In 2016, hundreds of Indigenous people, led by women, staged a silent demonstration during the historic collective action against the Dakota Access Pipeline, also known as the Standing Rock Protests\u200a\u2014\u200aa battle whose slogan, \u201cWater Is Life,\u201d emphasized that the proposed pipeline route posed a real danger to the waterways that sustained life in the region. The poignant juxtaposition of Edison\u2019s preserved breath and the silent protest by Indigenous water protectors revealed a paradox: protest uses breath as a form of resistance to protect life, while the commodification of a dead man\u2019s breath by industrialists like Ford, responsible for the proliferation of fossil fuels, offers only further destruction; yet it is that small vial that ends up being preserved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chacon\u2019s installation serves as a reminder that preservation is often re-enacted in the interests of capital, particularly in the context of colonial expansion. Therefore, decay may be a mode of resistance and transformation that alters and reorganizes how history is perceived. Here, I explore decomposition not as absence but as a generative force. Through the work of Chacon, Maria Chavez, Hajra Waheed, and JJJJJerome Ellis, I argue that sonic decay\u200a\u2014\u200awhat I refer to as de-composition<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200ais both an artistic and a political act, one that reveals the violence of archival structures. Although preservationists often claim to safeguard cultural heritage, they often reinforce hierarchies of power by determining which artefacts, voices, and sonic traditions are deemed valuable enough to endure.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

\n
$\"Raven$
Raven Chacon<\/strong>
Silent Choir (Standing Rock)<\/em>, 2017.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Yet sonic archives deteriorate not only through the physical erosion of magnetic tape or wax cylinders but through the social conditions that shape listening itself. The endurance of a sound, its ability to carry meaning, memory, and political resonance, relies on the collective repertoires that bind musicality to the memory of the world. In this way, the phenomenon of sonic decay becomes emblematic of alternative histories. It is precisely here, within the collapsing structures of official memory, that de-composition takes place\u200a\u2014\u200anot as loss but as reorientation. Bound to breath, to rhythm, to reverberation, and to the intimate and unstable infrastructures of human relations. Sound decomposes, but in doing so, it makes room for that which is otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
$\"Edison\u2019s$
Edison\u2019s Last Breath<\/em>, 1931.
Photo: courtesy of Collections of The Henry Ford<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Claude L\u00e9vi-Strauss\u2019s structuralist framework offers a useful model for understanding this process. In The Raw and the Cooked<\/em> (1964), he describes cultural transformation through a metaphorical triad in which raw materials (nature) are processed into structured cultural forms (cooked). The \u201crotted\u201d complicates binary logic by suggesting a state that is neither purely natural nor fully cultural but transitional or destabilizing.^{1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 1 <\/a> - Claude L\u00e9vi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked<\/em>, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).<\/span> De-composition of sound\u200a\u2014\u200awhether as physical erosion, archival silence, or fractured language\u200a\u2014\u200adoes not dissolve meaning, but redistributes it, exposing new patterns through the very act of breakdown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A vinyl record is an unstable object, accumulating distortion over time. With every revolution of the turntable, the needle slides through the grooves of a record, contributing to its gradual breakdown. Maria Chavez\u2019s hands-on live performance The Language of Chance<\/em> (2018\u200a\u2013\u200aongoing) foregrounds physical degradation as a central compositional element. She does not rely on the turntable to preserve recorded music but instead repositions it as an entropic instrument. \u201cWhat I\u2019m actually doing with my vinyl records is I\u2019m having miniature sculpture sessions. I have my needle as a chisel. The PVC is the subtracting material,\u201d she explains.^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - Maria Chavez, \u201cTopography of Sound: from PVC to Marble,\u201d keynote lecture, Concordia University, Montr\u00e9al, 2023.<\/span> As she frames her process as one of active deconstruction, her work lingers in the materiality of its decay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
$\"\"$
Maria Chavez<\/strong>
The Language of Chance<\/em>, 2018-ongoing, performance views, Le Guess Who?, TivoliVredenburg, Utrecht, 2018.
