What happens over the lifecycle of a commodity? Where do its components come from? How are they extracted, processed and put together? Where does it travel? How is it used, thrown away, re-used, broken apart and reconstituted? These are the questions at the heart of Rubbish Music’s Symphony of Waste. 

Over four years as Rubbish Music our practice has intervened in modest ways in the lives of discarded commodities. Packaging has lived on as instruments, tin cans have been re-purposed as tools for playing. Living closely with rubbish we might otherwise have thrown away has given us the chance to think more fully with these objects, and their journeys and transformations which extend far beyond our relationships with them. In Symphony of Waste we use sound to follow the extraordinary chains of extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal through which contemporary commodities move. From the clangs of factories to the doorbells of distribution, from the brief lives of our most throwaway items to their crushing, sorting, melting, decay and re-purposing, the symphony follows materials as they are repeatedly assembled, dispersed, discarded and transformed.

In sound we imbue these commodities and their lifecycles with a vivid liveliness; a sense of wonder and dismay at the incredible journeys, iterations and processes they undergo set against the startling brevity of many of their useful lives. The objects we let go of do not simply disappear. They continue in many guises without us: buried in dumps, circulating through recycling plants, accumulating in oceans as well as human and non-human bodies, breaking down into smaller and smaller parts, and sometimes becoming materials from which new objects and new worlds are made. Symphony of Waste is both a protest and a hopeful re-imagining of what the lives of our objects might be. What would it mean to make things which remain useful for longer, which can be repaired, re-purposed and transformed? How can we live in a world where who makes waste and who gets to deal with it is more equally shared? What other lives might our commodities have, might we have?