Field Recordings & Magic Tuber Stringband

This section of a great interview with Magic Tuber Stringband in the June 2026 copy of The Wire really struck me. It relates to the influence band member Courtney Werner’s field recording work on a former nuclear weapons production site in South Carolina had on the band’s Heavy Water album. “Werner’s field recordings appear on every Magic Tuber Stringband recording, sometimes as a textural element added after the music was played. But on Heavy Water, found sounds are used in a more interactive fashion transmitting layers of historical and natural information about the Savannah River Site. After the 800 square kilometre site was established in 1950, about 6000 people were relocated, and the area has been off limits to the public ever since. It contains active facilities, shuttered reactors and power plants, and the razed town. Werner obtained access when she took a job in 2023 as a researcher tasked with determining if leaked nuclear waste was making the local songbirds radioactive.…