Into the Earth, Out of Your Head: The Producers Making Albums in Places That Were Never Meant to Be Studios

The reverb tail in the cave lasts eleven seconds.

Eleven seconds. No plugin, no algorithmic approximation, no impulse response captured and resampled comes close to what happens when you strike a singing bowl in a limestone chamber 200 feet below the surface of the earth in rural Kentucky and just... listen to it dissolve into the dark.

That's what brought Simone Varga down here. That's what keeps her coming back.

"The first time I recorded in an actual cave," she says, her voice still carrying some reverence for the memory, "I understood immediately that I had been making music in the wrong rooms my entire life."

Varga is part of a loose, growing movement of experimental producers and sound artists who have completely abandoned conventional studio spaces in favor of recording in environments that were never designed for music at all. Caves. Old-growth forests. Decommissioned military installations. Salt mines. Grain silos. The philosophy driving all of it is the same: the space isn't decoration. The space is doing work.

Why the Studio Fails Them

To understand the appeal, you have to understand what a standard recording studio is actually designed to do — and what it kills in the process.

A treated studio is built to eliminate the room. Acoustic foam, bass traps, diffusion panels — all of it exists to neutralize the space so that what you capture is the sound of the instrument or voice in isolation, clean and controllable. For most commercial music, that's exactly what you want.

For experimental music, that sterility can be suffocating.

"A studio is a room that's trying to pretend it doesn't exist," says Portland-based producer and field recordist Dex Holloway, who has spent the last four years recording in locations across the Pacific Northwest, including old-growth forest groves in the Cascades and a decommissioned Nike missile silo outside of Scappoose, Oregon. "I want the room. I want the space to have a voice. I want it to argue with what I'm playing."

What Holloway and artists like him are after is the opposite of sonic control. They want the unexpected resonances, the natural reverbs, the electromagnetic interference, the biological ambient noise that a place generates just by existing. They want the music to be shaped by something larger than their own intentions.

The Geology of Sound

Caves are the most extreme version of this practice, and the results can be genuinely hallucinatory.

Limestone cave systems — and there are hundreds of them across the American South and Midwest, many with sections accessible to the public or navigable with a permit — create reverb environments that are literally impossible to fake. The irregular surfaces scatter sound in non-linear ways. The humidity affects how high frequencies travel. The sheer depth of the silence when no one is playing is itself a kind of instrument.

Varga, who records under the name Pale Karst, has now made three albums entirely in cave systems in Kentucky, Tennessee, and New Mexico. Her process involves minimal gear: a handful of acoustic instruments, a portable field recorder, and a contact microphone that she attaches directly to cave walls to capture the stone's own resonant response to sound.

"The cave is mixing the record," she says. "I'm just suggesting things."

Her most recent release, recorded over five days in a system she won't name publicly to protect it from foot traffic, features eleven seconds of pure reverb decay as its opening track. Just a struck bowl, then the cave's response, then silence. It runs four minutes and twelve seconds. It is, depending on your state of mind, either the most boring thing you've ever heard or a genuine out-of-body experience.

Cold War Acoustics

For producers drawn to the electromagnetic rather than the acoustic, abandoned military infrastructure is the destination of choice.

The United States is dotted with decommissioned Cold War-era installations: missile silos, radar stations, underground command bunkers, coastal artillery batteries. Many are on public land. Some are privately owned and accessible with permission. A few exist in legal gray zones that we'll leave deliberately vague.

What makes these spaces sonically unique isn't just their physical dimensions — though a missile silo's cylindrical concrete shaft creates a standing wave environment that's genuinely unlike anything else — it's their electromagnetic character. Thick concrete walls, buried cable conduits, and residual metal infrastructure create interference patterns that show up in recordings as hum, buzz, and artifact. For most engineers, that's noise to be eliminated. For experimental producers, it's texture.

Holloway spent three days in the Nike silo outside Scappoose with a modular synthesizer, a shortwave radio, and a set of contact mics. "The building was generating its own sounds," he says. "Wind through old ventilation shafts. Metal expanding and contracting. The shortwave was pulling in something — I still don't know what — that sounded like voices in a language I couldn't identify. All of that went into the record."

The resulting album, released on a small experimental label in Chicago, sold out its vinyl run in two weeks.

The Forest as Frequency

Old-growth forest recording occupies a different emotional register — less confrontational, more immersive, but no less intentional.

The acoustic properties of a dense, old-growth forest are staggering. The canopy creates a natural high-frequency diffusion. The root systems and soil composition affect how low-end sound travels. The biological noise — insects, birds, wind through specific tree species — changes by the hour, the season, the weather. Recording in a forest isn't capturing ambient sound. It's collaborating with a system that has been developing its own acoustic identity for centuries.

Several artists working in the drone and ambient spaces have begun building albums around specific forest recordings, treating the biological environment as a compositional partner. Some bring instruments and play into the space, blending with what's already happening. Others record the forest alone and build music around it afterward, using the natural material as the foundational layer.

"There's a grove of Douglas fir outside of Ashland that I've been recording in for two years," says composer and multi-instrumentalist Raina Foss, who records under her own name and releases through a Bandcamp-only label she runs out of her home. "It sounds completely different in February than it does in August. I'm making a record that's actually four records — one per season. The forest is writing it. I'm just the notation system."

Isolation as Method

Beyond the acoustic and electromagnetic arguments, there's a psychological dimension to this practice that the artists are surprisingly candid about.

Being in a cave, or a bunker, or a forest far from roads and electricity and the general hum of connected life, does something to your head. The sensory environment changes. The absence of the usual inputs — screens, notifications, ambient urban noise — creates a kind of mental space that many of these producers describe as the closest thing to an altered state they can achieve without chemical assistance.

"I'm not going to say it's like being high," Varga says, then pauses. "But I'm also not going to say it's not."

The isolation strips away self-consciousness. The pressure of the unusual environment — the physical discomfort, the disorientation, the awareness that you're somewhere genuinely strange — forces a kind of creative directness that hours in a comfortable studio rarely produces. You make decisions faster. You commit. You stop second-guessing because the environment demands your full attention.

Holloway puts it more simply: "You can't overthink it when the silo is making noise at you."

What Comes Out

The music that emerges from these sessions has a quality that's difficult to articulate but easy to recognize. It sounds located. It sounds like it came from somewhere specific, somewhere that existed before the music and will exist after. There's a presence in it — a spatial and temporal weight — that studio recordings, however beautifully crafted, rarely carry.

It's also, increasingly, finding an audience. Not a mainstream one, but a real one. The experimental and ambient communities in the US have always had an appetite for music that prioritizes experience over accessibility, and recordings made in extreme environments scratch an itch that nothing else does.

Varga's cave records have been picked up by listeners in the drone metal scene, the dark ambient world, and — unexpectedly — by a growing number of people who use them for meditation and sleep. "I don't really care how people use it," she says. "The cave didn't care either. It just let the sound happen."

Eleven seconds of reverb. The stone remembers everything.