Nate Hofer: Big Underground Echoes
I’m listening to Nate Hofer’s album “Decommisisoned” while I write this. In Dispatch #3, I noted Nate’s artistic endeavors connected to old underground missile launch facilities. While working on the first several drafts of Sound Effect Infinity, I’d known nothing about his work. The silo thing had always been a part of the story. They were nearly mythological when we were growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. We had regular safety drills in school partly to practice what we would do if our sector of the state were hit in a nuclear attack.
Why us, you ask? Because there were dozens of silos hidden underground within a one hundred mile radius of Columbia where we lived.
Thankfully, we never got bombed by the “Rushkies” or the “Red Menace.” Eventually our government began to decommission the old silos. Some were dismantled then buried. Some were simply cleared out and left for people to sell or repurpose.
That’s where Nate Hofer comes into the picture. As I was putting the finishing touches on the Final Working Draft of the Sound Effect manuscript, I stumbled onto the eerie pedal steel recordings Nate made inside an Atlas F missile site near Wilson, Kansas.
In a TEDx Talk Nate gave a few years ago, he noted “the loneliness of the unlistening.” Indeed, his silo work offers up surprisingly huge echo and reverberation. No doubt, I was developing a fondness for music that is the cousin of the good old High Lonesome sound. I’m dubbing it Dark Lonely music. For a week there as I revised Sound Effect Infinity, I played his ambient soundings and thoughts about the sonic effect of silos over and over again.
In that TEDx Talk, Nate is making a connection between the decay and abandonment of the original decommissioned silos (there are still several hundred active launch sites) and the global penchant some hawkish politicians have for weapons and nuclear arsenals and the weird standoff all of that creates. His work underground with pedal steel gave him the opportunity to face “old ideas” against “new sounds.” He also says, quite insightfully I think, that those Minuteman installations “stood in the fields abandoned, like old ideas.”
You can find a particularly poignant exploration of his original work at his YouTube channel where he demonstrates the interesting (and infectious) uniformity of prolonged reverb echo inside the silo chamber he recorded in. That clip sparked my imagination and provided me with certain clear directions for Sound Effect Infinity to take in the end.
Check out more detail on Nate’s work below:
Pedal steel guitar vs. nuclear missile | Nate Hofer | TEDxKC
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