In the early 2000s, I made my first boat-crossing to the untrue island of Orford Ness. ‘Untrue’ because The NesUntrue’ because The Ness-–as I’ve since come to call it––is a ten-mile-long shingle spit that curves south along the Suffolk coast like a bracket, joined thinly––but still joined–- to the mainland at its northern end. Shaped by storm, tide and longshore drift, The Ness is startlingly dynamic. Between 1812 and 1821 alone its length shifted by nearly two miles. If you could view the Ness as an aerial stopmotion film shot over several centuries, you would see its long stone tail whipping around in the North Sea.
Because of its isolation, for seventy years (1913–83) the Ness was used by the Ministry of Defence for secret weapons-testing; from air-gunnery and bombing during World War One, to the environmental testing of British nuclear weapons in the 1950s and 1960s. It is, therefore, a landscape produced by a collision of the human death-drive and natural liveliness. Now it is a conservation site unlike any other, unnerving in its juxtapositions, where decaying ferro-concrete test laboratories are re-colonised by moss, bracken and elder, black-backed gulls build their nests in broken control panels, brown hares big as deer lope across shingle expanses cratered by explosions –– and the wind sings in the wires of abandoned perimeter fences. If you were to imagine a landscape co-designed by Andrei Tarkovsky, JG Ballard and Tacita Dean, well, you might begin to come close to The Ness.
I’ve returned to Orford Ness dozens of times since that first visit. There’s no English landscape that has haunted me more deeply, or drawn me back more often––and I am only one of many to have fallen under the Ness’s eerie spell. In the course of those repeated returns, I’ve learned to perceive some of the more withdrawn and secretive aspects to The Ness. I’ve learned, among other things, to hear The Ness –– to tune into its subtle, shifting soundscape, in which the military industrial and the natural-historical twine and whine off one another. “Listen. Listen now. Listen to Ness.”, begins the second section of Ness, the book of mine to which Drew Mulholland’s work here forms a soundtrack: “Listen. Listen now. Listen to Ness. Ness speaks. Ness speaks gull, speaks wave, speaks bracken & lapwing, speaks bullet, ruin, gale, deception. Ness speaks pagoda, transmission, reception, Ness speaks pure mercury, utmost secrecy, swift current, rapid-fire…”
Drew Mulholland knows how to listen to a place. How to lay ears to a landscape and catch the voices and utterances that surface into the skull. But fidelity is not his aim here ––and nor should it be with such a deceiving, treacherous site as The Ness. The tracks you hear are––in their distortions and manipulations––truer to The Ness’s unsettlements and resonances than any others I know. They hover somewhere between field-recording and haunting. Acoustic elements have been worked over until they are scarcely recognisable, surviving scantly as hyper-mutated catalysts. Mulholland even used the place itself as the distortive force; he gathered lichen species found on The Ness, ground them nearly into dust, glued the resulting powder onto a length of cassette tape, played and recorded the lichened tape, then stretched the recording to ten times its original length – before splicing it and adding reverb and echo. The resulting tracks are fabulously unfaithful to their origins on the untrue island.
They bleep, shiver, rattle, quiver, shudder, detonate.
There are footsteps, drips, the clatters of doors and minds being closed, as well as the warping cries of the Mellotron. Interference of several kinds crackles throughout. Throughout, this remarkable soundscape echoes in its unsettling patterns the ‘environmental testing’ of nuclear weapons (stress testing, vibration testing, temperature testing that occurred on The Ness under the veil of the Official Secrets Act:
“For Ness is a place to improvise. Ness is its own realm with its own rules.
Don’t look. Don’t tell. Don’t understand. Don’t ever remember.”
Rob MacFarlane; Hannover, Autumn 2019
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