Many retired electrical components may no longer function, yet they continue to carry traces
of the power systems they once sustained. For sound artists, they resemble musical
instruments after the performance has ended, silent objects that still hold the memory of
vibration, resonance, and energy.

Located in Ruifang on Taiwan’s northeastern coast, Shuinandong was once shaped by the
prosperity of the nearby mining settlements of Jinguashi and Jiufen. As Taiwan’s electrical
infrastructure rapidly expanded after World War II, Taiwan Power Company established a
large-scale materials depot here in the 1950s, taking advantage of its coastal location and
strategic transportation links. For decades, the site served as one of northern Taiwan’s most
important storage and dispatch centers for transformers, high-voltage equipment,
transmission materials, spare parts, and retired infrastructure.

Many of the components that supported Taiwan’s power grid passed through this facility. In
many ways, it functions as a repository of the grid itself, a retired archive of electrical
infrastructure. Neither a power plant nor a substation, Shuinandong Materials Depot has
quietly operated for more than half a century as part of the invisible logistical network behind
Taiwan’s electricity system.

If a power plant represents a power system in the act of producing sound, then Shuinandong
embodies the memory left behind after that sound has faded.
Although it generates no electricity, the depot preserves more than half a century of material
memory embedded within Taiwan’s electrical network. During our participation in the Electric
Meter Glass Reuse Project, we documented the sounds surrounding the dismantling of retired
analog electricity meters, recording fragments of a place where industrial history,
infrastructure, and material culture intersect.

For Electric Musicology, Shuinandong Materials Depot is more than a warehouse. It is an
archive of energy, a landscape of industrial memory, and a site where the histories of
Taiwan’s power grid can be encountered through listening. Hidden along Taiwan’s northern
coastline, it reveals another origin of electronic sound, not within synthesizers or studios, but
within the infrastructures that have quietly powered everyday life for generations.