At Tate Britain: Emptyset

By Charlie Fox

When a nuclear strike seemed inevitable during the darkest hours of the Cold War, the BBC outlined a procedure to be followed in such an event and assembled a collection of radio programming judged suitably entertaining for the surviving public in the aftermath of the blast. Listeners suffering through the horrors of radiation sickness or covering the bodies of dead relatives with sheets in accordance with the instructions given on the government’s Protect and Survive public information films could escape momentarily with an episode of Hancock’s Half Hour or the music of Julie Andrews. The coming of the bomb would be announced across all television and radio stations, accompanied by ‘Dalek music’ (probably a merciless radiophonic drone) and repeated flashes of light.

In preparation for Emptyset’s Trawsfynydd installation at Tate Britain, I’ve gathered all kinds of information about nuclear sites – ‘Trawsfynydd nuclear power station was shut down in 1991 and is currently being decommissioned by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’ – re-read the irradiated sections of Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) and found some stuff about how ‘the chemical waste, the nuclear waste, this becomes a remote landscape of nostalgia’, then abandoned it, and researched various catastrophes involving power stations and/or radiation. All of which is immediately thrown out of my head when I enter the room and experience the immense ferocity of the piece itself, with its concussive bass, stretches of toxic noise and writhing static. Onscreen, footage of the site, abstracted beyond recognition by digital trickery and layered with atmospheric murk, loops on and on – for how long I’m not sure (it’s the purpose of such assaultive stuff to obliterate your sense of time). It was audible before I reached the building. Emptyset was on the air.

This is not what might be expected from art about the afterlife of nuclear power. Following catastrophe or in decline, almost all of it features soundscapes of uncanny vacancy, sinister humming and haunted silence. Take Heavy Water: A Film For Chernobyl (2006), with its meditative footage of ruined interiors, climate of electronic lulls and susurrations and strangely disconnected narration, the blank cadences echoing, perhaps not accidentally, the patrician iciness of Patrick Allen’s voice-over on those Protect and Survive films. In the BBC’s Threads (1984) and Peter Watkins’ The War Game (1965), nuclear winter unfolds in nightmarish muteness, intermittently punctured by the sobbing of survivors and the howl of wind transmitting fall-out.

According to a North American report from 1961, in the wake of a bomb or catastrophe, ‘most of the familiar sounds would be missing. Birds and insects would be dead, so you wouldn’t hear them. Traffic would be dead too – or very nearly so. And the factories, of course, would be out of operation. It would be a silent world to which you emerged.’ Noise vanishes and an eerie hush reigns.

And here we are also moving stealthily towards the territory of the ruin. Trawsfynydd is on the brink of becoming a ruin of the future, and post-nuclear art is littered with ruins and wreckage, abandoned spaces and sinister zones. Jane and Louise Wilson have dedicated themselves to exploring similar forgotten sites in works such as Gamma (1999), shot at a deserted, decommissioned nuclear storage facility, and ‘Nature Abhors a Vacuum’ (2010), a photographic series documenting the abandoned city of Pripyat close to Chernobyl. Gamma, like Trawsfynydd is full of disconcerting drones and sudden bursts of malevolent noise, as if any intruding presence rouses some dormant menace within the building. In each film, you drift through these fascinating spaces, inhabiting somewhere formerly forbidden but now as Trawsfynydd‘s press material puts it, ‘at the end of its functional arc’ and edging into the slow process of decay. ‘Nature Abhors a Vacuum’ is, just like Trawsfynydd, another symptom of contemporary ruin lust, with its interiors overrun by nature, degrading and at the same time taking on a strange kind of grandeur. Ruins are bleak but always sumptuously so. Isn’t the experience of examining those covetable monographs like The Ruins of Detroit or Left London an uncanny negative image of leafing through certain home interior magazines? And Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) is inescapable here, too (still bewitching but, like David Thomson, I identify most with the dog): that sense of entrancement by industrial space, and of trespassing on an area which possesses, as Geoff Dyer writes in Zona (2012), his book-length essay on the film, ‘a slumbering sentience’. The disused hydroelectric plant in Tallinn, which doubles as the magical Zone is full of strange resonances. The wind wearily sighs through it and Eduard Artemiev’s synth score seems to alternately rumble from the polluted earth or drift mistily overhead. Malevolence hidden and energy banished, all these buildings are gradually transforming into enormous tombs onscreen, haunted by their history and slipping into further decline.

But in Trawsfynydd, no space slumbers or stretches out for contemplation. This space is fiercely alive, even whilst coated in thick, eerie phosphorescence. Everything takes place at manic speed and ferocious volume; the effect is hypnotic and incapacitating. Against other sound pieces drawn from similar co-ordinates, this is purposefully aggressive, damaging and loud. Plot it against Jacob Kirkegaard’s Four Rooms (Touch, 2006), which contains the resonances of four sites in Chernobyl’s Zone of Alienation obtained by recording their near-silent ambience, playing back them back and recording the results repeatedly until sound emerges in drones and atmospheric murmurings. Absence is made audible in long, dark spells. Nothing so gentle here. Trawsyfyndd is concerned with hitting a more visceral frequency, as if recalling the site’s past as a monumental power source. I think of the sign of enforced workplace cheer displayed on the canteen wall inside a nuclear facility in Mark Aerial Waller’s film Glow Boys (1998): ‘where science never sleeps!’

