Tritium Forests

Tritium Forests is the debut solo album by Magic Tuber Stringband’s fiddle player, Courtney Werner. Inspired by the cyclical unfoldings of natural soundscapes, her improvisational strokes weave in and out of the many-layered animal voices that form the dense ambience of the Deep South in summertime. 

The field recordings on Tritium Forests document the wild inhabitants of the nuclear exclusion zone surrounding the Savannah River Site in rural South Carolina, where Werner worked as an ecologist. During her second summer on the site, she began a research study on the soundscapes of its contaminated forests. Werner writes:

“The forests that stretch across the zone are designated as sacrificial buffers, the idea being that their soil, water, and plant and animal life will serve as ‘sinks’ for the toxic contaminants released by decades of industrial activity. I installed acoustic monitors in remote grid cells affected by hazardous waste and recorded the daily rhythms of the birds, frogs, and insects whose bodies are meant to absorb it. The improvised pieces collected here are fieldnotes of sorts- the outcome of the months I spent studying those recordings.” 

Conceptually, Werner drew inspiration from the same sources for Tritium Forests as for Magic Tuber Stringband’s Heavy Water but took a different approach by relying entirely on improvisation and the intentional use of overdubs. She collected the field recordings using Wildlife Acoustics SM4 microphones strapped to trees, set to automatically record for two hours at dawn from April to August. The record began with Werner combing through her field recording and keeping notes on timestamps with interesting activity, be it whip-poor-wills duetting, barred owls chattering, or lively choruses of dawn birds or frogs. Selected recordings were sent to Nathan Taylor (Softer Recordings), who balanced out frequencies, created space, and drew out certain voices. These tracks were the foundation for the layers of improvisational sessions recorded by Taylor over two evenings in July, 2025 in Carrboro, NC. 

“I tried to imagine myself as another voice in the soundscape, responding to and communicating with the calls,” says Werner. The resulting pieces, named after the grid cells on the Savannah River Site where the recordings originated, are embellished with varying layers of instrumentation. On “november four echo one,” Werner uses extensive overdubbing and extended techniques to replicate small insect sounds that dominate the majority of South Carolina soundscapes in the summer. On “sierra six whiskey four”, the shrieks of the fiddle usher in the roar of a helicopter flyover, which then melds gradually into the low drone of strings.

Tritium Forests is a requiem for the radioactive swamps and riparian forests of the Savannah River Site, in all their persistent, glittering beauty. Werner, who typically collaborates in performance with other musicians, replicated the process by improvising with the voices of birds, coyotes, insects, and frogs. The resulting album is a transformative experience. The listener is transported to the wetlands, immersed in their natural rhythms by way of thoughtful, delicate, and deep listening of a gifted improvisor.