Slower Than You’d Almost Want: On Wind Turbines

By Harry Burgess and Jame St Findlay

Not long ago we received an email from Harry Burgess , a member of the band Adult Jazz. He explained that there is a track on their new album about wind turbines. You can find the premiere of that song’s music video below.

Burgess had discovered that a visual artist named Jame St Findlay was making a film with a strong wind turbine theme. He wondered if we would be interested in publishing a conversation between the two about wind turbines and, I inferred, related aesthetics. 

The answer, of course, was yes—the material is valuable but I could not see a path to selling it.

—The Stopgap

Harry Burgess: Let’s start by talking about why we decided to have a discussion. I feel like that would be the first thing. So, we first met at a Colin Self thing a very long time ago.

Jame St Findlay: We danced for Colin Self in 2019. And then have bumped into each other at gigs. Many times!

HB: Many times. And then we both realised we were making work about wind turbines. This is the hook for a conversation which can go wherever. 

Wind Turbines

HB: Why wind turbines? So you’ve just had your degree show at the Royal Academy, which featured a new film of yours called The Whorl. I loved it—there was humour, sadness, beauty, strangeness and . . . wind turbines! What was your thinking behind that? 

JSF: In central northern Scotland, where I grew up, there was a lot of discussion surrounding the building of wind farms. As a child, it felt like the discussion was constant, with a lot of people saying they would destroy the landscape, ruin the views, etc.. I had always thought they were so beautiful and monolithic when I’d seen them, and couldn’t understand the aversion to them.

Saying this, I hadn’t actually been close to one or touched one until I started making my film, The Whorl, which is set partially in a variety of wind farms. In my experience, wind turbines had always been in the distance: Up a hill or offshore, they looked polite and slow moving. It wasn’t until I was stood at the base of one that I realised how truly monumental they are.

HB: There’s a scene towards the end of the film where the scale of the turbine is really established in contrast to the smallness of your character. Where the structure meets the ground is like an ankle, like it feels like the foot of an iron man. When you get the scale of it, when you see it against a person, you kind of understand people’s objections to them for their scale.

JSF: The sound they make is bizarre too, you can hear the blade cut through the air, it’s like a Doppler or whistling sound mixed with a generic, low-intensity machine hum.

HB: The cultural tussle over them that you mentioned also struck me as a really interesting flashpoint for an ecological question: Do you prioritise a picturesque sense of what nature should be over like the actual material health of it? In Scotland, in the Lake District, or wherever, none of those landscapes are actually “natural” in any sense, but come to signify “nature.” I feel like agriculture and nature are confused a lot in imagery. My sister was reading a book called I Hate The Lake District about how strange that landscape is. The only bit that would have actually been bare would be the very top of the rocky crags; the rest would all be forested.  

So I guess the tension is: Do you preserve this fake—often Victorian, Picturesque-movement vibe—version of natural beauty for people? Or do you do something that makes it ugly, but which actually materially benefits biodiversity? Because the impact on actual plants and creatures is generally minimal. I mean, obviously the odd bird is probably going to get chopped up. 

As a tangent, I’ve been obsessed by an image of a kind of hubris affecting the proposed 170km linear city called “The Line” in Saudi Arabia. It’s going to be so long and so tall that it will have a substantial impact on bird migration paths. I’m imagining this high scale luxury soundtracked by the repetitive thud of birds against the mirrored windows. It’s also supposedly an “Eco City.” It’s interesting when these things are put in contention. 

JSF: So tell me about your track Windfarm?

HB: We have a song called “Windfarm,” featuring Oliver Coates on cello, which is at the end of our new record So Sorry So Slow [see the below music video—ed]. For the song, a wind turbine became this totem of that trade-off. It’s like this desire to uphold a fetishised view of “nature,” even within the climate movement, versus what’s going to be beneficial to non-human species. 

