James Hoff has returned to PAN with a new audio-visual project titled HOBO UFO (v. Chernobyl), which utilizes a modified version of Google’s Street View to explore Chernobyl and its surrounding environs. The artist, with the aid of coder Reuben Son, has hot-wired Street View so that it is audio reactive, creating a first-person viewing experience dictated by music Hoff has created.

Originally commissioned by Unsound Festival, Hoff began working on this version of HOBO UFO in 2017, creating over an hour of music that had the hallmarks of his work on Blaster, his 2017 album for Pan: noisy, intense, and chaotic.

After spending dozens of hours on Street View while composing, Hoff decided to visit the zone of exclusion in 2018 and his experience there prompted him to start fresh. In particular, he focused on Pripyat, which, prior to the meltdown, was a grand city and a “triumph of Soviet urban planning.” Hoff sought to reflect this moment as well as that of the valor of the people affected by the accident and the tens of thousands of workers who fought to contain it.

The resulting 14-minute work employs woodwinds, brass, double bass, and synthesized GPS signals, which Hoff recorded on site. In it, we hear a melody that is both “uplifting and melancholic, punctured by lurking static and Geiger-counter like pulses,” the label explains.

All of this drives a visual component that takes the viewer through the empty streets of Pripyat and into its municipal buildings, schools, theaters, and athletic facilities; into the Cherynobyl nuclear facility and its control room; and eventually to the Duga Radar system and the landscape that surrounds it. The narrative unfolds with the music, creating an experience that is “unsettling in its unraveling, yet captivating in its particular form of digital voyeurism,” the label adds.

Hoff debuted HOBO UFO in London in 2016 and has since performed with it several times as a site-specific audio-visual work. The program runs in real-time as a backdrop to Hoff’s performance, beginning at the venue where the show is held.

HOBO UFO (v. Chernobyl) is out now, with a stream below.