Gimme Radiation

German sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard draws some strange music from Chernobyl’s deathly silence on his sophomore album, 4 Rooms, and the way he got it is downright eerie. Decimated after the meltdown of a nuclear power plant in 1986, Chernobyl, Ukraine only exists now as a radioactive wasteland. Kirkegaard captures and studies the city’s radioactivity in a tonal way by recording four empty rooms ("Church,” "Auditorium,” "Swimming Pool” and "Gymnasium”) chosen for the human traffic they once hosted. He then plays the recorded silence back into the room, and records that process ten times over per room. Somehow, some spooky warbling drones end up on the recordings that may or may not be the eternally suffering souls of the dead crying out in pain. In a word: whoa.