’Feeding the Habit of Energy’ was originally created as a podcast designed as part of a series of soundwalks for RADAR at Loughborough University in the UK. It is a meditation on the sonic environment of the huge BRUSH factory which sprawls next to Loughborough train station. BRUSH manufactures industrial scale electrical generators and transformers which help to feed society’s insatiable “habit of energy” — which Italian Futurist Marinetti urged artists to celebrate at the beginning of the last century but which is now looking increasingly like a self-destructive addiction rather than a liberating “love of danger”.

Given the industrial heritage of the Midlands, I thought walking along the Grand Union Canal would be the most appropriate way for listeners to experience this piece, at the end of which they will find themselves on a bridge overlooking the factory.

All the sounds in Feeding the Habit of Energy were recorded within the factory; it moves back and forth between unmanipulated recordings and a kind of abstraction distilled from those recordings. Listeners will, I hope, discover some unexpected beauty in the industrial soundscape and also, perhaps, experience their broader sonic environment a bit differently after hearing this piece.