Budhaditya Chattopadhyay’s Withering Field is an essay on manmade violence over earth’s ecologies and natural environments, on the threatening of the Global South created by Western modernism, and the impending catastrophes looming. Withering Field is a sonic narrative developed around these events of displacement and dispossession, developed through fieldwork and field recordings made in what are currently denominated of Special Economic Zones of South Asia. It delineates transitions of indigenous habitats dislocated from their natural settings, forced to gearing fast towards a contemporary urbanisation, a process rendered within a mode of criticality and questioning, incorporating sonic elements collected from the sites to facilitate a context-aware listening, which creates the space for in-depth reflections on the intricate processes that affect indigenous communities, endanger their memories and erode cultural practices.
Withering Field was published as a CD in 2022. This recording documents the live performance of the work in progress at Sonorities Festival, Belfast, in 2015.
Withering Field Live is now available for download or stream.