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Lying just off the Suffolk coast is a desert. Orford Ness is a vast shingle spit, some 12 miles long and up to a mile wide, which curls offshore round from Aldeburgh down to Hollesley. For most of the 20th century, the Ness was owned by the Ministry of Defence, for whom its natural security and secrecy made it the ideal military test site. Bomb ballistics, gun gears, phosphorous shells, nuclear detonators: for 80 years, the physics of death was tested and perfected out there on the shining expanses of flint.
Though it now belongs to the National Trust, the site still feels militarised. Across the Ness, enigmatic structures jut from the shingle: barracks, armouries, listening stations, beacons, watchtowers, bunkers, and two huge blast-chambers nicknamed the pagodas. It is an architectural rattle-bag that includes concrete brutalism, Dutch woodcraft, East Anglian tabernacle barns, Nissen huts and a lollipop lighthouse.
The Trust pursues the finely named policy of "controlled ruination", which sounds like a South African rugby strategy, but in conservation terms means allowing entropy its play. Here, there is little of the painstaking repair work that goes on at most Trust-owned properties. When glass shatters or tarmac cracks, it is left unfixed. Rust spreads in maps. Buildings dilapidate. The splintered, the fissile, the ruderal: these are the Ness's textures.
The Ness is also a wild place. It is front-line North sea: big storms chew hard at it in winter. Its mixture of mudflat, salt marsh, grassland and shingle is hunted over by marsh harriers and peregrines. Avocets, curlews and whimbrels probe its rich mud. Lesser black-backed gulls breed on and around the pagodas. An eerie and intricate landscape, then, in which the military and the natural combine, collide and confuse. Brambles coil and loop like barbed wire. Orange lichen camouflages the concrete of pill-boxes.
I have been visiting the Ness regularly for nearly a decade now, drawn back by its juxtapositions and encryptions. It is without doubt the strangest place I know: a dreamscape co-designed by MR James, JG Ballard and Andrei Tarkovsky. You reach the Ness – The Zone – by boat, ferried over the River Ore, and that brief crossing takes you through a frontier. "The first rule of Orford Ness," the ferryman told me once, "is never believe anything you're told about it." I didn't know whether to believe him or not.
Two years ago, Duncan Kent, one of the Trust wardens, approached me about a possible collaboration with the jazz musician Arnie Somogyi. Duncan wanted to commission a performance piece involving text and music, inspired by the Ness and having its first performance somewhere on it. No one knew what to call it. A jazz opera? A composed poem? A play for voices? We decided to worry about genre later, but settled on a name: Untrue Island.
The Ness, like other east coast spits (Spurn Head, Blakeney Point, Dungeness), is a dynamic structure. Created and shaped by tide, current, shore-drift and weather, it is in continual slow migration, forming and reforming over time. Spurn Head, when mapped across centuries, appears to lash like a tail. The distal point of Orford Ness can extend and retract by miles within decades. Storms throw up new ridges and swales of shingle along its outer edge, fattening the spit.
Arnie and I agreed early on that we wanted the Ness's volatility as a landscape to be a formal principle of our work. Arnie's expertise as a double bassist was well suited to this, and it became clear that the eventual performance would include major elements of jazz improvisation.
Writing is mostly a deskbound and solitary business, but this collaboration kept me out of the study and in good company. Arnie and I spent days and nights on the Ness, in various seasons and various weathers. We were issued with electric bikes so we could whizz around the site, and an old Land Rover for transporting Arnie's double bass. Duncan gave us access to off-limits areas into which I'd long wished to pry: flooded and collapsing laboratories, abandoned control rooms. We came to know the site and its resonant place-names off by heart: Cobra Mist, Lab Three, the New Armoury, the Bomb Ballistics Building.
One December night, Arnie and I fished off the nose of the Ness until 3am. The sky was cloudless, the moonlight strong enough to read by, and Jupiter stood bright in the sky. We drank too much hot wine from Thermoses, and caught whiting to cook up for a hungover breakfast in the barracks. The next day Arnie heaved his double bass over to the New Armoury, and we tried out a seven-verse lyric that I'd written the night before, with a call-and-answer relation between spoken text and musical response. The acoustics of the Armoury – an open-ended atrium, with two big weapons-storage rooms coming off it – were booming and uncanny. With each footfall came the crunch of broken glass and metal.
Through the months of development, I was keeping notes of images, phrases and other splinters of found language; and Arnie was jotting down shards of melodies and half-heard harmonies. Slowly, these fragments began to assemble themselves into something larger: the artistic reverse of "controlled ruination", perhaps. Recordings and lyrics were emailed back and forth, overlaid and intercut. Inspirations were kept to hand: the Kevin Flanagan Quartet's settings of Gary Snyder's Rip-rap poems, the Richard Burton reading of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, and Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes, based on the dark poem of the same name by George Crabbe. Arnie acquired recordings made on location by Chris Watson, who constructed tiny microphones that he could poke down between the flints of the Ness, and so hear the sound of the sea moving deep within the stones.
I have long been fascinated by the many languages of the Ness: the specialist dialects (military-technological, ornithological, geological, conservationist) that it has generated; the many voices (human, avian, mineral) with which it seems to speak. It is a profoundly polyglot place. Also fascinating to me is the discourse migration that has occurred between those voices: the mist that rolls in off the North sea; the mist-nets that the ornithologists use to trap and ring migrant birds; the Cobra Mist listening station, designed to eavesdrop on the Soviet Union. I took these multiple languages and overlapping lexes as my forms and themes when writing. "Listen to the Ness," whispers the first voice of the libretto (if that's what it is), "it speaks gull, it speaks wave, it speaks rust, it speaks lichen."
What at last transpired is a strange and hybrid thing. The audiences are ferried over the Ore, and then walk for a mile through the site – past sculptures by the artists Jane and Louise Wilson – to reach the New Armoury. The piece is an hour in length, consisting of part improvised jazz and part pre-composed music, the text part-spoken and part-sung, all by Arnie and his fellow musicians. But because the Armoury is open to the weather – doorless at both of its vast and ruined ends – the other performer will, of course, be the Ness itself.
• On Location, an event exploring British landscapes in words, sound and film, is at the British Library on Tuesday, featuring writers Alice Oswald and Marina Warner, and chaired by Madeleine Bunting. Details: bl.uk. Untrue Island runs until 30 July. Details: untrueisland.org.uk
