“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.” That’s how Joshua Dumas describes Bad Waters, an album released under his Tired Circuits moniker. A dispatch from a country where billion dollar companies need not even hide their own rule breaking, preferring instead to report their sins and pay the inconsequential fines. A bought absolution operating according to the logic of capitalism, allowing the same crime to be committed again and again.
“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,” Dumas explains. “I composed piano melodies atop those soundbeds while viewing images of the affected towns and waterways.” But against this more abstract artistic endeavour stands the forthright nature of the labelling. Each track takes a specific case, with the title stating the story behind the song plainly. ‘PBF Energy released 8 million lbs of toxic chemicals into US waterways,’ ‘Koch Industries released 7 million lbs of toxic chemicals into US waterways’, ‘DuPont released 17 million lbs of toxic chemicals into US waterways’ and so on, with JBS Foods, Cargill, Phillips 66 and others all implicated. The result is marked in both its fury and sorrow, bringing to life the full malignant greed of corporate America and the loss inherent in the devastation it has wrought.