A turbine became this totem, which was maybe hopeful about that trade-off—not pretty, but correct. Like, maybe it’s this little amulet that you wear and you go, ah, perhaps things are going to be okay. We’re going to solve it. We’ll just make all our energy from the air. They’re really legible in terms of how they work and what they’re doing, in a way that other technical solutions to climate issues are not. They’re almost devoid of the nitty gritty of data and detail about how our future is actually going to work. They can just become an . . . the word I settled on was “amulet” because there’s a slight irrationality in there, trying to ward something off. You can easily get carried away with hope. Perhaps they’re kind of dangerous in that way, maybe, in terms of creating a lack of urgency because, you know, I’m driving on the motorway in my car, but I can see a load of them so it’s gonna be fine. 

JSF: There’s something hopeful about them. They feel utopian. Whenever I fly over an offshore grid of them in a plane I feel this deep feeling of wonder and relief, as if by their existence the world is healing, divorcing myself from the reality that the only reason I can see them is because I am in a plane which is one of the many reasons the world is dying. 

HB: That’s the kind of admirable thing, to hope that’ll do it. But it requires a lot of head-in-the-sand-ness, I think.

JSF: I’ve always loved how elite they look, too; almost over-designed compared to other large industrial structures. They are sleek and sci-fi looking, harsh white, almost as if they want to stand out. I was reading recently about Disney’s copyrighted colours “Blending Blue” and “Go Away Green” that they use to disguise the monumental scale of the structures that house the rides at their parks so you don’t feel dwarfed by them. 

HB: What? So it doesn’t impact the look?  

JSF: You just don’t register it at all, it blends in with the sky. Most big factories or silos are painted that off-white sky colour. As I was saying, wind turbines have always felt so . . .

HB: Bold?

JSF: Very bold.

HB: They’re a bit like . . . millennial Apple-vibe.  

JSF: Extremely Apple.

HB: Sleek and sexy, and generally white.  

JSF: The blades are almost like leaves, or petals.

HB: Ergonomic. Kind of touchable. 

JSF: I also like how there’s no obvious access point to them—when you’re up close, that is. There’s a little service hatch, but it’s bolted like the door to a submarine. Being up close made me think of objectophilia.

HB: Okay. 

JSF: As in people who are sexually attracted to objects or, oftentimes, monumental structures.

HB: Like the woman that married the Golden Gate Bridge or whatever?

JSF: Exactly! I remember seeing a documentary in which a woman lay at the base of the long arm of a long-disused fairground ride and begged it for fluids. I think at the time everyone made fun of her and of the sexuality but when I was up close with a turbine I kind of understood it. Not that I was aroused, but something about being that close to something so huge and animate that is humming and spinning, it felt . . . 

HB: Intimate?  

JSF: I guess so, yes, but also frightening. Also, the hypnotic, steady movement turbines have adds massively to their allure for me. 

HB: Slower than you’d almost want. It feels like glacial movement, like something that is just unnervingly slow, but, you know, it would fuck you up if it hit you. 

JSF: I used to ask about this a lot as a child. I’d ask if I could touch the blades. I had this image of being able to hold on and be carried around in a steady circle above the hills. It felt like a realistic goal. Someone had to explain to me that the blades are essentially knives travelling at hundreds of miles an hour, that I would be obliterated before I even had a chance to hold on.

HB: Do you ever see ones, like lone ones maybe, on, like, a smallholding? And you look and you think, God, that’s such a shit one. 

Jame  St Findlay: Yeah. 

HB: With, like, a triangular flat blade, not at all ergonomic, and it’s like, God, what an embarrassing turbine to have on your property. 

JSF: It looks like an engine for a small speedboat.  

 HB: It’s just a bit steampunk. It’s like, fuck off. I don't want to see that. 

JSF:  Really boring. Didn’t you say that you did like a 360-degree virtual reality tour of a wind farm or something?  

HB: Yeah. When writing the track Windfarm, I was singing over this old Brian Eno drone and then came across this video from a company called Dong Energy, who are a Norwegian oil giant who have invested heavily in “green” energy. They’re all funded by big oil, basically. It’s not like you’ve got grassroots wind farm builders. I bought a little smartphone VR headset from a charity shop and did a tour of one of their North Sea sites. You can look around. It’s beautiful. Just to be out in the middle of the ocean. I did all the preliminary takes for that song while wearing the headset. I mean, it would have looked like the most embarrassing thing. 

JSF: So, you were listing things that you saw when you were there?

