The Sunshine Miners released on Woodford Halse

The Sunshine Miners cassette on Woodford Halse

Conflux Coldwell’s new album is out today. The Sunshine Miners explores a disappearing industrial landscape near Coldwell’s hometown of Leeds, UK. Many country parks and wildlife reserves in this part of Yorkshire have a hidden history as quarries and open cast mines. This was the domain of the “sunshine miners”, who worked the coal seams above ground, an oft-neglected part of Britain’s industrial story. After decades in terminal decline, coal mining in the UK ceased entirely this year, with no plans to ever restart. This milestone seemed like a good opportunity for the artist to explore his own family history in mining, and the lasting impact of opencast on the natural environment. Coldwell began the project making field recordings of wildlife at these sites, supplementing them with layers of drone and analogue synthesiser sequences, including the use of an early 80s Casio keyboard that he bought in a former mining town, not far from the derelict remains of the coal-fired power station at Willington. As such, The Sunshine Miners feels like a natural successor to his work on The Phantomatic Coast (2022), where a haunted sense of place was also evoked using field recordings, tape loops and samples from salvaged equipment and old media - another kind of mining, in a way, searching for sunshine in the dark. 

Coldwell has also made an accompanying experimental film which uses his invention of “deconstructed rephotography” to explore the hidden hauntings of these places using field recording and old media: https://www.michaelcoldwell.co.uk/work/the-sunshine-miners

Listen and purchase the album here:
https://confluxcoldwell.bandcamp.com/album/wf-93-the-sunshine-miners