Osek by Sonicity

All the sounds you are listening to were created by a post-industrial heritage landscape in the border region of the mountain range between Saxony and North Bohemia — The Ore Mountain mining region (Czech “Podkrušnohoří”). The title OSEK refers to the gathering place of ten years ago. At the end of September 2015, this huge Romanesque former Cistercian cloister was almost empty, its dormitories cold, its corridors very resonant. We arrived there to resume the international https://frontiers-of-solitude.org/ project, having begun in June of the same year, which took place in and among the regions of North Bohemia, Northern Norway and Iceland.

The atmosphere of the entire "Lignite Clouds Expedition" (the title of the Czech section of the event) was quite serene and melancholic, as were the ambits, church, cloister garden, the dark hills and the high sky above. The entire architectural complex seemed desolate, reflecting the landscape and the related soundscapes, which have witnessed the traces of almost 800 years of exploitation; the extraction of silver, copper ore and minerals, and recently — probably the most cruel of all — fossil fuels.

A hundred years ago, there was a dense railway track network in the Most basin, which is now gone, replaced by a giant earth-organ consisting of hundreds of kilometers of pipes. They connect both the existing and abandoned mines, petrochemical plants, tall chimneys, tailing ponds, power stations, and cut through the hills and fields, which were once the rich agriculture orchards of Bohemia. In 2015, only occasionally did we encounter any fruit trees or people walking around.

Several of the recordings on OSEK were made later, during the Soundworms Ecology Gathering, which took place at the end of September 2017, to continue the discussion and to share ideas and concerns about this area, and about the possible role of acoustic ecology. This location - an old place of pilgrimage was the parish house of Mariánské Radčice only a few kilometers from Osek.

The surrounding landscape was blanketed in an autumn fog, coal dust, and the waves of a deep hum coming from the heavy mining machines nearby, down in the Bílina open pit. Nevertheless, as you will observe, there were also chirping birds, singing water in the brooks and inside the pipes and … the wind howling over the grass, reeds and trees.

The complex system of surface mining, petrochemical industrial parks and the power plants fuelled by the extraction of brown coal during the 20th century, erased many of the human settlements and cultural monuments. Apart from more than 100 municipalities, including the 650-year-old royal city of Most, hundreds of square kilometres of old cultural landscape were scrapped, hundreds of years of sophisticated drainage and water management systems, the entire ecological stability of landscape, and its agricultural and forestry potential were degraded. But since the 1990s, nature is slowly recolonizing this human-made wasteland.

OSEK was released in May 2025 as a commemoration of the ten years since the interdisciplinary project took place. We would like to dedicate it to Ibra Ibrahimovič, a local photographer and ecological activist who died in December 2024.

With each track you can open a link to the website aporee.org, an online sound map where you will find many more location recordings by different phonographers. There, you can further explore the landscape whence the OSEK tracks originate.

https://frontiers-of-solitude.org/meeting-at-the-osek-monastery

Sonicity is a virtual entity, devoted to soundscapes, field recording, acoustic ecology, slow music, slow food, slow movement, quick actions. based in Prague. Occasionally making the recording public. see: sonicity.cz
contact: zvukac@centrum.cz

sonicity.cz