Helgoland
2012
Artist: Lasse-Marc Riek
Please listen with headphones or good speakers
Lasse-Marc Riek talks about Helgoland (2012)
Nicholas John Jones: Lasse-Marc, in this issue of PRAKSIS Presents we are featuring recordings relating to your work on the islands of Heligoland (Helgoland, in German). What is this place, and why is it special to you?
Lasse-Marc Riek: Helgoland is an island archipelago some seventy kilometres off the north German coast. My work there came from a very direct and personal perspective, because I first visited Helgoland as a child and was deeply affected by its isolated, paradisical quality. As an adult, I discovered the complicated history of the two islands that make up the archipelago. Hitler and his regime had huge strategic ambitions for it as a military and submarine base in World War Two, and between 1945 and early 1950s the Western allies attempted to bomb it out of existence. After the war, Helgoland’s small human population was forced to leave. Abandoned, it became a haven for over 350 species of birds. It’s now a nature reserve with a small resident community and a bird research centre plus various completely protected areas that are normally off-limits to everyone. So it’s a powerful emblem of survival, and an example of the need to protect our ecology. It sustains a microsystem of breeding birds that depend on the area’s isolation for its existence. Helgoland and its ecosystem may be small in the big scheme of global environmental problems, but it’s a precious and vital example of ecological resurgence.
NJ: We’ve just been listening to extracts from your Helgoland recordings. What were the logistical issues recording in such a wild and restricted place? How did you go about things?
L-M R: Parts of the main island are riddled with tunnels and caves and the terrain has been impacted by colossal levels of bombing. I recorded the guillemots you’ve just been listening to in a rock formation that I refer to as the ‘Chapel’: a kind of ruined natural chapel with no roof but with ‘walls’ thronging with thousands of birds. The birds have no effective experience of human contact and they started bombarding me because I was a threat. When you are granted access to this place, you are required to wear a helmet at all times and carry a phone, so that you can report in frequently to say you’re Ok, you’re still alive! I eventually left the chapel so as not to disturb the animals any more than necessary: it’s not a place for humans. I left my recording equipment running, gave the birds a chance to calm down and retreated into a man-made military tunnel for several hours. It was a strangely peaceful situation, with yellowy-orange sunlight reflecting off the shiny walls of the tunnel, and me sitting listening on stereo headphones to the nearby colony of birds.
In general, experience doing field recording clearly shows you that sound is unpredictable and can’t be controlled. The accidents that arise demonstrate the infinite number of variables in play: human activity, the weather and much more. So when I’m exploring a site and reflecting on what it is telling me, I really take time, walking around it and talking to the people who live or work or research there. They know their environment intimately and will have particular knowledge and views about it. After that, I immerse myself in the place and begin to test different recording strategies, including different configurations of microphones and different mikes: contact mikes, or devices I can leave in place for long periods, or ultrasonic detectors that can pick up sounds outside of the human hearing range – bats, for example. I like to stay overnight in a tent or maybe even longer. On one project I took four days sitting almost motionless in a tree watching a pair of eagles with an egg in their nest. This was a protected site that required permission from conservation authorities, of course; a really sensitive situation, very intense and physically demanding – almost like a meditation. The essential elements are to take time, to be completely respectful of the place that you are in and to be fully in contact with it, almost as if it were a face-to-face communication with a human being.
The recordings from Helgoland are unedited and the outcome of extended visits at different times over the course of a year. Also, many technical experiments: finding different positions and configurations for my microphones, testing different perspectives. The point was not to archive the sound of birds for its own sake but to explore what might be done with the material: to create a tool for others, to show them this extraordinary and beautiful environment and explore its literal and metaphorical power as an example of survival.
NJ: I think the imagery of survival relates to the individual life cycles of the birds as well as the islands as a whole – could you say more about this?
L-M R: Yes, you are right: one of the big motivations for the project was to witness a dramatic situation that arises for just a couple of weeks each year, when the common guillemot chicks launch themselves off the cliffs and into the water for the first time. They are incredibly vulnerable, partly because other species of birds such as ravens are also raising chicks, and for them the baby guillemots are much-needed food. Added to this, these birds can neither fly nor swim very well. I witnessed the chicks jumping at night, when there was a stormy sea. One of the parent birds stays on the rocks, while the other waits for the chick in the sea, and although the chicks seem so unequipped for it, they have to jump off the rocks and fly then deal with high waves. The situation is full of energy. It confronts you with the drive to survive in a very raw way.
My recordings encompass the full soundscape of the island, including its seals and its human infrastructure. On the Dunes (the smaller of Helgoland’s two islands) I recorded the sounds of a huge bull seal that appeared to be sleeping, but was actually patrolling the beach and its broods of pups. Behind it was Helgoland’s airstrip and in the course of the recording you can hear a plane take off and fly right above the seal. The recording of the seal and the plane forms the final track on the Helgoland CD. Helgoland’s wildlife and its small human population, both residents and tourists, exist in very close proximity. Through careful regulation and lots of resourcing the combination seems to work. This is another level at which the Helgoland recordings point towards the resurgence of life and to ways in which co-existence is possible.
Lasse-Marc Riek, footage of the guillemot's dive on Helgoland
NJ: The tracks on the CD are quite short. How do you make decisions about editing?
L-M R: With a great deal of reflection! The tracks that you hear on the Helgoland CD are very short, just two to four minutes in length. My approach to recording tends to be very extended, and on Helgoland I ended up with long recordings, several hours in some cases. I also spent extended periods of time there simply listening without recording, making extensive notes, and immersing myself in the site in a private, meditative way rather than treating as if I was on a kind of hunt for something extraordinary – the principles I spoke about earlier on. Through this the concept of presenting the Helgoland recordings as a portrait of a landscape – as a series of very concentrated episodes telling the place’s story – gradually emerged.
NJ: How do you decide when to record, and when not to record – what needs to be explored through recording, and what doesn’t?
L-M R: That’s an important and complicated question and something that I started thinking about quite early on, when Roland Etzin and I set up the Gruenrecorder label to distribute field recordings, soundscapes and sound art. You have issues to do with accessing protected areas and the potential for vital habitats to be disturbed. Travelling to record in distant places has an environmental impact, as does data storage. There were many “early adopters” when the concept of environmental field recording first emerged, and I realised it was important to be connected and to share. I built up a sharing network through releasing works and making material available to others, and it was easy to accept that if I have friends or contacts working in far-flung places – Antarctica, let’s say – there’s absolutely no need for me to go there. Better to be the person who dedicates herself to knowing where she really is – for instance by exploring in detail what is present within a 30-kilometre radius of home and using creative licenses to share recordings. I accept this is a somewhat Utopian way of thinking; the sounds within field recordings are in the public domain but recording is actual work requiring skill, knowledge, time and equipment. The ultimate solutions to the economics of this creative discipline are bound up with much wider ones, to do with alternatives to capitalist economies, and a strong community acceptance that culture and the environment both deserve substantial support.
NJ: Do you have a key piece of advice that you would offer to an aspiring field recorder?
L-M R: It’s tricky to generalise from my own individual practice, but I might suggest some of the things I’ve already mentioned: to ‘stay with yourself’ and take time; to be fully in contact with where you are, and in the process, you will also discover your own inner landscape. For me, at least, it is all about slowing down and stepping out of everyday distractions in order to ‘read’ and observe what’s there. That might simply mean standing in the kitchen and looking at what’s outside the window; this can potentially tell you a huge amount not just about the immediate environment but the whole world. There is so much literal and metaphorical noise around us. We need to calm down and start again.