Photos: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"Maria$ <\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
By treating the breakdown of vinyl as a form of composition, Chavez foregrounds a mode of listening that values imperfection, interruption, and instability. The inevitable material deterioration that takes place through the use of an instrument\u200a\u2014\u200afor example, the eventual breakdown of a drum skin\u200a\u2014\u200abecomes an intentional part of the process, an element that shapes the sound, reinforcing the idea that de-composition is not an external force but something inherent in its structure, an invaluable part of its coming to being. In The Language of Chance<\/em> and other works, Chavez transforms this so-called waste into a productive sonic force. She dramatically breaks found records on stage and layers their fragments onto a spinning turntable, creating fragmented, live sound collages. The skipping needle, the fracturing of recorded music into unpredictable rhythms, and the emergence of unintended loops exemplify the notion that de-composition is not merely disappearance but a necessary expenditure that sustains the system itself, a \u201clife beyond utility\u201d^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume I: Consumption<\/em>, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 26.<\/span> that expands on de-colonial critiques. While the poet and cultural theorist Fred Moten suggests that improvisation is \u201cmaking nothing,\u201d^{4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 4 <\/a> - Fred Moten, \u201ccome on, get it!,\u201d The New Inquiry<\/em>, February 19, 2018, accessible online.<\/span> Chavez asks, \u201cHow do you destroy nothing?\u201d^{5<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 5 <\/a> - Chavez, \u201cTopography of Sound.\u201d<\/span> <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
Sound archives are not neutral repositories of history but systems of control, in which power structures determine what is preserved.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Hajra Waheed examines the erasure of sonic repertoires through lost protest songs, censored voices, and politically motivated disappearances of sound. Unlike Chavez, who engages with physical deterioration, Waheed reveals how sound that is systematically and historically removed, suppressed, or made inaccessible survives in the oral traditions of women who often assume caretaking roles. In the installation Hum II<\/em> (2023), which premiered at the Sharjah Biennial in 2023, she incorporated a soundtrack of protest songs central to popular uprisings, mass social movements, and anti–colonial struggles across the Americas, Africa, and Asia in which women have been at the forefront. Suppressed and banned, these songs are still being sung and hummed today as nursery rhymes. The immersive sound installation was presented in a soft conical structure that amplified the gentle melody: womb-like and serene, with a small window to the sky. Waheed\u2019s work poses a critical question: Where is the archive containing intentionally suppressed songs?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
$\"Hajra$
Hajra Waheed<\/strong>
Hum II<\/em>, installation view, AI Mureijah Art Spaces, Sharjah, 2023.
Photo: Ismail Noor, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
Like Chacon\u2019s Silent Choir<\/em>, Waheed\u2019s Hum II<\/em> presents a music that has been broken down into its core elements, yet instead of diminishing, its meaning expands, bleeding into new areas. Without lyrics, slogans, or words, the hummed melody contains not only the initial message but the traces of resistance. A song may be erased from official records, but it continues to exist as memory, rumour, or whispered refrain: the missing sound itself becomes the object of inquiry. Unlike the physical object, the erased song stands witness to the deterioration of the fabric of free societies and cultural alliances. Yet, Waheed\u2019s work suggests that even this erasure is not absolute. \u201cSometimes what is missing is the loudest thing in the room,\u201d she notes,^{6<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 6 <\/a> - Hajra Waheed, \u201cCrisis and Creativity: Artists Speak Series,\u201d lecture, Institute for South Asia Studies, University of California, Berkeley, February 8, 2022.<\/span> reinforcing the idea that sonic absence haunts the spaces it once occupied.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The composer Maryanne Amacher might have added that perception itself is a co-generative process, that sound is not simply an external object but something co-produced by the listener.^{7<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 7 <\/a> - Maryanne Amacher, \u201cPsychoacoustic Phenomena in Musical Composition: Some Features of a \u2018Perceptual Geography,\u2019\u201d in Arcana: Musicians on Music<\/em>, ed. John Zorn (New York: Granary Books, 2000), 13.<\/span> Her auditory research demonstrates how responsive tones are generated within the inner ear, making the listener an active participant in the materialization of sound, but I would go further to suggest that not only tones but meanings are co-created between the listener and producer at the threshold of breakdown, continually reconfigured by entropy, excess, and changing perception. Likewise, in Waheed\u2019s work, the listener is drawn into an active process of reconstruction, filling in the missing gaps where sound has been erased, and reinventing history in the process. The act of listening extends into the larger realm of cultural memory.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
