Recording Burning House and Fire Sounds

Last summer Pole Position had the honor of helping out on one of the weirdest recordings we have done so far. The Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson was filming a small house being burnt down, and his sound designer Chris McDonald asked us to do the sound recording of the event. It came with quite a few challenges for our Mats Lundgren who took on the job, since expected time for the house to burn down completely was 12 hours, and no interruptions for battery or memory card replacements were accepted during this time, as well as no level adjustments and no equipment visible in picture.

Realizing what a rare possibility this was to capture unique material, we also contacted Kim Nedertorp at DPA Microphones who were kind enough to sponsor us with two DPA 4060HD to mount inside the house, and that eventually would be lost in the fire, but hopefully give some really rare material before they died, which is exactly what they did. A total of 14 channels were recorded.

The video is now part of Kjartanssons exposition “Scenes from Western Culture”, displaying at Palais de Tokyo in Paris until January 10. A few clips from the video can be seen an heard here.