Requiem for fossil fuels is a timely and deep meditation on the culture, its fascinations, and its future.

O+A (Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger) perform their composition, Requiem for fossil fuels, playing an 8-channel “Orchestra of Cities” with singers Hai-Ting Chinn, mezzo soprano; Martha Cluver, soprano; John Young, tenor; and Joshua South, bass. They are currently preparing to tour Requiem for fossil fuels — not to the usual music venues — but to architecturally iconic spaces around the globe; places that, in one way or another, speak to our use of fossil fuels.

Requiem for fossil fuels is the result of more than twenty years of work and collaboration by Odland and Auinger to transform fossil-fuelled city noise into harmony. Inhabitants of cities are bombarded by and become inured to the sound of fossil-fuelled energy being used all around them. But, by putting the sense of hearing at the center of the experience, O+A allow people to encounter their world in a new way. By changing the way they hear, by making hearing a conscious act, their perception can change, and then their behavior. In that way, Requiem for fossil fuels can help people around the globe to say goodbye to the fossil-fuelled patterns that are so etched on their minds and lifestyles.

Materials for Requiem for fossil fuels come from O+A’s “alphabet of sounds”. This collection of recordings is the result of an ongoing search for a “Hearing Perspective” of the sounds we make as a culture. Each section of Requiem for fossil fuels uses a location recording and its real-time flow as cantus firmus. Over this cantus firmus, or baseline song, come soloistic “voices” of helicopters, jets, traffic, busses, horns, train wheels, footsteps of commuters, sirens: the found “voices” of a fossil fueled culture organized as music. O+A have constructed this playable digital orchestra of extraordinary sonic voices extracted from cities around the world. Against and sometimes with this “Orchestra of Cities” are the human voices of singers and the text of the full Requiem Mass, the setting of which was composed by Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger.

Commissioned by Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD, O+A presented the early installation version of Requiem for fossil fuels at the SophienKirche in Berlin as part of the 2004 Inventionen Festival, to considerable acclaim.

In October 2007, O+A premeired the performance version of Requiem for fossil fuels with an eight channel “orchestra” of city resonances, played live and heard against four un-amplified voices, at Judson Memorial Church in New York City as part of the second Ear to the Earth Festival, produced by Electronic Music Foundation. This world premiere of the performance of Requiem for fossil fuels was commissioned by Harvestworks with funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, Kunst und Kultur, Österreichisches Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Ske & Austro Mechana, and Stadt Linz. Rfff was sponsored by Austrian Cultural Forum NYC, Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD, and Land Oberösterreich.

Possible tour venues for Requiem for fossil fuels include the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center in New York City (next to Ground Zero), the Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex in Essen (a UNESCO site), the Galleria Mall in Houston, an abandoned Ford factory in Detroit, a shopping mall in Dubai, the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London, Las Vegas, the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C., and the “green city” of Greensburg, Kansas. A documentary film of the tour will allow O+A to reach an even larger audience than those at each venue.

The plan to tour Requiem for fossil fuels is bold and timely as we struggle as a culture to come to terms with how we choose to power our lives and how those choices affect the planet.