On March 13, 2017, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory uploaded 63 videos of U.S. nuclear weapons tests to YouTube. This footage was recorded between 1945 and 1962, and depicts exploding atomic weapons in real-time, slow motion, black and white, color, and negative exposure film. Its digitization is in an effort to preserve thousands of reels of film holding the results of U.S. nuclear weapons testing, which physicists are revisiting to collect more accurate data. The footage does not include sound.
Sound for Bombs is the soundtrack to these videos. The tracks here feature improvised analog synthesizer performances, and are intended to focus the viewer’s attention by pausing contextual thought and introducing or allowing for new ideas through sound. As unpredictable, strange, vibrant, and at times frightening as the explosions themselves, these tracks remove the footage from history (already displaced on celluloid and now online) and place it in the immediate present for viewers.
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