Listening... really listening to how we live is a radical political act!
The status quo, that same status quo that will raise ocean levels, depends on our continued deafness.
In the modern world we have learned to NOT LISTEN. We have become experts in not listening and that has divorced us from our environment,from connecting, from feeling part of it. We have substituted the sound of our plunder with a happy ipod soundtrack.

Learning to really listen reveals clues we need to change the world.
we can hear... our economy, its scale and force and power,
we can hear... our howl of disconnection
we can hear... our disdain for efficiency
we can hear... our joy in burning resources
we can hear... our isolation
we can hear... nature's distress

LISTENING TO OUR OWN NOISE IS EXACTLY THE FEEDBACK WE NEED TO CHANGE THE WORLD.

This is entirely invisible to the EYE.
When we look around we cannot see our inefficiency,
our howl of disconnection, our dwindling resources.
JUST LISTENING WE CAN HEAR THE CLIMATE CHANGING.

We hear it in the sound of lawn mowers, leaf blowers, rush hour, helicopters, jets, air conditioners,etc.
Those are the everyday sounds from which we make the REQUIEM FOR FOSSIL FUELS.
The Rfff "orchestra " is made up entirely of the sounds of fossil fueled culture going mad.

Then there are the voices 4 lovely voices wandering like Candide, like EVERYMAN, through this compelling chaos, this howling, ringing, economic vortex- the actual sounds of how we live.

In this REQUIEM FOR FOSSIL FUELS our whole culture and its use of fossil fuel power is mirrored to the depths of our soul. We hear ourselves and find ourselves in the music. We hear our relationship to power, our love/hate affair with machines. Just by listening we make the connection to the culture as a whole in a new and emotional way. By listening, we have gained an emotional connection to all the DATA (the new scientific data on climate, on energy, on nature under seige). A warm place near to our hearts has been opened by listening to the Requiem where we can TREASURE THIS NEW DATA that usually just slips away with the morning news, with the yoga workout. To change actions we must first change perceptions, it is on this level that the Requiem for fossil fuels operates.

To create this piece, this emotional mirror, this work of art, we had to REACH WAY BACK and find a place outside the ECONOMY so we could comment on the HUGE CHAOTIC ROAR of the economy- for standing within the ROAR no comment can be heard. We reached back to a system that was in place BEFORE THIS ECONOMY WAS CREATED to the ancient text of the REQUIEM. This is a ritual that has been going on for 1000 years, a ritual that assists us in comprehending change, in understanding that ALL THINGS PASS. This ritual exists intact, far from the continents of our economy, and from there we can see very far, far beyond the horizen of the quarterly reports, far beyond the perception of profit index. It is a lighthouse that has lasted for a thousand years, rising above a thousand years of change.

The Requiem for fossil fuels did not come out of nowhere. Sam and I have both been working for 20 years to understand and unlock the meaning of the sound of our cities. We have made dozens of installations in urban places, hundreds of hours of recordings, we have explored the soundscapes of remote ruined cities far from the electric grid, studied the sounds of nature and the sounds of man, thought long and hard about what this all means. We have become sonic shamans- outsiders to our own visual culture. We beleive that the visual culture is almost blind to its own actions, that the eyes are easily led and that the truth lies in what we hear. This we call the "HEARING PERSPECTIVE" of the world. We make our work from this perspective.

This piece Requiem for fossil fuels, could be considered a radical gesture that challenges the current politics of the senses, where visuals rule, pie charts charm, and the editing jump-cuts get shorter and shorter with our attention spans. We say visuals lie, and hearing reveals. In this piece we put it all together for the first time as a political and artistic act. Listening can save us. It can wake us up. It can let us live in our bodies and in our environment. It can stop us from being deaf to the cries.

LISTENING IS A POLITICAL ACT.
THINK WITH YOUR EARS.

Bruce Odland, Croton 2009