Energy Fields by John Atkinson

On Energy Fields, John Atkinson uses his distinctive treatments of warped, microedited, and tuned field recordings to evoke our turbulent transition from fossil fuels to renewables in an era of climate change.

All of the album’s sounds were recorded during Atkinson’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. These 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.

$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.

I build electronic music out of processed field recordings from natural and urban environments. Prior work in Brooklyn's Aa (Big A little a).

johnatkinson.org