This is what might be expected from Emptyset. Paul Purgas and James Ginzburg like things to be relentless, abrasive and overpowering. Sleep is not a possibility. Their work is minimalist and precise, drawing force from an austere index of jagged textures, jackhammering rhythms, electrical jolts and all-over claustrophobia. Track titles like ‘Void’, ‘Interstice’ and ‘Core’ suggest some especially bleak territory mapped with geometric exactitude and worked by forbidding digital programmes.
Their discography – three full-length albums, a clutch of EPs and 12’‘s, each of which should be handled like a weapon – takes the total force of contemporary techno, welds it to noise, and can turn, as per ‘Armature’ on their most recent EP Collapsed (2012), gloriously propulsive: it flattens everything. That Collapsed was released under the auspices of German record label Raster-Noton, home of sound artists known for a certain severity like Ryoji Ikeda and Carsten Nicolai, gives some indication of their seriousness and sense of purpose.

Against much of contemporary bass music’s lithe resistance of anything as distracting as ‘content’ (what does the music mean? It doesn’t matter, it just works and takes the body in the right way, into the possession of rhythm and clout), Emptyset are assiduous in their attention to processes, experiments, particular Events and methods of making noise. Consider the occult undercurrent to last year’s LP Medium, recorded at Woodchester Mansions in Gloucestershire – yet another abandoned space, a site of rumoured magickal activities and rituals, an accidental bat sanctuary in which, according to Purgas, ‘stairs lead nowhere and there are fireplaces suspended in mid-air’. Medium was the attempt to translate this space into sound, capturing its uncanny atmospherics and buried resonances, sculpting pieces from feedback, echo and ghostly room tones- much of the same rubric concerning translation underpins Trawsfyndd. The outcome on Medium is a powerful, immobilizing object, carved out of metal, full of punishing high-frequency howls and blizzards of noise. Technology and architecture become involved in some dark, mutual metamorphosis, producing material which is imposing and brutally mechanical but also nastily, thrillingly organic, festering, overrun with decay, lichen, detritus.

So into the room I went. Trawsfynydd is a slight work – more slight than minimal, not so much economical as attenuated – but still powerful and disorientating, all reassuringly huge. The images are where it fails. Everything is fed through the eldritch X-ray effect and much else is hidden in darkness so it resembles a surveillance tape hit by a little radioactive damage: monster’s lair or final level on videogame dystopia?

Sound and image operate in delirious correspondence: shadow for slabs of bass, caustic textures twinned to harsh, pulsating shapes. This fits in with the aesthetic of their other videos but through in its rigorous chilliness and abstraction, you get a phantom space, a stagger through an unreal site. Trawsfynydd might be there in sound but it feels so much like just watching the video for some music and nothing more with all its familiar digital contortions and graphic flux. The rewards of the process are hollow. The immense, anxious meaning of the site, that aura of secrecy, catastrophe and desolation, gets lost in the feedback loop.

The soundtrack, though, is astonishing. Set at that bludgeoning volume and playing through high-grade equipment you feel the full richness of its texture, all the bristling edges, riots of pure noise, squealing high-end and always that thudding rhythm underneath which begins to feel warm, almost cocooning, after a little while. Their work has its own particular gravity, all pressure and devastating heaviness, it drags everything down into the void.

Maybe the shadowy presence of the nuclear power station serves to obliquely underline a particular continuity within their work. This is the latest mutation of industrial music, the discipline which stretches back to David Lynch and Alan Splet’s sound design for Eraserhead (1976). ‘Collapse’ is, after all, a translation, in fact, of the German ‘kollaps’, the name of the great Einstürzende Neubauten record made in 1981 which has the same sort of metallic nastiness running through it and echoes their obsession with architecture and decay (the group’s name translates as Collapsing New Buildings). The same electronic extremity can be found in the work of Finnish duo Pan Sonic through records like Kulma (1997, another architectural title, meaning ‘angle’ or ‘corner’) and Katodivaihe (2007) where black holes of noise meet with brittle rhythmic ingenuity – Afrika Bambaataa’s 1982 ‘Planet Rock’ after an ecological disaster, everything overcome by toxic sludge.

It’s awesome and monolithic and afterwards my stomach feels like the interior of a beehive, electrified. (This might just be my private response to bass pressure: my friend reported no such symptoms). It ran for three hours; contemplating the effects of such repetition, I didn’t make it to the end. Sound like that deforms you: this is its pleasure and its pain. Such things are not only the domain of masochists. After everything’s collapsed you can begin again.