UNDER BOOM (2024) is a hallucinatory audiovisual experience shaped through a combination of human-shaped sonic ecologies and deep time. Framed as a listening station and a geological hotspot to imagine society’s shifting sonic world, the work takes the audience through an anthropogenic experience with infrasound, an inaudible bandwidth of 0–20 Hz filled with shockwaves caused by human activities. These include mining blasts, burning space debris, air strikes, atomic bangs, sonic booms, seismic guns, and the calving of ice sheets. The work stems from the discovery of a listening island in the mid-Atlantic, which due to its geo-positioning and low noise ratio is hyper-sensitive to long-wave sounds. From this island, the sonic ruptures of the Earth’s ever-changing global acoustics and politics can be heard.  

UNDER BOOM is captured using stroboscopic techniques, where anthropogenic beats orchestrate the presence of visuals. Infrasonic events become markers of visibility, entangling frequency with video frame-rates in an act to dissolve ocularcentrism. The frictions of vibrating matter, shaking sonics, and flickering images highlight the physical renderings of human sonic disasters on the Earth. What if the Earth was dancing faster and faster every year?  

The 2-channel installation alludes to the ever-sounding surfaces of our Earth, and how our inaudible soundscapes are getting louder and louder, heavier and heavier. UNDER BOOM suggests that tomorrow will be louder. Everyday infrasound energy increases in quantity and intensity as we see more and more disasters, geopolitics, land grabs, wars, genocides, colonizations (earth and space), and an inherent condition of capitalism to keep accelerating. These entanglements of devastation manifest in sound, and echo around the Earth as long waves. It is infrasound that moves our bodies to the subwoofers in techno clubs, it is infrasound that flirts with ghosts, and it is infrasound that will be the sonic evidence of the Anthropocene. 

Director, concept, research: Louis Braddock Clarke
Cinematography: Zuzanna Zgierska & Louis Braddock Clarke
Infrasound acoustic research: Läslo Evers and Jelle Assink 
Research guide: Alice Twemlow 
Curator: Yannik Güldner
Microphone design: Ronald Vester 
Site deployment: Céu Jesus 
Sound mastering: Rob Bothof
Colour grading: Martin Menso 

With support from: Stimuleringsfonds NL; Mondriaan Funds NL; Instrument Inventors Initiative;  Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute; Rewire Festival 

Exhibited:
Rewire X Proximity Music Instrument Inventors Initiative, The Hague 2024
Rencontres Internationale Paris/Berlin CWB, Paris 2024
Loods 6, Amsterdam 2024/25
SeeYouSound, Turin 2025 
Recontemporary, Turin 2025