HB: No, I was just singing lots of melodies and phrases over and over and thinking about endings, nothing very specific at that point. Because the song itself is kind of a goodbye, I think. I think it was like a soft giving up, or a goodbye to a human narrative on earth. Trying not to be too sad, a kind of grown-up ending. I emailed Oliver Coates about the emotional tone of it and the image we connected over was the scene at the end of Gladiator where he runs his hand through the wheat field. You know what I mean? It’s like, beautiful orange sunset and the music is so emotional to the point of being incredibly manipulative, and his wife and son are there. And it’s just like, I remember as a 12-year-old or whatever, seeing that film, just being so moved; just out of my mind, having not felt such sadness and beauty. The way Olly layered up, like, 60 tracks of incredibly quiet cello was just so perfect for the emotional tone of the piece.

JSF: Did you tell Oliver that the song was about a wind farm?  

HB: Yeah, I sent both Oliver and Dan Jacobs, who made the music video, a CGI image of a wind farm with an insanely saccharine sunset behind it and the lyrics. The lyrics describe objects to do with the material reality of trying to exist in inhospitable places—desalination equipment, metal struts, and things like that. A little Mad Max. There was originally this lyric which I had to cut from it, which was, “Shut the ski lodge down!” instead of “Tear all shelter down.” I didn’t think I could pull off having that in the song, but I was thinking about those buildings perched so perilously up mountains, all the shit has to be pumped out. All the water needs to be pumped in and desalinated—all those tech-y things. I was thinking of all those objects needed in extreme environments, and retreating from those places as the start of letting go, or loosening of the grip or the dominance on the earth. All that stuff is swirling around.

JSF: I did think it was spooky when I made that connection. I was a month or so away from finishing the film when your album came out and I heard the song “Windfarm.” The final shot of my film is of an offshore farm in the distance with a soft pulse of amber coloured light emanating from it. There’s a deep drum sound and the image disappears. The tone is sad but hopeful, and I feel your album ends on an almost identical tone. It may be because you told me about the 360 VR experience, but whenever I listen to “Windfarm” I imagine the protagonist as a spirit, maybe a construction worker who died on-site, wandering the workplace without a physical form, listing off the things they see, moored there forever. 

The Whorl: Processes, Industry, and NFSCO

HB: I’d like to ask you more about your film. I did a little bit of Googling for some things that I read, which I didn’t understand. Can I ask you about the letters NFCSO? Is that a reference to the company that removes fallen livestock from farms?

JSF: That’s a logo on one of the ceramics in the exhibition yeah. The National Fallen Stock Company, according to their website, “exists to facilitate an efficient and competitive nationwide service for the collection and disposal of fallen farm animals and horses.” I am very interested in agriculture and the myriad of niche services that exist to facilitate the running of a farm, especially one that deals with livestock. I grew up in farmland, but not on a farm; I have always been a voyeur looking in from the sidelines, trying to make sense of it all from the outside. 

The concept of “fallen stock” was foreign to me until a few years ago, but when I found out about it it felt so obvious that a service like that would need to exist. In homage, the sculptural works in my show, which took the form of slip cast plastic bottles adorned with logos, were called “Fallen Stock” or “Stock” depending on if they were upright or collapsed. Once on the radio I heard a Scottish sheepherder say, “The farm is a carnival of life and death,” and that quote has always stayed with me. 

HB: Of course a service like that has to exist. A couple of the characters in your film fall down in fields or wooded areas, completely isolated in the way that the corpse of a cow might be. I guess the NFCSO struck me, because I’ve always had this interest in those two layers: The world that we see and interact with, and the one behind every single object or process. There’s often these enormous endeavours on behalf of other people to make these things happen. I was walking recently up in the Black Mountains—there’s this lovely valley with this priory called Lanthony. It was around the time of the release of the record and I was feeling kind of weird. I came across this delicious, rich, umami smell. I was like, oh my God, this smells incredible. Then it morphed, so slowly, from this incredibly delicious, pay-£40-for-it-small-plates-East-London-vibe into the most rotten smell I’ve ever smelled in my life. And there was a horse.  

JSF: Oh my God.  

