Tired Circuits - "Cleveland-Cliffs released 17 million lbs of toxic chemicals into US waterways"

Tired Circuits plays a kind of beautifully distorted, glitch-heavy music that moves between heavily emotional ambient and neo-classical music and harsh noise with grace and ease. As a project, however, Tired Circuits marries this kind of aching ambient music with climate activism. According to the press release, “Bad Waters is a research project and music release which aggregates and sonifies data from academia, watchdog groups, the EPA, the U.S. Treasury, and the finance sector to draw connections between major water polluting companies and federal funding.

Billion dollar corporations are dumping millions of pounds of toxic chemicals into our waterways, self-reporting those releases to the EPA, and paying the fines leveraged against them. But those fines are a sliver of the massive government contracts and tax breaks these companies receive, and a minuscule fraction of their annual revenue.

Using homebrewed code, I sonified this data, mapping toxic release, revenue, federal contracts, etc to audio elements like distortion, pitch, and waveform to build noisy soundscapes. I composed piano melodies atop those soundbeds while viewing images of the affected towns and waterways. The result is ten short pieces of witness, accusation, grief, and nostalgia.”