In the depths of a Swedish forest, a haunting new kind of choir is warming up—not of voices, but of decaying vehicles. From July 30 to August 17, visitors to the car cemetery at Kyrkö Mosse in Ryd, Sweden, three hours away from Copenhagen by car, will find themselves surrounded by more than just rusting wrecks and moss-covered dashboards. They’ll hear music. Not the roar of engines, but something quieter, stranger, and more profound: the slow song of time.
“Cars Choir – The Redemption Sound”, a sound installation by Danish composer and sound artist Mons Niklas Schak, turns the ghostly remnants of 20th-century automobiles into instruments in an ambient symphony. With support from the Danish Arts Foundation, Schak has transformed nine decaying cars into resonant speaker cabinets using custom-made vibration units. These cars don’t just play sound—they become sound.
For Schak, the installation is the culmination of over a decade of work and wonder at the forest site, where more than 150 cars from the 1940s and ’50s have been slowly swallowed by nature. “I’m interested in how we experience time,” he says. “When you walk through this place, you don’t just see decay—you feel it. And now, you can hear it too.”
The installation is not a museum or a graveyard tribute. It’s something more immersive. The vehicles, from classic brands of a bygone industrial age, seem to hum and breathe. Some visitors describe the sensation as if the cars are idling, waiting patiently for a driver who never returns.
Schak describes the installation as “a musical memoir” of these automobiles. Each one carries echoes of personal stories, mechanical ambition, and cultural identity. And now, literally, they echo again—through carefully composed ambient soundscapes that emanate from inside their corroded frames.
“Reverberation is usually measured in milliseconds,” Schak explains. “But here, the echo stretches over 80 years. It’s like a lifelong reverb, slowly fading out.” As rust claims metal and vines creep through dashboards, these physical remnants of the past become part of a strange, slow symphony—a sound that stretches across generations.
At the opening on July 30, Schak will introduce the installation and share his reflections on the site’s history, including the story of Åke Danielsson, the man behind the scrapyard, who unwittingly laid the groundwork for this strange collaboration between industry and nature, technology and art.
A forest symphony
The musical experience is spatial, almost orchestral. As visitors move among the cars, the sound changes—brighter here, more muffled there. One moment, you feel surrounded by subtle strings; the next, engulfed by deep brass tones. It’s an ambient orchestra, spread not across a stage but across the forest floor.
The work also incorporates augmented reality. Several of the cars have been 3D-scanned, allowing visitors to download them to their smartphones. With accompanying soundtracks, the digital cars can be placed in any environment—from a kitchen table to a city square. Schak invites visitors to make their own interpretations and contribute recordings to a growing online exhibition.
For Schak, technology isn’t an escape from the world, but a way to deepen our connection to it. “I’m not seeking perfection or beauty,” he says. “I’m looking for the fragile, the transparent—the things that surprise us. That’s where meaning hides.”
A time machine disguised as scrap
Mons Niklas Schak is the composer and sound designer behind Heirloom by Larissa Sansour (Danish Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2019), the award-winning film The Ambassador by Mads Brügger, and the critically acclaimed release Recollective, under the pseudonym Man Eat Fish. He is also a lecturer at the Danish Academy of Music and a visual artist.
“Many artists are interested in controlling time. The perfect example is taking pictures,” Schak says. “I try to do that in music. There’s the immediate sound, and then there’s the echo. And the decaying cars—well, they have their own echo too. One visual, the other auditory. I wanted to bring those two together.”
