Hot Salvation

In the summer of 2022, HKW Berlin asked Kristen Gallerneaux to make an hour's worth of new music to be performed for the first time at their Cosmic Awakening festival that same year. So, naturally, she hit the road with some mics and a little bit of gear, driving five or six hours to the McClintic Wildlife Management Area near Point Pleasant, West Virginia, where she began to gather sounds for the new body of work she'd been tasked with creating. There are stories here - of process and place. McClintic itself is a charged environment, and a wild one, sitting strangely at the crossroads of world and weird history. But right now, today, we're concerned with TNT. See, McClintic wasn't always McClintic.

"From 1942-1945, this site was known as the West Virginia Ordnance Works or 'TNT Area,' in reference to its history as a WWII-era explosives manufacturing facility," Kristen writes. An immensely destructive abundance of "over 720,000 tons of TNT were produced daily on the grounds. A series of concrete 'igloo' storage huts were erected and covered with earth as camouflage from enemy aircraft flying above. These structures are the only architectural clues that remain of this landscape’s former life."

Astounded by the acoustic properties of these domes, "now overtaken with 'legend tripper' graffiti," she captured stomps and claps and coughs and chatter as it all mingled with nature. Later, back at the hotel, headphones on, she began manipulating and arranging fragments of an archival recording of a West Virginia sacred harp choir into her own chorus. The next day, at sunrise, she returned to McClintic, stomped through mud and brush with her laptop and speaker, and, stepping into the ominous black of a dome, played her choir loud - recorder in hand.

The sounds captured that morning became 'TNT Chorus' - the heart of the set played in Berlin last November, almost a year ago to the day as I sit here typing this. Over coffee this morning, when asked about the track - an intensely moving combination of gut-rattling low-end drone and a heartbreaking, overwhelming mass of voices - Kristen said, "It's about the terrifying sublime. And reversal - the reversal of destruction."

'TNT Chorus' is taken from Kristen Gallerneaux's forthcoming second LP, The McClintic Chorus.