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March 15, 2023 (Brooklyn, NY):
On Energy Fields, John Atkinson uses his distinctive treatments of warped, microedited, and tuned field recordings to create vivid soundscapes that evoke our energy system and the ways it is changing in response to the threat of climate change. The sounds of electrical hums, shuddering coal mines, roaring refineries, and gently clanking wind turbines, along with groaning bison, chattering cranes, and other wildlife, are reshaped into four tracks of heavy drone that veer from anxiety to awe, and from anthropocentric to transcendent.
On Energy Fields, John Atkinson uses his distinctive treatments of warped, microedited, and tuned field recordings to create vivid soundscapes that evoke our energy system and the ways it is changing in response to the threat of climate change. The sounds of electrical hums, shuddering coal mines, roaring refineries, and gently clanking wind turbines, along with groaning bison, chattering cranes, and other wildlife, are reshaped into four tracks of heavy drone that veer from anxiety to awe, and from anthropocentric to transcendent.
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.All of the album’s sounds were recorded during John’s September 2019 residency at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming – the largest coal-producing state in America as well as a burgeoning hub for renewables and carbon capture. Inspired by John’s 15+ years of looking at the technological and political aspects of the energy transition as a writer and consultant, Energy Fields aims to capture the more visceral and spiritual aspects of these systems of resource extraction and transformation that define our lives, yet are too often invisible and taken for granted.
$2 from each album purchase will go to Terraset, a nonprofit that allows donors to directly support promising startups removing carbon from the atmosphere. Terraset supports companies using scalable technologies to remove and store carbon for centuries (or millennia) in a verifiable, permanent way. Wyoming has emerged as an early leader in this area, seeking to use its incredible geological gifts to bury and store carbon - even as it simultaneously unearths it through continued fossil fuel extraction.
All sounds recorded and processed by John Atkinson
Mixed by Jeremy Scott
Mastered by Andrew Weathers
Art & layout by Francie Chang
Photography by John Atkinson
AKP019
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John Atkinson’s music career began as part of the Brooklyn, NY-based experimental ensemble Aa (“Big A little a”), which released three albums of multi-drummer DIY maximalism that were hailed in Pitchfork for creating a “spectacular, expertly sculpted 3-D sound world.” More recently, he has released a series of collaborative albums on several ambient and experimental imprints, including Loom (cached.media), East Portal (AKP Recordings), Call Me When You Can (Fluid Audio), and Plains (Florabelle Records). His current process harnesses field recordings and acoustic instruments to sculpt soundscapes that are organic yet intensely artificial, seeking to embody the complex ecologies of the 21st century.