Composing and recomposing music’s relation to our environment. A conversation with Kyle Devine
Agustina Checa*
Experiencing late-stage capitalism with intentional criticism and deliberate awareness commonly engenders feelings of despair. Every day, screens of different shapes and sizes present us with a world in which profit prevails over people and their humanity, while they leave at our fingertips software to contribute to the irreparable damage to our ecological and living environments. Infrastructural dispositions rooted in older world regimes shape our media ecologies, and novel technological innovations complicate the ways in which we communicate and connect to a multiplicity of others, as well as the ways in which we create and disseminate knowledge about our experiences. You, as a reader, must trust that it is indeed a person who is typing out these words and that they are not merely lumped together by a pseudo-intelligent, data-gathering, trained machine. To combat the pervasive dynamics of global neoliberalism that leads our planet to defuture itself[1] and propose new sustainable designs[2], we must attend to the various ways in which capitalism’s unmaintainable and deeply inequitable rules reproduce themselves in the cultural artifacts that shape vernacular meaning-making. We must dare to ask uncomfortable questions. How may something so seemingly benevolent as music be tied to global patterns of ecological exploitation and resource extraction? How do we justify the creation of music technologies that our societies do not intentionally dispose of, and our planet is not easily able to decompose? How are the various industries that shape our everyday experience of music reproducing colonial or capitalist forms of dependence?
The “climate question,” which Bruno Latour finds is at the heart of all geopolitical issues and crucial to address issues of injustice and inequality[3] was sidelined from music conversations for decades. Yet recently, it has provided scholars with productive avenues to disclose the ways in which music indexes, resists, and also reinforces unequal power relations outside of a merely symbolic, artistic or discursive realm and into empirical, material, infrastructural, environmentally impactful, industrially built arenas. Kyle Devine has been one of the forerunners of this shift. His deft study of the political ecology and environmental impact of recorded music in Decomposed sparked cross disciplinary engagement and discussions on the ecological impact of music that extended beyond the echo chambers of academia. Co-editing Audible Infrastructures with Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, he added further critical interventions to dimensions of music making and listening that go beyond the “surface procedures” that mold our day-to-day sonic experiences.
Aiming to pair Devine’s incisive and ever-growing engagement with music and ecology with the scholarly production within this issue of American Music Review (centered on community and activism around music and climate change), I met with him to talk about Recomposed, his forthcoming book soon to be published by Verso. In this new intellectual endeavor, Devine examines the underlying patterns and social dynamics that shape the individual and institutional responses to music’s environmental impact that grew significantly since the publication of his first book. A slightly edited version of our passionate conversation during the summer of 2025 follows.
Just half a decade after Decomposed was published, it feels like we live in a much different world, particularly with regards to our relationship to music… now something that can be made by robots?! How is the context of Decomposed different than that of Recomposed? What has changed?
I don't know how much has changed, but a lot is sure happening. When I started the work for what became Decomposed, I was basically reading articles and encountering investigative journalistic pieces like “the environmental toll of a Netflix binge” and a sort of growing prominence in media studies about “e-waste” that was coming out. There were journalistic pieces asking what is the online and [what is] the environmental cost of this online consumption. That was around 2012, and I knew that music was wrapped up in all of those same issues. You heard it a lot then (and is still common today) that music digitized was music dematerialized and that music “had gone up to live in the cloud,” and so we were freed from all of these earthly tethers…and all of this “stuff”. And I thought, well, that's romantic, but it's not true. And in thinking that it could be possible to quantify the streaming imprint of music I went backwards, through different eras of the history of the record industry and tried to show what were the main materials used in making records and, the most commercially successful formats through the history of recording. In the five or so years, half a decade, since that book was published, I think things have changed quite a lot in terms of people thinking seriously about the environmental impact of music. The so-called “live music” industry, the record industry, touring, merch, instruments, all of it. And that has been really interesting to sort of watch and be a small part of. Because basically, when the Decomposed book was published a fair number of people were reaching out to me, for a number of years. People working in music would reach out, and they would say: “Hey, we heard about your book, we heard that things are kind of grim. Check out what I'm doing! I'm making records out of sugar,” or “I have a dream of making a streaming service that's powered by geothermal energy,” or “I'm making solar-powered stereos,” or “I have this music industry carbon certification,” or “I'm writing a play about music.” People would reach out and tell me about all of this. And on the other hand, a lot of journalists would reach out and basically say “okay, okay, okay… we've heard it's grim, what do we do?” But they didn't want 300 pages describing the mess, they wanted to know how to clean it up, a kind of listicle “top 10 things that I can do right now to decrease my own personal music environmental impact.” They wanted to know “should I stream or listen to LPs, dig out my CD collection?” or “is this streaming service better than that streaming service?” These kinds of questions. So basically, over a number of years, I had a lot of those encounters and started to notice patterns in the ways that people are thinking about the relationship, the connection between music and climate issues, and what they want to do about it. I never planned to write a book about this stuff, but I was drawn into this world, and eventually I just gave in. So that's what the book became, the story of how the music business is wrestling with the issue of climate crisis and how people in music are seeking solutions.
