PADS & TEXTURES
Waste
Field recorded atmospheres
Jacob Kirkegaard records with accelerometer sensors — not microphones pointed at things, but sensors pressed into the material itself. He listens from the inside out. Behind the surface of things that look hostile, or contaminated, or just deeply unglamorous, he finds something else: resonance, beauty hiding in matter that most people would rather not think about. The Waste Project began in 2018, inside facilities that don't usually get treated as recording studios. Scrap metal from buses and cars. Mountains of crushed glass that ring with an almost mystical shimmer. Sewage rivers moving with strange industrial grace. The crackle and breath of electricity and incineration. Sounds that exist because something else stopped existing.
Audio demos
Behind the scenes
Recording Waste
Making the instrument
Some of what's here is deeply textural — long evolving drones that hum at frequencies the original materials didn't know they had. Some borders on percussive, rhythmic patterns emerging from processes never designed with rhythm in mind.
Running on the Orbits engine, four sound sources blend across an X/Y field — industrial weight to spectral drift, close to cavernous. Concept and curation by Alexander Hacke of Einstürzende Neubauten, a band that spent decades finding music in demolition.
