Cletrac Crawler

"Degradation deconstruct a 12 second sample of a Cletrac Crawler Tractor and reassemble the results to create an episodic imagining of the guttural churn of a tractor’s working life. Composed entirely from loops and samples extracted from the original field recording — courtesy of the Whiteman Collection, Revolution Transport Museum — ‘Cletrac Crawler 144’ is a work of fragmented assembly and materialist noise, formed through heavy processing and sonic patchwork. The Cletrac’s natural tones are cleaved from the meadow; saturated, time-stretched and reversed, they are harvested and sowed back into the furrowed grounding of multiple droning effect chains. Emerging from the mulch of the enclosed field, the obsolete machine finds a phantasmatic afterlife as a revenant which returns, chugging through the deep time of a sonic afterlife. An echo of stuttering rhythms and ghostly voices celebrate the machine’s name day in an ode to this forgotten technology of the recent past.

Degradation is