HB: There are wild horses in the Black Mountains, and I think it must have been sick or fallen. Its flank had swollen so massively. I was blindsided by the feeling of having gone from trying to sniff into it for the deliciousness and then being so repulsed by what it turned out to be.

JSF: Horrible.

HB: A perfect case for the NFSCO. We’re so often insulated from a lot of processes which keep the world running. There’s a sense of being coddled by not knowing that those companies exist. And that’s all someone's job; someone files a tax return. Especially if you live in an urban environment—objects just appear for you. There is a kind of artist’s paranoia about art’s inefficacy,  against proper work.  

JSF: Totally, totally.  

HB: I think that’s why artists are often drawn towards industrial imagery.

JSF: Industry is huge and it’s always happening. You can either give into it or you can kind of live in denial of it. I feel like I’ve always been in awe of these hyper-industrial landscapes. There’s something about them that I find great pleasure in, but they also are terrifying because their very existence denotes the sheer scale of how much we need to survive. 

HB: Yeah. The scope of extraction needed to make anything work is kind of terrifying. I also think there’s also this subconscious motivation, in that trying to use it in artworks is a way of, like, defanging it a little bit.  

JSF: In The Whorl I was interested in the body in relation to these landscapes, rather than just their aesthetic components. Those kinds of spaces have always made me feel really existential, in a way, and I’ve always found that feeling quite peaceful. A sense of giving in, the grim acceptance that there’s nothing I can do. It’s like being on a shoreline and looking out at the sea. It’s a terminal point. 

Suits

HB: I was going to ask, did you script the film?  What was the scripting process like?

JSF: The film wasn’t scripted, no. There is only one speaking role in the film, played by my friend and fellow artist Luca George. Luca is a really great and intuitive performer who was able to improvise based on the relatively vague instructions he was given. I hate to see a film be constricted or characters limited by bad writing, so I worked with Luca by way of outlining scenarios that his character was in and letting him fill in the gaps. For one scene I had him on the phone, and I told him that his character was having nightmares, that he was at the centre of a DNA strand, and that the person on the other end of the line was struggling to understand it. The rest was up to him! And he did an incredible job. 

HB: I’ve written “Double Helix” down. It felt like he was talking to a therapist or some kind of guru? I liked that he had the vibe of a very together guy; very articulate, very probably successful, very city-boy, positioned beneath a shiny skyscraper, but he’s constantly referring to this quite oblique image of a double helix which the person on the phone isn’t quite comprehending. It felt very sad, in a way, as a viewer—to have a very specific quandary, but with all your educated, articulate, literate ability, you are just fundamentally unable to reach another person. 

JSF: Some people who saw an earlier cut thought, “This guy’s going through a full-blown mental breakdown,” whereas for me it was more that he was trying to articulate something clear to him which to someone else sounds really extreme. I wanted to strike that balance; he wasn’t meant to be a crazy or mentally unstable character, he was someone who was being told he was unstable by virtue of the fact that nobody else could understand what he was trying to describe. I’ve experienced this before many times. 

HB: Yeah, it didn’t seem like he lost control. It felt like he . . . the thing he was tasked with relaying truly and accurately was just illegible to the listener. 

JSF: As I said, Luca is a really talented actor and performer so I was super lucky to work with him (IG: @lucage0rge).

HB: There’s a scene where he lies down in a multistory car park, wearing a suit, while being guided through some therapeutic process with his phone—either an app or a conversation. He’s asked to find somewhere comfortable, and he makes do with the brutal car park floor. Like, when have you ever seen someone wearing a suit lying flat down on concrete? Could you tell me more about the use of ‘the suit’ in the film? It’s in stark contrast to the other narrative thread, which is a group of goths in full face makeup on a road trip of sorts, and you’ve mentioned the figure of the ‘everyman’ as a theme you return to. Suits appear quite a lot in your work.

JSF: The suit is specific to a very particular context. It’s either a metropolitan environment or it’s a formal dress event or it’s something which you need to “look smart” for. It’s also a super succinct symbol of assimilation to a particular system, and often one associated with labour—you wouldn’t typically choose to wear one of your own volition. The image of a man in a business suit anywhere other than an office or a financial district looks surreal.  

