Sounds of Silence

Before my recent artist residency on the tiny islands of Fleinvaer in Norway, everybody had told me how quiet it was — no cars, no shops, just sea, sky, and the rhythm of weather. So I bought a new Zoom 360 recorder, with no idea how to use it, to try and capture the sounds of silence.

The idea for this work first came to me in Svalbard, where I began recording under the ice and quickly realised how noisy the underwater world is. Glaciers creak and fracture, the sea ice shifts, and even when I tried to stay perfectly still, the crunch of snow gear betrayed my presence. That experience taught me that silence is always layered, always alive with sound, and I carried that awareness with me to Fleinvaer.

Sitting, listening, and recording for hours on those remote islands, I began to hear the same patterns: the subtle textures of wind, birds, shifting water, even the resonance of the space itself. Just like in the Arctic, civilisation was never far away — the faint hum of planes or distant boats intruding into the edges of the soundscape. These interruptions only underlined the fragility of the environments I was working in, vast yet vulnerable.

This is a work in progress: first learning how to record, and now figuring out how to shape the material into something more than files on a hard drive. I’m trying not to let them just fall into the never-ending abyss of unfinished work on my laptop. What I want most is to find ways of weaving these recordings into immersive soundscapes, where audiences can experience for themselves that once you quiet yourself and listen, nature — like the world itself — is never really silent.