Acoustic Heritage Collective – ELS SONS DE LA INDÚSTRIA LP

“The Sounds of Industry” by Acoustic Heritage Collective is an album available on Bandcamp as a limited-edition 12″ vinyl (250 copies, €20+) or digital download (name your price), both in 24-bit/48kHz quality. It contains 10 tracks totaling around 36 minutes, with titles referencing sound categories like “Modulated,” “Percussive,” “Aerophones,” “Noise,” “Orchestral,” “Drone,” “Granular,” “Idiophones,” and “Impulse Responses.” The digital version is binaural; the vinyl is a stereo speaker mix.

About the project: In 2020, the collective partnered with MNACTEC (the National Museum of Science and Technology of Catalonia) to record the sounds and acoustics of heritage machinery and spaces tied to Catalan industrialization, mostly preserved in museum networks. The project aims to safeguard the sonic heritage of the 19th and 20th centuries — the steam, metal, and oil sounds that once defined entire towns. Rather than just reading about history or viewing silent machines in museums, they wanted people to hear the past firsthand.

They gathered testimonies describing deafening noise, occupational deafness, textile workers who invented sign language because speaking was impossible, streets where footsteps and rustling leaves were drowned out by relentless mechanical rhythms, and shrill sirens dictating the social tempo of entire communities. During recording, they revived dormant machines, worked with generous retirees who reproduced long-forgotten gestures, and captured machines still operating in living industries.
The project draws on thinkers like Jacques Attali (Noise), who argued that controlling sound and institutionalizing silence are exercises of power. These industrial sounds speak to political dimensions — worker oppression, labor revolutions, social struggles, migrations of Spanish working-class families who came under precarious conditions and stayed to enrich the culture, exploited women who organized and raised their voices, and movements rooted in anarchism, communism, republicanism, and anti-fascism. The album also confronts deliberately silenced histories: Catalan industrialization’s deep ties to colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and a financial system built to serve the returning colonial elites (the indianos).