Lustmord’s album Trinity was originally commissioned by Unsound Festival in 2012 as a live presentation, with the project being developed further for this album version. It includes location recordings made at Los Alamos National Laborites, where the atom bomb was developed and at Jornada Del Muerte Alamogordo Air Base (aka White Sands), New Mexico where the first bomb was detonated, along with audio gathered at the Los Alamos National Laboratory Archive via the Freedom of Information Act. “Twilight: Los Alamos” features the voice of J. Robert Oppenheimer, leader of Los Alamos National Laboratory and “the father of the atom bomb”.
At 5:30 am on 16 July 1945 the first atomic weapon was detonated at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in the Jornada Del Muerte desert, New Mexico. The test was codenamed TRINITY. The resulting explosion had an energy equivalent to 20 kilotons of TNT and was the largest man made explosion up to that time. It’s now iconic mushroom cloud reached 12.1 km (7.5 miles) in height, and the shock wave was felt over 160 km (100 miles) away. We have lived in its shadow ever since. For millennia we as a species have successfully killed each other at an alarming rate, but with TRINITY we gained the power to kill a thousandfold more in an instant. At this very moment hundreds of millions of people around the world are a direct target of a nuclear missile.