Wanna know what the Internet actually sounds like?

The People's Cloud - an "artist-led investigative team interested in the material infrastructures of the Internet" - have created a new documentary about the Internet - or, more specifically, the "ecology and impact of cloud computing on the lives of those who use it, the places it is physically located in, and the people who work to maintain it."

The hour-long film, also called The People's Cloud, will be released early next year, but you can hear the soundtrack now - and it's a fascinating expedition, whizzing through synthetic textures and ambient drones. The OST is made from "field recordings, soundscapes, and compositions" which were made only from "recordings taken during field trips to... data centres in Iceland, The Netherlands and the UK, hydroelectric power stations in Iceland, Fibre Optic landing stations and other critical network sites across Europe and one of the world’s most powerful computers, SURFsara."

"The People's Cloud project started as a response to an installation piece I made called The Cloud is More Than Air and Water," says artist Matt Parker, who directed the new film." [That piece] investigates the sounds inside a small data centre in Birmingham. Following making this work, I began increasingly interested in the scale, scope, politics and power relationships that were required for the Internet to exist. Who owns it? How does it work? How is it all connected? How many millions of miles of cable are used to connect our homes, and who owns the access to this? How is it powered and who powers it?"

"During my field trip visits, where my team and I went to underground power stations, data centres, internet exchange terminals, blockchain mines, subsea cable landing stations and other significant sites of Internet infrastructure, I was always struck by the intensity of sound," Parker continues. "Whether that sound be the accumulation of thousands of air-conditioning fans cooling microprocessors, or the violent rip of the ocean tide, I found the sounds to be as mesmeric as anything that I might see."

"It seemed right to release the soundtrack that was produced for the series as a standalone piece, with full length edits of tracks and raw field recordings in expanded length. All of the sounds in The People's Cloud OST are made using originally sourced field recordings made during our trips across Europe. The real material sound of the Internet."