By: Brett Bloom
Publisher: Auburn, IN; Breakdown Break Down Press, Covid-19, 2020
Pages:8-page booklet; one-sided machine-carved salvaged wood
Dimensions: 5.5 in X 8.5 in (booklet); 3.5 in x 28.5 in x .5 in
Cover: Paper
Binding: staplebound
Process:offset
Color: full color
Edition size: 500 (booklet); open (carved wood)
ISBN: none

NOTE: This item ships separately from all other items in our store. You must choose USPS Priority, this item does not qualify for Media Mail.

This Sonic Meditation was written in the first months of the 2020 global pandemic. Pollution levels everywhere dropped dramatically. The petroleum-dominated soundscapes of daily life emptied of astonishing amounts of human noise intrusion. Covid-19 is here because of climate breakdown. This Sonic Meditation is practice for more severe disruptions of your fossil-fuel-based life.

Sonic Meditations are written or spoken instructions that anyone can do to explore listening. They were developed by musician and composer, Pauline Oliveros, as an essential tool of the practice of Deep Listening she initiated. Sonic Meditations give attention towards various aspects of how listening and perceiving in a concentrated manner can reveal many things that are present, but that you do not regularly engage.

Sonic Meditations are used in BKDN BKDN workshops, camps, publications, and public initiatives, to explore relationships to the world focusing on the ecological entanglements that define human existence.

Sonic Meditations provide powerful experiences that can alter your sense of the world and your relationships to it. You face unrelenting challenges to hold onto what Sonic Meditations teach. Fossil-fuel-based time and space constantly pull you into abstractions and misrecognitions of where you are and what is happening. People must daily consider climate breakdown—and getting free from fossil fuel reliance—if our species is to survive.

Carving “Listening To The End Of Fossil-Fuel-Based Civilization” into a piece of salvaged wood offers a tool to help you hold the awareness the phrase conjures. It is a talisman invoking a healing process that will take generations to accomplish; its humble magic is in repeated mental and verbal utterances practicing post-oil culture summoned from the future.

Breakdown Break Down press is experimenting with ways to print and publish while making as little embodied waste as possible. Embodied waste is the hidden energy and material resources that go into making publications, and things in general.