If music erodes over time\u200a\u2014\u200athrough wear, distortion, and degradation\u200a\u2014\u200athen speech, too, loses continuity. JJJJJerome Ellis works through conventional understandings of speech and fluency as a form of musical and political phrasing. His compositions and performances engage with linguistic breakdown in a way that mirrors glitches in recorded sound, foregrounding the material instability of voice and language. Whereas Chavez embraces the sonic artefacts of damaged vinyl and Waheed reveals the empty spaces where songs once lived, Ellis foregrounds temporal interruptions. He notes, \u201cTo stutter in an economy that values speed is to assert another form of time,\u201d positioning his practice within a broader critique of capitalist temporality.^{8<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 8 <\/a> - Interview with JJJJJerome Ellis, January 24, 2025.<\/span> He does not attempt to \u201ccorrect\u201d speech but instead asks what it means to inhabit a different kind of sonic and temporal logic, emphasizing the way time and meaning fragment through speaking, as a form of sonic entropy. In the video and sound work Life of Life<\/em> (2020), a composition that reinterprets the text of a WANTED poster for a stuttering person who had escaped enslavement in the United States in 1777, he extends, mixes, and amplifies these disruptions, stretching out moments of hesitation and repetition, making them central to the listening experience. \u201cWhat happens if we refuse to smooth over these breaks?\u201d he asks.^{9<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 9 <\/a> - JJJJJerome Ellis, On Fugitive Speech<\/em>, Whitney Museum of American Art, April 18, 2022, accessible online.<\/span> Like the skipping record in Chavez\u2019s work, Ellis\u2019s piece loops, fragments, and generates unexpected rhythmic structures. By disrupting the poster and reinterpreting it through stutter, he recovers the humanity of his subject.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
\n
$\"JJJJJerome$
JJJJJerome Ellis <\/strong>
Life of Life<\/em>, in collaboration with Alice Sheppard, 2020.
Photo: courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
$\"JJJJJerome$
JJJJJerome Ellis<\/strong>
Life of Life<\/em>, in collaboration with Alice Sheppard, 2020.
Photo: courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s a fermented logic that fizzles, morphs, and feeds new cultures, permeating the air. Whereas preservationist approaches to sound prioritize fidelity and continuity, songs, objects, and words rot, fester, and decompose in the moulding archive. Root through the decomposing spaces between words and find new meanings blooming, scattered stutter waiting to turn over the rotting landscape. The loss of sound is reconfigured through memory, perception, and traces of its material and historical presence. Its afterlife suggests that listening itself is shaped by what no longer remains intact, what strays from capital. Archives such as songs, records, and historical artefacts, often imagined as neutral repositories of cultural memory, are touchpoints of perceived permanence in a landscape of continuous, entropic change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If archives determine which sounds are preserved, then what remains after sound decays? De-composition generates sonic fossils\u200a\u2014\u200apast sound pressed into form, still echoing. Chavez\u2019s record players, Waheed\u2019s vanished protest songs, and Ellis\u2019s stuttered clearings are traces of another time in the state of de-composition\u200a\u2014\u200atransforming from imposed order to disorder. Yet it also raises the question of whether all loss leads to new configurations or whether some forms of disappearance are final, especially when the material conditions of sonic media are increasingly ephemeral. By Levi-Strauss\u2019s logic, the rotted is not a mediator between the raw and the cooked but a third space, the life-giving state that nurtures future structures. If all sound is destined for entropy, then perhaps the most urgent question is not how to preserve it but how to let it reveal the structures through which meaning is made. Yet, as Chavez, Waheed, Ellis, and Chacon demonstrate, self-destruction triggers renewal. Preservation and de-composition are not opposing forces but intertwined processes, shaping not only what is remembered but how it is understood. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the 2022 Whitney Biennial, titled Quiet as It\u2019s Kept,<\/em> artist and musician Raven Chacon revealed a new installation that featured a vial purportedly containing Thomas Edison\u2019s last dying breath\u200a\u2014\u200aa relic collected by Henry Ford, symbolizing the preservation of industrialization\u2019s legacy and the coalescence of energies into capital, often at the expense of life. The room that contained the vial, painted black and otherwise empty, was filled with a sound piece titled Silent Choir<\/em> (2017), which captured the ambient sounds of shuffling feet, breath, and distant helicopters.<\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":269763,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[7549],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[6015],"artistes":[2914,7585,7577,7575],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[319],"class_list":["post-269778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-115-decay","auteurs-xenia-benivolski-en","artistes-hajra-waheed-en","artistes-jjjjjerome-ellis-en","artistes-maria-chavez-en","artistes-raven-chacon-en","type_post-principal"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269778"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":269782,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269778\/revisions\/269782"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269778"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=269778"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=269778"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=269778"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=269778"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=269778"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=269778"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=269778"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=269778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}