Tell me more about how you are doing that in Recomposed. What kinds of patterns are you noticing?
In this new book, I divide up three most prominent axes around which I see music changing itself in response to climate issues: technical solutions, institutional solutions, and cultural solutions. For technical solutions I focus mainly on the record industry, but there are many more throughout live music and instruments and beyond. Institutional solutions focus on the way carbon mentality is being grafted onto music as a culture industry, how “carbon thinking” becomes part of what it means to evaluate and value music both economically and in terms of arts funding. And in cultural [solutions] is basically this idea that there are cultural solutions to climate crisis, and that music specially somehow provides this missing link. This is the language of this world. [That music may be] the missing link between climate awareness and climate action because it transmits not just information but emotional content and things like this. Those ideas present themselves as self-evidently true and good and natural to a certain segment of the population, and all of them can be understood historically, they do come from somewhere historically. All of it can be understood in terms of a variety of limitations. What the book eventually shows is that all of those solutions to climate crisis, those “genres of solutions” can be pursued and more or less achieved without asking a single question about the underlying economic arrangement and social architecture that is the root cause of the climate crisis in the first place [capitalism]. So, in trying to describe all of this work I ask…what else is possible? What else is needed? I really try hard, and in all of this have that old improv comedy rule of thumb, which is yes and. I want to say yes to everything that's going on, I want to see what else is possible. Yes, let's pursue all of these solutions, and let's recognize that they're fully compatible with capital and classism. And let's also figure out how to ask questions, how to confront capital through labor (which is still for my money the most effective way of trying to make improvements within that system) and maybe get beyond it one day. And that's really the sort of spirit and message of this book.
I wonder about how these kinds of “solutions” may also differ when they are done from a business-oriented perspective, a kind of corporate top-down approach that looks good for donors and investors but will never sufficiently address the fact that is precisely this capital-driven and extractivist labor that is creating the majority of these ecological tragedies around music. What is the difference between those corporate approaches and something that is more ground-up, grassroots, community-oriented, driven by musicians or people being more conscious about their own environmental footprint in music making?
One of the ways that I think about this is in terms of objects and objectification. I think that those larger corporate entities, those kind of top-down perspectives in relation to the kind of from-below perspectives they're both caught between rocks and hard places. These are the contradictions and tensions that define what it is to exist under capital. Larger corporations can do fairly big things (environmental social governance reports, they can try and lower their carbon emissions), they have the possibility of influencing systems of objectification, the ways of abstracting and regularizing systems of relationships that kind of define us and the world around us. But they don't have the inclination to influence those systems of objectifications because they are baked into the business model. Corporations are not going to go beyond a kind of certain testing limit or restrictions imposed by government organizations. They are not going to do things that threaten their own bottom line. So, while corporations operate at the kind of scale where they could influence a system of objectification (like models of information and music under AI) they don't have the inclination to do that. In fact, they have a disinclination to do that. Whereas people working on a more grassroots, from below, level have the inclination to influence systems of objectification but only have the power to influence objects, so they work on different scales. They both are between a rock and a hard place, a cassette label owner or someone who wants to run a streaming service based on solar power, for example, might be able to do that, but it's very, very limited and has no impact at all on a wider system of objectification. And that's the frustration that many people feel. They have this kind of interlocking and opposite relationship, and everybody recognizes this, it is not a secret of the world that people don't see. If you talk to the head of global productions at one of the three major labels, that person is working within the best of their abilities to do what they can, their environmental social governance reports, they do big life-cycle analysis of vinyl supply chain and all of this, but they won’t ask fundamental questions about their business model, which is built on withdrawing uncompensated value from the work that people do and (depending in which side of the debates you land on), extracting value from the natural world.
And returning to Decomposed, this is something that been going on for centuries… the exploitation of natural resources, extraction of labor, and uneven power relations that keep reproducing under the veil of music or cultural production being a neutral or harmless thing. And of course, as time passes these relationships take new forms. Tying both books together, and playing with your yes and approach at the moment, I want to know if you think there can ever be an eco-friendly relationship between music and climate.
Well, I guess I would start to answer that by backing up slightly. In a way, bouncing off of the first question (or how I answered it) going back to where that Decomposed book came out of. This was a moment when people weren't asking a lot of these kinds of questions, and now I'll read things that begin by saying “the environmental impact of touring and the festival” or the so-called live music industries “is a catastrophe on a global scale” and I'll go, “whoa, hang on. It's not, actually. It does, you know, it does have an environmental impact, but we're not talking about fossil capital at large, or anything like that. I've contributed to this, and so I'm trying to sort of walk it back slightly. I really want to keep music's environmental impact in perspective. I don't think it's helpful to overblow its contribution, or to run too far in that direction. And that is a change in the last 10 years or so. Whereas people weren't thinking much about it before, now it's got this huge, crazy impact. And yes, there is impact, and the impact is substantial, and people invested in music have a right to want to decrease that impact and try and address those issues. But we're not talking about fossil capital, we're not talking about the global construction industry, we're not talking about global agriculture. Yes, it's significant. But let's not exaggerate. Let's not exaggerate the significance while also being serious about trying to reduce it. So… can music ever have an eco-friendly relationship with the environment? That's a really big and difficult question. Can anything have a better relationship with the environment under capital? I mean, the answer to that is yes. Capital is capable of improving its own relationship to the environment. Obviously, it is not super likely, but it is possible. I think one of the most serious impediments to improving the relationship between what some scholars talk about as the “durables of existence” (that were required to sustain people in their societies and the environment), one of the most serious hindrances to improving that relationship is capital. Can music develop a beautiful, harmonious relationship, or equilibrium with the environment under capital? Maybe, but it's unlikely because it's at every stage connected to those wider industries.
