Kyle Devine is a thoughtful, insightful, and even entertaining guide to the complex relationship of climate change and music. Central to the book are the efforts of diverse individuals and collectives to address the threats to the planet and its inhabitants. Readers will encounter tales of the carbon police patrolling Glastonbury, of the manufacturers of Green Vinyl discs that are not just recyclable, but dishwasher safe, and of the music activists involved in EarthPercent and Julie’s Bicycle.
These initiatives are linked throughout to the grim reality of climate change, which, while I was reading the book, were vividly evoked by the climate scientist Bill McGuire in the Guardian (26 May Reference McGuire2026):
Let me take you to the last day of July 2052, the rays of the climbing sun reveal a city still sweltering in the residual heat of the day before. From the air, London resembles a colossal refugee camp. Streets, gardens and parks are teeming with tents and cobbled-together shelters, within which the city’s residents have spent another uncomfortable night away from the heat traps that their houses and flats have become.
For Devine, such scenarios have to be understood as structurally caused and defined by corporate and class interests. He argues that even if ‘carbon emissions are drastically reduced or eliminated, the pressures of competition and profit will continue clobbering nature in other ways’ (p. 9). It is capitalism’s dependence on growth that threatens the planet.
Against this backdrop, Devine focuses on what those within music’s industries are doing to challenge a world not of their making. The discussion is organised under three general headings: Technical Solutions, Institutional Solutions, and Cultural Solutions.
The first is primarily concerned with the physical manufacture of recorded music, but Devine is alert to the argument about the relative carbon costs of the physical form versus the streamed version. Indeed, he dismisses the suggestion that digital music is not physical. It is and it can appear more efficient and less environmentally damaging than vinyl, but this remains true only for as long as you ignore the structures and systems that make streaming possible.
Devine reports sympathetically on the entrepreneurs and others who are working to make sustainable forms of music production, but he is also alive to the limits of their efforts, whether, for example, their initiatives can be scaled.
Those limits lead him to consider the institutional route to music sustainability. Here he analyses the efforts of an organisation like ClimateEQ, which works to produce ‘carbon literacy’ and hence responsible citizenship. In music, this takes the form of accounting for the carbon costs of live music. This leads, suggests Devine, to the creation of ‘ homo carbonicus ’, and dealing with climate change becomes a matter of personal responsibility. The problem with such solutions is that ‘scrutiny of the personal trees passes for consideration of the political forest’ (p. 95). He evinces a similar wariness about what he calls the ‘climate philanthropy’ associated with EarthPercent, a charity which asks those in the industry to donate some of their income to support climate causes.
Devine favours initiatives such as the Music Climate Pact, which wants to see the music industry reach net zero. It has the advantage of a framework that takes account of wider matters of energy, resources, and waste. In the end, though, he argues that yet more is needed to address the causes of climate change. This is to be found in what he labels ‘cultural solutions’ and the thought that ‘it is easier for people to act themselves into new thinking than to think themselves into new acting’ (p.128).
Culture is here taken to be the ‘missing link’ between climate awareness and climate action. Here Devine’s attention turns to music as sound and performance. His claim is that ‘music has power that, properly harnessed’, can provide the key: ‘it can bring about novel ideas and stitch together various ways of thinking about the world’ (p.145).
It is in this last section of the book that Devine’s argument loses some of the sharpness that is evident earlier. Having asserted that acting can lead to thinking, he argues later that ‘wrong awareness can make for wrong action’ (p.162). This suggests a very different role for culture. But either way, the final section of the book tends to rest too much on generalisation and assertion about what music does, and too little on justifying these claims. I missed the close attention that Devine brought to the earlier sections on the technical and institutional solutions.
Nonetheless, Recomposed is a very valuable addition to the literature on music and climate awareness and action. It is a short book, but a bracing and broad one.
