use the ancient material, in the case of coal, for electricity, for heating the house, commodities, to type a message on a phone. It’s absurd when you start to think about it. So much time is compressed in this material and it’s burned up in minutes. It’s not like wind or the sun, which give you immediate energy. It’s millions of years compressed into hard materials that are burned up, like coal, or painstakingly refined to yield useful metal. This ungraspable void of deep time fascinates me: the time compressed in iron ore, the coal that started billions of years ago as organic material, the gold flecked asteroid far away in space, or the more recent ‘slambanken’ in Kirkenes, a manmade landscape of unusable slag that might be mined in the future.’"

De Player, 2019