We all have musical preferences. I tend toward the bluegrass side of things. A little acoustic guitar, some good fiddle playing and a bit of raw country harmony, please. Never would I have imagined the sounds of a wastewater treatment plant could become music. But then again, I’m not a member of the New England Phonographers Union, a loose group of artists who work with unprocessed sound.
Phonographers love pure sound. And the New England Phonographers Union loves recording at the Massachusetts Deer Island Sewage Treatment Plant in Boston Harbor, where the group has turned the echoes and reverberations of pumps, flowing water, machines and digesters into high art.
Last week, the group — represented by musicians Matt Azevedo, Ernst Karel and Jed Speare — held a public concert at the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum to highlight new recordings from Deer Island. They’ve been collecting sound from the plant and its surrounding five pump stations since 2010, and this latest concert is just another chapter in their treatment-plant sound journey.
“We did not venture into this project because we wanted to record water sounds,” says Jed Speare in a report from WBUR in Boston. “We wanted to record the enormous infrastructure.”
Unlike other concerts, these noises from the wastewater plant were recorded by accelerometers, which detect vibrations. To listen to an earlier recording with more traditional equipment, take a look at this interview with the Boston Globe. I’ll admit: It is musical in a way. Maybe a little eerie. And perhaps a very new way to view — well, hear — a wastewater treatment plant.