And industries in plural, too, which is a key contribution of your first book. So, in examining the relationships that music can have with nature and the environment you are uncovering a more pressing concern that seems fundamental to any vision of a sustainable and eco-friendly relationship with music… the relationship that music has to capital. Would you say this is the bigger question that Recomposed points out to?
Yes, I think that is fair to say, and it is counterintuitive. Because the climate crisis is so urgent, so obvious to most people now and so confronting [it is counterintuitive] to suggest that some direct solutions that are being offered (that are all at the moment needed, necessary, and urgent) need to take another view and another perspective on this (and one that is actually not directly related to climate issues) to not just bandage some of these climate issues and get to [their] underlying causes. The issue of capital and class is not directly a climate issue.
Or not presented as such…
Yeah, exactly. And so, to introduce that kind of clutch and a gear change, it's too much for many people. Even if people know that it's the case, they think “that's too big, we can't deal with that, let's just bandage it.” It's triage, right? And I get that. I get that. And I really think it's important, it's fundamental and necessary to ask those more essential questions about economics and social architecture. That is not an opinion that I began writing the book with, but an opinion that I worked myself into trying to make sense of the material that I was encountering. A big starting point for me was this old idea that the definition of a problem determines the scope of its possible solutions. And so, if we define this problem as a sort of “carbonist climate crisis” then our solutions are going to focus on carbon and they are going to universalize a particular range of experiences and places and solutions based on those positions. And that will ultimately perpetuate the issue. It is tricky. The musical world is trying to solve a problem called “climate crisis” and that itself is part of the problem because the underlying problem, which has very different solutions than the problem of climate crisis, is the problem of capital and class and all of the clear inequalities that flow from there. And that, again, is one stage removed from directly lowering carbon emissions, and it’s every bit as important if not more so. That's where the book tries to go.
Wrapping up, I was wondering how Artificial Intelligence may fit into all of this. AI today is everywhere, embedded in most search engines and document readers, but also making songs, videos and playlists… how does it fit into all of this?
There’s a little part about AI in the new book. There’s this book by Emily Bender and Alex Hanna (The AI Con) where they do a nice job framing it, and Kate Crawford's Atlas of AI which lays out what the biggest lie about artificial intelligence is that it is neither artificial nor intelligent. In this book they consider AI like a synthetic content extrusion machine and one of the most important things there to remember is that extrusion is extraction of value (from labor and of resources from the natural world). And that's a really important point about AI, especially as there are quotes out there of people who run these AI music services and they're dreaming of flooding the world with billions, hundreds of millions or billions of AI-generated tracks (some of which are only listened to by other robots) to get into this entirely artificial realm of generating weird copyright profit without listening, without human personal listening. And all of that is going to have an enormous musical price tag and it will have an environmental price tag as well. As far as we can tell right now, [that impact] is going to be high and that's a concern. Another thing interesting about AI (in the colloquial, marketing sense) and with the previous sort of “digital” moment, the digital media frenzy of NFTs, one of the automatic criticisms was environmental. When NFT’s came out journalistic pieces were coming out saying “whoa, along with crypto, this stuff is using more electricity than entire countries.” And the environmental criticism of AI has become automatic. And so, again, in a way we're back to question one which is “how much have things changed in the last 10 or 15 years since I've been working on these topics?”. We've gone to a point where all of this was hidden in naturalistic metaphors to one where the environmental criticism is the first port of call in bourgeoise media and that is a really interesting development. I'm not quite sure what to make of at this point, but my critical brain is tempted to think that it says something about what environmental critique means in our moment. If it’s such an automatic call now, what is the content of environmental critique anymore? Has it lost meaningfulness? I haven't landed what I'm trying to make of that.
Recomposed. Music, Climate, Crisis, Change will be published by Verso in 2026.
Kyle Devine is an award-winning author and editor, Dean of Graduate Studies and Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies and Sciences at the University of Winnipeg.
Fry, Tony. 2020. Defuturing: A New Design Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Escobar, Arturo. 2018. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Latour, Bruno. 2018. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity, 3.
*Agustina Checa (she/her/ella) is an ethnomusicologist working at the intersection of popular music and media studies and the director of the Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music (HISAM) at the Graduate Center. Checa is Assistant Professor of Music at Lehman College and doctoral faculty at the Graduate Center, CUNY.