Angus Carlyle – Six or Seven Conveyor Belts in an Arctic Coal Mine
Friday, 11 September⋅10:00 – 10:45am
This morning at 10 am we have a most unusual guided tour – coal miner, Tarjei, takes Angus Carlyle deep underground into a working Arctic coal mine just prior to its closure. ‘Six or Seven Conveyor Belts in an Arctic Coal Mine’ is the resulting sound work.
“The closure of Gruv 7 mine in Arctic Svalbard in June 2025 ended a century of coal extraction on the archipelago. Just before the final shift, the Svalbard Museum’s Anatolijs Venovcevs and Haakon Unhammer Kvaale negotiated access and the miner Tarjei provided an expert ear.
Deeper underground the tunnels got lower and the temperature dropped, each three-hour trip was experienced in a pulsing red zone of intensity yet I was only recording the edges of things – not working there for 10 hours straight on fourteen-day shifts with responsibilities for my own and my co-workers’ safety. The sheer ferocity of the environment frequently defeated my field recording abilities, often too panicked to focus on the microphone or the recorder settings, these recordings of the six (or seven) conveyor belts clip and distort, surge, falter, harshness that contrasts with several conversations that share knowledge, care, awe and occasionally laughter.”