Sluice 2025 'Infrastructural Futures Emergency Broadcast'
- Matthew Shenton
- Feb 15
- 2 min read
In May 2025 some of my sound work was included in Sluice's 'Infrastructural Futures Emergency Broadcast' as part of their 2025 Iceland expo. I recently revisited the work and enjoyed hearing how the tracks work together as a whole.
Background
Sluice asked for work that responded to how "our lives are shaped by infrastructure that both sustains and controls us." I submitted six sound collages for the expo, with each piece being informed by one of the six ways to die as outlined in Vinay Gupta’s 'Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps'. Sluice loved my submission, and included it in their global broadcast.
The Sounds
The sound palette for each sound collage contains sounds predominantly recorded around the UK county of Suffolk, but also from Belgium, France, Germany and The Netherlands.
The six collages bring the everyday sounds of infrastructure to the foreground: air conditioning units, water treatment plants, industrial scale farming sounds and a nuclear power plant all produce sounds that we accept in our daily lives without realising it. How do we feel when these sounds are emphasised and distorted? What other sounds do these infrastructural rackets obscure? What can we do about this?
Each composition features elements from its siblings:
'Hunger' - field recordings of intensive farming methods sliced and combined with electricity.
'Illness' - the repeated opening of pharmaceutical blister packs and the gurgling of plumbing
'Thirst' - a rural water treatment plant obliterates the natural sounds of the countryside
'Too Cold' - in blustery conditions the groaning of Sizewell B combines with usually hidden sounds of electricity captured on an Electromagnetic Field Microphone
'Too Hot' - The catch 22 that the electrically powered air conditioning and extractor units used to cool buildings only further contribute to climate change and global temperatures rising
'Injury' - Apache helicopters circle amongst hospital heartbeats and shipping containers
The work was originally broadcast on Friday 23rd May 2025 on Seyðisfjörður Community Radio in Iceland, and online for a global audience. It can be heard in full below. I hope you enjoy.
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