Brent (2023)

Brent is the name given to North Sea oil, named after one of the early oil fields brought into operation. In Norwegian, brent is also the past tense of the verb "to burn." The work is based on a series of sound impressions from Stavanger – Norway’s oil capital – drawing on both imagined and real sounds. The music takes the listener on a journey that begins out in the North Sea, where the echo of seismic air guns – used to locate oil deposits – ripples through the water beneath a vast, grey sky.

Off the coast at Klokkeskjærene, the sound reaches the cathedral bells that sank with a Danish vessel during a shipwreck in 1558, and the bells respond with submerged chimes from the deep. Then we hear the infernal noise of supply helicopters shuttling to and from the oil fields, hovering over the city as the bells of Stavanger Cathedral begin to ring. Along the way, fragments of Edvard Grieg’s Bell Ringing (Klokkeklang) can be heard – perhaps carried on the wind from the Stavanger Concert Hall.

The sound waves gradually fade as we drift back out to sea, where the bells can be heard only as faint, undulating echoes beneath the wide sky and an open horizon.

Eivind Buene, 2023