Probably best known as a sound artist and fiddle player with Magic Tuber Stringband, Dowsers, and Weirs, Courtney Werner has announced her debut solo album, Tritium Forests, out February 26 via Thrill Jockey.
Heavy Water, Magic Tuber Stringband’s latest stuio album, was inspired by Werner’s work as an ecologist on the Savannah River, a site heavily contaminated by a nuclear plant built by the US military in 1952. Throughout that album, alongside her fiddle playing, can be heard watery and avian field recordings that give their music a sense of place and which include songbirds and woodpeckers alongside a radioactive waste canal.
For her debut solo album, her work as an ecologist surfaces again. As stated in the notes of this release, Werner, despite being classically trained, rediscovered her relationship with the violin through North Carolina’s old-time and experimental music communities, developing a practice rooted in improvisation, extended techniques, drone, and repetition. In a similar manner, the field recordings – the everyday sounds recorded as part of her work, are presented through a smililar experimental lens, accentuating the very presence of the wildlife she is recording. The title of her lead single sierra one whiskey eight, and the remaining four tracks, sound like a scientific reference points, yet the sound, which includes coyotes, barred owls, and whip-poor-wills recorded in the dark, pre-dawn hours, is both etheral and almost spirtitual, the coyotes as much an instrument as her spare fiddle playing. As the dawn light increases, as if tightly bound to each other, her fiddle lifts with the bird song. “I tried to imagine myself as another voice in the soundscape, responding to and communicating with the calls,” says Werner. I love how she references her improvised pieces as field notes in the comments below, taking the very nature of her work into an alternative reality.
Through careful listening and improvisation, Werner creates a dialogue with an ecosystem shaped by decades of industrial contamination, capturing its remarkable abundance and resilience.
The field recordings you hear on Tritium Forests document the wildlife inhabiting 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, Werner began a research study on the soundscapes of its contaminated forests. She explains: “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.”
While on paper, this album’s concept may sound similar to Heavy Water, it takes a different approach, relying entirely on improvisation and overdubbing:
Werner’s acoustic monitors, strapped to trees throughout the site, automatically recorded for two hours each morning from April through August. She combed through the resulting recordings, noting moments of activity, before sending selected material to Nathan Taylor (Softer Recordings), who balanced frequencies and brought individual voices into focus. These recordings became the foundation for improvisations Werner and Taylor developed over two evenings in July 2025 in Carrboro, NC.
“Tritium Forests is a requiem for the radioactive swamps and riparian forests of the Savannah River Site, in all their persistent, glittering beauty.”
Pre-Order (DL/CD/LP) via Bandcamp: https://magictuberstringband.bandcamp.com/album/tritium-forests