Feeding the Habit of Energy

Feeding the Habit of Energy was commissioned by RADAR, Loughborough University’s contemporary arts research programme. Designed for headphones, the work is intended to be heard while walking along the canals of Loughborough—the industrial arteries of the city’s Victorian heyday.

The piece is a meditation on the sonic environment of the Brush Electrical Machines (BEM) factory, which stands behind the railway station. BEM manufactures the generators and transformers that feed society’s insatiable “habit of energy”—a force the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti urged artists to celebrate at the dawn of the 20th century, but which now increasingly resembles a self-destructive addiction.

All sounds were recorded within the BEM factory. As the work unfolds, it moves between unmanipulated field recordings and a form of abstraction distilled from that industrial source material.