Inverted Mountains

13 min., 2022

Field recording based composition by Alëna Korolëva, with voice of Eki Shola.
Recorded in marble quarries near Borba, Portugal, October 2022.

Strange but true fact: mining is responsible for nearly half of the world’s economy. The history of mining around the world can be read in the open scars that have been left when the sought after resource has been extracted. In these wounds, often larger-than-life pits abandoned by humans, new forms of life have gathered. Inverted Mountains is a documentary record of one of these spaces.

Portugal’s Borba Region is rich in marble, 400 pit mines dot the landscape, all but 50 are abandoned. In 2018 a wall of one of the biggest quarries collapsed and buried five people in a landslide.

This track offers a detailed examination of sunset at the bottom of the pit, four years after the accident. Pigeons circle in the lower levels, offering a sound of wings, while starlings and swallows gather near the mouth of the pit, 50 meters above. The natural echoing acoustics of the steep walls allow each bird cry to resonate in a living delay, as if there were thousands not hundreds of birds gathering here. At the very end, the lonely bird song is echoed by a human voice, calling out in a plaintive wordless cry, the ghost of all those whose lives were lost in this forsaken place.