A Sounding

Out on the prairie before the sunset the artists set up in the field near the pond the beavers had enlarged into a lake. The group had been working together for months, visiting damaged lands from Illinois coal works through the Missouri lead belt, finding all that led them to Picher, OK. The artist, Gavin Kroeber had been connected to LEAD Agency by a tribal environmental department staff person 6 months ago. Since then, Gavin and his team had been creating and collecting the sounds that have now become a newly released limited edition vinyl record.

Over the weekend, the group gathered for a concluding event, and I was able to welcome them to the land that has not been harmed by industry or extractive mining over 25 miles away from that harmed land.

It was a sound event I was allowed to host, on land being stewarded so differently than the places the group had spent so much time experiencing during the last year.

They did come and they made sound on, for and with the land, witnessed by the unseen and the few who sat together taken by the droning, mesmerizing sounds we were allowed to share.

Gavin Kroeber is a Tulsa Artist Fellow, a 3-year position with this project only 6 months into his tenure, which we know will evolve further with time. “The Tulsa Artist Fellowship is a place-based, durational award dedicated to supporting visionary arts practitioners.” LEAD Agency and myself have known a previous Fellow, Kathryn Savage, the author of Broken Glass.

NNN Cook, Nokosee Fields and Josh Levi were joined by Bailey Stephenson who brought her harp to the grass covered space out on the land. Aaron Owens had scouted out the location and we all discovered that evening the magic the sky’s sunset added.

I was allowed to sit and speak into the harp. One must say yes and try a thing, and that was truly different. Who could hear? Are the words sentences? Can feelings be shared that are felt so deeply this way? I am left wondering.

There were guests who came and walked the field as the sounding traveled across the water, across the fields. I visited the patch of tallgrasses and videoed them moving in the wind and wonder now if the sounds beyond the grass will be heard when listening closely.

How could I describe the work or sounds? Gavin’s description:

This performance is one part of a wider, eponymous sound art and critical spatial practice project exploring Ozark mining landscapes, initiated in St. Louis’ constitutive hinterlands: the Old Missouri Lead Belt and Southern Illinois Coal Belt. 19th-century St. Louis can arguably be understood as an extractivist war machine: digging up Illinois coal, melting Missouri lead, producing armaments for the St. Louis Arsenal, and provisioning the genocidal military forces at Jefferson Barracks.

Gavin and his team visited post-industrial territories and performed “soundings” like I heard here on the land. He calls them sonic experiments. And I would agree.

If their Lead & Coal: A Sounding had kept recording when the lights were turned off the speakers, the sound systems and amplifiers they would have caught the sounds of the night’s life returning when the insects, the crickets, the birds began settling in for the night with their amplified voices surrounding us.

I am going out to that space tonight to listen for them again and hope the hard freeze won’t have silenced them for the season. I long to hear their sounds, as I resonate with them too.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim