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. Decomposed is a superbly lucid study that places recording in the broad human history of industrialization, globalization, resource extraction, labor exploitation, and ecological damage, debunking ideas of music's inherent goodness or intangibility. An immensely rigorous and compelling study, an absolute must-read, this book paves the way for a new ethics of music consumption.

He was a young, thin man in his early 20s, experiencing an extremely meager diet; who was hunting, hiking, climbing, leading life at its physical extremes, and who had begun to eat massive amounts of seeds containing a toxic [amino acid]. A toxin that targets persons exhibiting and experiencing precisely those characteristics and conditions …. In “Into the Wild,” the book I wrote about McCandless’s brief, confounding life, I came to a different conclusion. I speculated that he had inadvertently poisoned himself by eating seeds from a plant commonly called wild potato, known to botanists as Hedysarum alpinum. According to my hypothesis, a toxic alkaloid in the seeds weakened McCandless to such a degree that it became impossible for him to hike out to the highway or hunt effectively, leading to starvation. Because Hedysarum alpinum is described as a nontoxic species in both the scientific literature and in popular books about edible plants, my conjecture was met with no small amount of derision, especially in Alaska. Devine’s findings may, at first glance, provoke a helpless shrug. Every field of human endeavor entails some form of environmental destruction, and the music industry is perhaps no worse than any other. A sour critic might point out that printing a book about the political ecology of music makes its own contribution to the despoliation of the planet. But Devine isn’t interested in inducing guilt; he simply wants us to become more aware of the materiality of music. He writes, “There is a highly intoxicating form of mystification at work in the ideology of musical culture more generally.” As a result, music is “seen as a special pursuit that somehow transcends the conditions of its production.” Devine’s critical history of recording formats throws a necessary wrench into that mythology of musical purity. Many successful apps that exist today were created as monoliths. The app is a hit and continues to evolve, iteration after iteration, adding more functionality.

Credits

To establish once and for all whether Hedysarum alpinum is toxic, last month I sent a hundred and fifty grams of freshly collected wild-potato seeds to Avomeen Analytical Services, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for H.P.L.C. analysis. Dr. Craig Larner, the chemist who conducted the test, determined that the seeds contained .394 per cent beta- ODAP by weight, a concentration well within the levels known to cause lathyrism in humans.

Kyle Devine opens us to oil wells, studio albums, digital accessories, and much else —creative, horrible, and in between—on which music reproduction depends. Itself rendered with precision and elegance, Decomposed is fit for music lovers, social scientists, and all citizens of a tremulous earth. MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology.Gary Tomlinson, John Hay Whitney Professor of Music and Humanities, Yale University; author of A Million Years of Music Each release becomes as small as possible and requires a full deployment of the entire application. The MIT Press has been a leader in open access book publishing for over two decades, beginning in 1995 with the publication of William Mitchell’s City of Bits, which appeared simultaneously in print and in a dynamic, open web edition.