Recomposed

A major look at the environmental impact of the music industry and a brilliant exploration of how musicians are thinking about and being influenced by the climate crisis

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