As Above So Below
2024
Halley Research Station of British Antarctic Survey on the Brunt Ice Shelf, Photo: A. Dubber
As Above, so Below (2024) is a stream of audio, bounced and reflected between the mirroring walls so that it has no apparent origin. The noise rains down and blows around, emerging everywhere. It makes a whistling and clattering, like ice blowing over snow. There are ghostly cries, chirps, a damp breezy sound, like a rainforest at night. There is a forceful ripping sound of wind tearing feathers, like migration into a headwind over the sea.
The work sounds like birds, and then trees, and then insects and flowing water, and then a different bird. But what you are hearing has come from somewhere quite different: lightning activity and geomagnetic storms in the high atmosphere, captured by a large radio antenna on the south polar ice shelf, and recorded by the British Antarctic Survey. The artists recomposed these recordings to make the spacey, ethereal arrangement that reaches your ears. You are listening to electromagnetic fields that are ordinarily inaudible to humans. When you hear it, you feel that you recognise it, but you don’t.
– Daisy Hildyard, ’As Above so Below’, in ‘Pink Noise‘, published by Distanz, 2025
Concrete Rotunda at the Langen Foundation, Neuss
As Above so Below. This work’s title invokes the Hermetic adage that ultimate ‘macrocosmic’ reality is reflected on a smaller scale, within the ‘microcosm’ of our world, and in each of its individual parts. The sound recordings that have been arranged for this piece present celestial events as if they were living beings: what sounds like birdcalls are actually acoustic signals generated by lightning activity and geomagnetic storms driven by the sun. These sounds were collected by space weather scientists at the British Antarctic Survey’s Halley VI Research Station via a Very-Low-Frequency (VLF) receiver located on the South Polar ice shelf. Broadcast from the centre of the Langen Foundation’s exterior Rotunda, the sound recordings create a sound mirror in which celestial noise resonates with the chorus of birds and insects commonly heard here. The recordings also form the soundscape of Troika’s animated film Terminal Beach.
’As Above so Below’ by Daisy Hildyard, in ‘Pink Noise’, p.75, published by Distanz, 2025