Full Description
Everywhere you look, music is changing-overhauling itself in response to climate crisis. There are records made of plants, stereos that run on sunshine, streaming services powered like hot springs. There are nonprofit and investment initiatives geared toward environmental concerns. There are sector-specific carbon calculators, literacy programs, and organizations that are sizing up (and drawing down) the environmental impact of music on every level. Top to bottom, we are witnessing a climate-oriented transformation of what music is and how it comes to be.
Praise for Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music
"Devine's critical history of recording formats throws a necessary wrench into [the] mythology of musical purity."
Alex Ross, The New Yorker
"Did you know that the CO2 equivalents generated by consumption of recorded music have not declined in the era of music streaming-supposedly an era of music dematerialized, rendered virtual-but instead have as much as doubled? Kyle Devine knows, and in Decomposed he teaches us about such things with intelligence, humaneness, and passion. His book is at once a history of materialities of recording, from lac beetle resins in the 1920s to today's energy-sump server farms, and a manifesto for ecological scrutiny of our musical behaviors."
Gary Tomlinson, John Hay Whitney Professor of Music and Humanities, Yale University; author of A Million Years of Music
Contents
Preface
Introduction
The Great Recomposition
Part I: Technical Solutions
1. The Ecological Record
2. Vicious Cycles
3. Green Vinyl
4. Evolution Music
5. Will It Scale?
6. Building Better Fetishes
Part II: Institutional Solutions
7. The Carbon Question
8. ClimateEQ
9. Atmospheric Accounting
10. Future Energy Artists
11. EarthPercent
12. Beyond Carbon Convenience
Part III: Cultural Solutions
13. The Missing Link
14. We Make Tomorrow
15. A Behavioral Change Is Gonna Come
16. Set in Motion
17. The Future, Wouldn't That Be Nice?
18. One Thing to Another
Postscript
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