There’s something unnerving about it. Growing up in the countryside, there were often situations in which people would end up walking down long unlit roads at night in formalwear, or in the woods making their way home from an event before they were old enough to drive. I always thought how surreal this must have looked to cars passing by, all these generic young men in suits walking together at night, stripped of the context they dressed for. When filming in the windfarm with Johnny (the other suited character), we were met with a lot of confusion. People instinctively assumed something awry was happening. 

Water 

HB: I also enjoyed these suited characters’ obsessive water collecting. I have written down “purity crisis” in my notes. I remember, while on a euro-camp family holiday in one of those pre-erected tents, my cousin and I were up in the mountains and we filled a water bottle with glacial ice, and kept it for about ten years. By the end it was browning and algae was growing in it, but we initially kept it because we were swimming and drinking at the same time, like, “Oh, it’s so fresh and delicious! We need to bottle it so we can drink it when we’re back in England!” But in the end we kept it and just watched the algae bloom in it.  

JSF: It’s a nice memory. 

HB: I think I’m projecting an ecological theme. I've got a tendency to try and decode when approaching visual art, probably through not really being trained in it as a discipline, and often along the lines of my current preoccupations. But I’d be interested to hear what you think . . . 

In your film, these suited characters collect brown water in plastic bottles from puddles, rivers, ditches, etc.. It made me think, initially, of the state of water in the UK, but also my expectation of purity when I approach the natural world—like with that glacier bottle. I think I saw your characters as having a tangled relationship to the purity of the water, which harked back to a previous conversation we’ve had about the kind of semi-rural or urban wasteland spaces, in between spaces, like the side of a railway track or industrial land that is left to do its thing, which does often result in good biodiversity. 

It is not the kind of ‘rewilding’ people hope for or imagine, but is possibly more cognitively important, psychologically—giving up control or the desire to manage things and name or be a steward of the landscape. There’s this song on our new record called “Earth of Worms.” In the process of making it I kind of zeroed in on an extreme childhood love of animals. I went to school dressed as Attenborough once. I love animals so much—it’s basic but I do, so deeply. 

There’s a bit of a strop towards the end of the song where it’s like, I don’t want the only thing to exist to be these nematode little worm leech things that are the only thing that can withstand whatever fucked up, like, chemical balance the water or soil has. And I was just trying to lean into that tantrum energy: I don’t want those. I don’t want these horrible little worms. Like, they’re boring, disgusting. But I’ll still look at videos of them. But then, step back and look at these insane human projections onto the value of those things: Our expectations of what is permissible or valuable in the natural world, what is disgusting and reprehensible and what is pure. I felt like there was that connection between that, and your character’s collection of this vile water, a repulsion-purity-obsession thing. I felt something ecological in it. 

JSF: There definitely was an ecological feel to it. But with the water harvesting thing—lots of people have read it in different ways. Some assumed it was an addiction thing. Others thought they were preppers—that they were, through the experience of their mundane day-to-day jobs, realising that the world is about to collapse in a way that they are not prepared for, and they are prepping for it in their office breaks, or after work. 

For me, it was similar to the objectophiliac stuff I was thinking about earlier.  If you have a compulsion or an attraction to something that isn’t societally harmful, but isn’t deemed societally normal, it becomes somehow perverse. I mean, whenever I see businessmen I think “You are the most unusual people.” I imagine that artsy people, eccentric people probably have quite normal home lives. Whereas these businessmen have such a limited time to express themselves, there’s probably a lot of strangeness behind closed doors. Concentrated. And it’s a really good disguise. It’s a really good mask, wearing a suit, having a normal job. 

I was really attracted to the idea of being driven to collect and drink “public” water. We are totally comfortable drinking processed rainwater and river water in bottles, but there’s something forbidden-feeling about drinking straight from a source, especially in a metropolitan area. I wanted to know what it would be like to look at a puddle and have the thought, “I really, really want to drink that”? How would you go about satiating your desire? Because you would have to get it back to your house and you’d have to store it somewhere. It’s not illegal, it could maybe make you unwell, and it’s not morally wrong either, but there’s something perverse about carrying empty plastic water bottles around and harvesting water from say, a fountain in the street, and then taking it home and drinking it. 

