Peter Wiley
this is the record i've been waiting for. beautiful textures and feelings held in contrast give the space an unusual sense of depth and complexity. relentless and calming.
Favorite track: Cyclic Churn.
Use these forgery field recordings to meditate on your garbage. Music for Cycling Waste imagines the music that people listen to in the far away shipping yards, workshops, or incineration centers where our waste sits at the end of a global journey that begins when we're done consuming. Disposal always feels like the end of our story with the things we buy, but long after we've forgotten about the motherboards and car tires we discard, they go on to live a rich second life without us, traveling across seas to rising world economic giants and developing, post-colonial countries alike. In these places — think China or the Philippines or Ghana — they'll be ripped apart for valuable components that can be reused or resold. Anything of negligible value may get buried in a landfill or burned. Our waste goes out of sight and out of mind, and the idea of it going anywhere may be just as abstract as it sitting on a purgatorial barge anchored in the South Pacific, waiting for someone, somewhere to start rifling through and ripping apart the stuff aboard.
This album aims to make these abstract global supply chains of recycling more concrete. These are fabricated field recordings of what the laborers who deal with our waste might themselves be listening to as their workshop machinery grinds away. Use it to think of the people as well as the spent and broken cell phone screens, even if they may feel only as material as the people and spent cell phone screens in a dream.
Music for Cycling Waste was inspired by the work of e-waste activist Eric Lundgren and anthropologist Anna Tsing, and their work on the way capitalism, supply chains, and consumerism shape human life and our environment. Be sure to read about Lundgren's electric car and imprisonment on behalf of Microsoft, as well as Tsing's essential, revelatory book The Mushroom at the End of the World.
credits
released September 30, 2019
Recorded live at Diane's Hunting Club 2018 and edited for concision.
Special thanks to Lexi, Melissa, Nina, Aaron and Molly, Also, and Diane. Your support, brilliance, and love are the reasons this exists.
Mastered by João Melo
Cover art is “Untitled” by Thomas Kong, a collage composed of discarded packaging from products he sells in his store. See more of his work at thomaskong.biz and Kim’s Corner Food in Rogers Park, Chicago.
The excellent Barcelona label House of (S)PUNK is back with a five-song comp showcasing the local hardgroove scene. Bandcamp New & Notable May 1, 2024