Book Review: Recomposed

This month's book from Verso was about music and the climate. Recomposed is a case study in how the music industry is attempting to address the climate crisis, from the concrete innovations to the abstract ideas underneath. Music also has a huge cultural impact, so there's also lots about the potential of music to impact our behaviour.

The book is divided into three parts: technical solutions, institutional solutions, and cultural solutions. The first part had lots of anecdotes about people working to make vinyl records more environmentally friendly. Some were trying to recycle (apparently difficult), some trying to change the process (injection rather than compression), some were trying to perform plastic alchemy to use less nasty plastic.

Devine explains the limits to these technological approaches. In a previous work, Decomposed, he showed that vinyl at its peak consumed less resources than streaming does today. This is not because plastic is good for the environment, it's because streaming has made music easier to consume, so we consume more. All of us switching to even "cleaner" vinyl for our music would be bad. The real root is consumerism and capitalism.

This section is concluded with some ideas on "building better fetishes", and was targeted at finding better alternatives to fulfil the cultural idea of "ownership" of music. Part of vinyl's allure is the possession of a physical manifestation of the music you love. If we had some alternative to fulfil this desire without needing discs of plastic, that could be an environmental good.

None of the examples grabbed me, sadly. My least favourite was a company peddling NFTs of LPs. The "digital ownership" of an NFT always rang hollow to me. The rank financialisation the crypto sphere manifests disgusts me, and the whole thing exists to prop up the environmentally destructive industry. Ownership of a record to me means that it lives in my house, and nobody can take it away from me. I don't think NFTs fulfil either. Devine doesn't seem particularly convinced by anything either.

The second section was about institutional solutions. This had a focus on metrification, measuring carbon output within institutions. It's nice that companies are trying to measure and reduce carbon emissions where they can, but what is measured can absolve companies of responsibility for some emissions. Devine also mentions that carbon footprinting was a marketing campaign by British Petroleum to try and foist the onus of emissions onto individual consumers, rather than the oil companies. As such I find any such metrification highly suspect.

These chapters also had a running theme of how economic incentives run counter to environmental ones. Many people we meet want to do the right thing, but struggle to do so due to financial pressure. This must be especially difficult in an industry of creatives with little stability. We're often told that the market reveals consumer preferences, and that the consumer prefers things to be cheaper. I can't help but wonder if that would still be the case if so many weren't struggling to scrape a living on low, stagnant wages in an ever-more-expensive economy. Once again Capital stands in the way of progress.

The final section handles cultural solutions. This focuses on the idea that music could influence our behaviour via culture. There's a really interesting history of this idea of culture influencing outcomes. Before the 1960s or so the main view was materialist – the material conditions cause the culture. The 1960s brought the "cultural turn", which flips that around: culture, ideology and ideas cause social outcomes. Since then this has become the dominant view, with materialist ideas getting drowned out. It's probable that I'm missing something here, but I'm reminded of dialectical materialism: we had a thesis and an antithesis, now we yearn for synthesis. It seems to me that both views are plainly true to some degree.

Reading this book during the umpteenth "heat wave" of the 2026 British summer made it a lot more bleak. Climate action is desperately needed, and it was certainly interesting to read about one small industry's actions. The trouble is that none of it seemed like it would really go anywhere. The technical solutions were small fry, the institutional solutions seemed ineffectual, and the cultural solutions seemed like a fantasy. I was left with something close to despair.

I thought about the industry I work in, and the wanton destruction we're creating. We're currently burning fossil fuels in the name of a technology that produces text nobody will read¹ and generates code that nobody will use, out of what seems to be a cult-like belief that it will become God, and save us all. Perhaps there's something to be said about the view of the cultural turn, where ideology drives culture. It's just not the ideology of us, the people. It's the ideology of the elite, making decisions that affect us all with no accountability.