Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (The MIT Press)

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After his body was flown out of the wilderness, an autopsy determined that it weighed sixty-seven pounds and lacked discernible subcutaneous fat. fuming out moist air from their deep roots stretching below to the massive underground oceans, filtering the air of dust clogging the atmosphere, bringing water on to the surface, and bringing life to the formerly lifeless expance of the library. The tapes, Hirschkind argues, are not mechanisms for social control as much as jumping-off points for Muslims to find their way towards ethical self-improvement. But Devine isn’t interested in inducing guilt; he simply wants us to become more aware of the materiality of music. Breaking the problem down into smaller parts means that each smaller problem can be examined in more detail.

We might examine, for instance, the segregation of music from everyday life constituted by the noise and discipline of industrial production or look to the close relation between music machines and industrialization. Stoever opens up new ways for us to listen to familiar voices, such as those of WEB du Bois, Lena Horne, Lead Belly, Richard Wright, and many more. Krakauer took a poor misfortunate prone to paranoia, someone who left a note talking about his desire to kill the “false being within,” someone who managed to starve to death in a deserted bus not far off the George Parks Highway, and made the guy into a celebrity. Sterne studies the constantly shifting boundary between phenomena organized as "sound" and "not sound.Unlike Holmes and Poirot, Song Ci was a real person, a Chinese judge who lived over 700 years ago and personally examined the crime scenes of physical assaults or difficult murders. Kyle Devine brilliantly excavates the political ecologies of sound reproduction, moving from nineteenth-century chemical labs and shellac harvests to Thai vinyl record plants and the infrastructures of streaming media. The toxic agent in Hedysarum alpinum turns out not to be an alkaloid but, rather, an amino acid, and according to Hamilton it was the chief cause of McCandless’s death.

Devine shows the historical rise in emissions to have continued with the turn of century shift to “data,” the third and final epoch in his account.He shows that recorded music has always been a significant exploiter of both natural and human resources, and that its reliance on these resources is more problematic today than ever before. Whether apologists or critics of capitalism, both groups appreciate the centrality of economic exchange among people who live in communities where absolute autonomy and self-sufficiency are unattainable. Every field of human endeavor entails some form of environmental destruction, and the music industry is perhaps no worse than any other. It’s a constant battle with yourself, the people around you, the world, and it’s exhausting and sometimes it can be too much but we find ways to keep going and books help me do that (as well as crying, screaming, potatoes). With an ear for the unexpected, scholar and musician Jonathan Sterne uses the technological and cultural precursors of telephony, phonography, and radio as an entry point into a history of sound in its own right.

He’s not offering a technical or theoretical explanation in this tome so much as exploring the value of music in society—what music gives us, how it shapes us, and how it emerges from various scenes and other social settings. When the compact disk entered circulation, in the nineteen-eighties, audio snobs attacked it as a degradation of listening culture—a descent from soulful analog sound to soulless digital. Never mind the goblins, who knows what disaster would befall the victim should we place the leek up the wrong nostril. By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising. announced, “The artists today that are making it realize that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans.These discussions were central to a politics of the voice harnessed in the service of the production of different notions of personhood and belonging. Upon completion of her tests, in 2004, Gruber determined that ODAP appeared to be present in both species of Hedysarum, but her results were less than conclusive. A beautiful book by one of my favourite comics about one man’s mental breakdown and how music and the people who made it saved him from the worst year of his life. From a cryptic diary found among his possessions, it appeared that McCandless had been dead for nineteen days.