There’s no sexual gratification in the film. I wanted to make it quite clear that it wasn’t sexual, and nor do the characters get high as a result. It’s almost as if they are numbed by it. It satisfies them but it gives no pleasure, outwardly at least. Ultimately it exists as a narrative on irrational compulsions and the undue sense of shame they bring. 

WASTELAND TOP 8

HB: I had a silly idea where we’d list some favourite objects that we’ve found, or would hope to find in the kind of semi-industrial, semi-rural wasteland that features in The Whorl. I find them quite sad spaces, because I’m often there hoping for some form of urban reprieve. But in London you can’t really access many spaces that do that, so you have to be in one of those in-between places. It means that there’s this tension, where I'm often there hoping for some form of transportation from humanity and it's just covered with the ephemera of people’s lives. 

1.

JSF: I once found this massive, industry-grade tub of this thing called Oestress, which has an image of a horse with a halo on it. It’s some kind of hormonal gel that you feed to a horse. On the front it says, “Turn your moody mare into a sweet angel,” or something like that.

HB: This has already gone far better than I could possibly have hoped.

JSF: I found that in Roslyn Glen in Edinburgh. That actually was a real trigger point for just wanting to know more about these companies that deal with very specific parts of livestock management. I really wanted to have some Oestress in my degree show, like a raw pool of it or something. I never really got around to it. But the logo is somewhere in the work. It’s on one of the ceramics. 

2. 

JSF: I was out walking on my own near where my parents live, and there were like these concrete blocks with slats in between them and they were all humming really intensely. And then it wasn't until I got up close that I realised that they were like apiaries.  Someone was doing beekeeping, but it was really an industrialised kind of beekeeping. 

3.

JSF: Any kind of machinery that I can’t place the use of. Huge, obscure parts. 

3.

JSF: Any kind of dead animal really, the biggest I’ve found is a deer or a sheep.

4.

JSF: Any item of clothing that’s obviously been there for a long time. A jacket on a branch, or a T-shirt stamped into a footpath. There’s something so unnerving about it, and something so sad too. It also makes me think about how totally indestructible synthetic garments are, destined to exist forever. 

5.

JSF: I once stumbled across a once-occupied caravan deep inside a copse between two anonymous fields. It was full of remnants of a life, with tickets for shows from 1985 and a kettle still on the hob. It filled me with a deep sense of unease and I felt as though I wanted to wash every part of myself after having been inside. 

HB: My cousin (who actually starred in the “Dusk Song” video) cuts a slightly similar existence, in that he’s given me access to a lot of isolated spaces of abandonment and agriculture. He spends a lot of time walking in the north of England most days, swimming in pretty unremarkable rivers or backwaters. He often does overnights where he sleeps in abandoned or out-of-season farm buildings. He’s able to make pretty inhospitable spaces comfortable, half due to skill, and half due to tolerance. 

I’ve gone on a few trips with him and he’s got a great knowledge of what will be in use, when, where you might be able to sleep in any given valley, and all these not particularly glamorous swim spots. It’s amazing. So I’ve enjoyed time in that unpretty, agricultural countryside, away from the idyll. You get the feeling that anything could have happened, that the world could be on fire, that you are sheltering in the most simplistic way. That image of being asleep in a hayloft, with my phone pinging with WhatsApp messages after a day of no signal inspired a lyric in “Earth of Worms,” actually. I think I was imagining being there as some kind of fleeing, like almost rehearsing what I’d do if something truly awful happened to the livability of cities. I’d like to add to the list.

JSF: Go for it.

6.

HB: When you see a nice old brown or green bottle pressed into the soil, and the rim of it is below the surface but there’s still air in it so there’s like a little world inside.

7. 

HB: Bits of polythene where some of it’s buried and some of it’s not.

8.

JSF: I’ll add anything waterlogged. It’s a surefire way to get some kind of that pleasure reaction. When you find a stockpile that’s been wrapped in polythene and weeks of rain has pulled all the dust or dirt into these little rock pools—I love that, it just drives me crazy.