Precious. Not a word you’d normally associate with a 500-foot-tall, 400-foot-wide concrete hulk. But in conversations about Cooling Tower 5, that’s the word that keeps coming up: precious.

It is a relic from an era that never really was, the golden age of American nuclear energy. In the 1970s, the Washington Public Power Supply System, nicknamed “Whoops,” embarked on a plan to construct five nuclear reactors in the Evergreen State: numbers 1, 2 and 4 at Hanford and 3 and 5 at Satsop, west of Olympia. It was the largest such project in U.S. history, and one of the biggest snafus. Due to billions in overruns and mounting public concern, only one reactor was ever completed, no. 2.

Today Tower 5 is empty, just a shell. Grass grows on the ground inside. Lichens and moss line its walls, and birds roost around its rim. It’s open at the base, supported by struts, and the hourglass shape — designed to encourage flow — channels air, draws it in and breathes it out.

The surrounding complex has been converted into a business park, and the noises you hear in the tower are the kinds of noises you’d expect: cars, hammering, the screech of saws, jets, weather, your own voice. They just sound different. They ricochet and reverberate and rise. That’s why artists working in the medium of sound have found it a haven. A precious, almost sacred place.

When sound artist Yann Novak entered Tower 5 the first time, there was a crew at work filling sinkholes, pounding the earth with a pneumatic tamper; it sounded like 10 tampers in the hands of Zeus. The men’s voices didn’t come from their mouths, but from random remote points overhead. It was “strange and magical,” he told me, meaning he can’t explain it. He was hooked.

Thanks to the collective Environmental Aesthetics, the brainchild of sound enthusiasts Gabriel Bacon and Paul Schrag (Full disclosure: Schrag writes for the Weekly Volcano. Duh.), artists such as Novak have been working in Tower 5 since 2007, by agreement with the Satsop Development Park. Each year, three selected “residents” are invited to record. So far there have been six. Some have made noise, and others, like Novak, just collected it. All have wielded it to create profound and unusual works.

Many credit the avant-garde composer John Cage with starting the American sound art movement. Cage saw music as “not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living.”

The work of the 2008 Environmental Aesthetics residents, which will be presented this coming Third Thursday in what promises to be a very interesting night at the Fulcrum Gallery, embraces this same ideology. Jared Arave; Kamran Sadeghi; and Brian John Mitchell, who works under the name Small Life Form, all have different viewpoints and approach but share a willingness to accept chaos and creation for what they are, to let them speak for themselves. Their work in Tower 5 reflects the paradox of the nuclear ruin itself, which seems a fitting metaphor for these post-industrial times: nature usurping man’s spectacular defilement of nature.  

Each artist spent one day in the tower creating and recording sound and then used the gathered materials to form compositions. Their methods are esoteric beyond the comprehension of most laymen, this writer included. (Arave’s include geometric drawings and algorithmic models.) But to enjoy the results, or, more accurately, to experience them, requires no expertise, just two ears and a soul. 

“I try to convey emotional ideas with sound that I can't express with words,” Brian John Mitchell told me, a sentiment shared by others I spoke with.  And words, appropriately, seem inadequate to describe the sound; there is no discernible structure, no conventional melody, no lyrics.  The best you can do is describe its effect, what it makes you feel and imagine, and hope you don’t sound like a wine critic.

An apocalyptic bus tour.  Hellfire out one side, floods out the other, a bag of mixed nuts in your lap — that’s Arave.  Sadeghi holds a seashell to your mind.  And Small Life Form?  Hmm.  Ah, yes.  Reading Cormac McCarthy on your death bed.

You don’t hear it, you live it.  Listen: You’re living it now.

[Fulcrum Gallery, Thursday, March 19, 6-10 p.m., no cover, 1308 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Tacoma, 253.250.0520]