#degradations

Performances (in development)

Degradations is a series of live sound performances that explores ecological collapse through the material and sonic processes of magnetic tape degradation. Each iteration draws on field recordings of environments marked by transformation, disturbance, and loss, staging ecological catastrophe not as representation, but as an unfolding sonic condition—felt through texture, repetition, and decay.

Across the series, magnetic tape functions as both medium and evolving system. Its physical wear, fragmentation, and instability mirror ecological degradation as a gradual, cumulative, and often imperceptible process. Through live manipulation—cutting, slowing, layering, and re-routing tape—recordings are continuously reworked, allowing environmental sound to break down into shifting, unstable sonic matter. No two performances are identical; each one emerges from the specific conditions of playback, space, and material degradation.

Field recordings operate as affective traces of place: fragments that carry memory, tension, and ecological change. As they are replayed and transformed in real time, they resist fixed interpretation, instead opening spaces where listening becomes a process of encountering loss, fragility, and interdependence. Over the course of the series, these sonic materials evolve, accumulating distortion and erosion, forming a progressively unstable archive.

Rather than constructing linear narratives, the performances unfold as immersive listening environments. Each site becomes a temporary sonic ecology in which sound, memory, and perception are in constant negotiation. Spatial configurations, speaker arrangements, and acoustic conditions shift from one iteration to the next, placing both audience and performer within a shared, unstable field of attention. Meaning emerges through duration, proximity, and resonance rather than explanation.

As a series, Degradations develops an ongoing inquiry into how ecological breakdown can be experienced across time. Each performance revisits and transforms earlier material, foregrounding processes of repetition, decay, and reconfiguration. In this way, the work mirrors ecological systems not as singular events, but as continuous processes of change, accumulation, and loss.

At its core, the project asks how ecological breakdown is not only an external condition, but something that can be sensed, remembered, and emotionally registered through sound. It explores how listening can hold grief without resolution, and how interdependence can be perceived through systems in decline.

Degradations situates sound as both witness and material: a way of engaging ecological crisis not through distance or abstraction, but through embodied, affective, and durational listening.