CD – LOM

These recordings date back to 2010 and were originally intended to be used as material for an audiovisual installation at the Exhibition of Mining at the National Technical Museum in Prague. The project, unfortunately, was never realised and the recordings remained in the archives of Stanislav Abrahám for more than ten years. Meanwhile, the mine closed in 2019 and from those original audio recordings, Abrahám has assembled a 43-minute selection divided into seven parts, according to the nature of the sounds and the dramatic structure of the collage. The work is not limited to a simple document of the environment: the care with which the materials have been selected and assembled reveals a musical attention that transforms an industrial context into a matter of listening. Sounds are isolated, juxtaposed, sometimes made to dialogue with each other, in order to return a layered work that oscillates between testimony and composition. At some points the elements intertwine and overlap, creating a timbral complexity that amplifies the density of the mining environment; in most cases, however, the listener follows a single, clear, linear stereo track, closer to the direct perception of those physically on site. In addition to the overwhelming noise of the machinery, which scans the rhythms of underground work, more subtle and unexpected details emerge: the hoarse and characteristic dialect of the miners of Ostrava, fragments of scattered conversations, the isolated song of a cricket hidden in a deep tunnel, and a two-kilometer journey aboard an underground train. These sounds are accompanied by hypnotic, whistling pneumatic tubes, their steady breathing becoming a kind of continuous bass, capable of transforming the mechanical environment into an almost meditative landscape. What results is not only an acoustic chronicle of a place now gone, but also a pulsating set of information, capable of restoring emotional and perceptual dimensions that go beyond documentation. The closure of the mine in fact, gives the project an additional historical value: listening to Důl Lazy also means confronting a world that no longer exists, sounds of an activity that has deeply marked a territory and its community remain. It is therefore a work that lives between sound art and ethnography, able to combine formal rigor and perceptual sensitivity. The result retains the character of a sensitive testimony, but at the same time assumes the value of an autonomous listening experience. A document that, while emerging from a specific context, manages to speak universally about the memory of places and their transformation.

 

Stanislav Abrahám – Důl Lazy