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 D O’Donoghue (who records under the moniker Vinegar Tom) and George Rayner-Law (who records under his own name, and formerly as Schwerpunkt). Their debut LP ‘Leadlined’ was released on Brachliegen Tapes in 2022."

Composition by Degradation. 

This is part of the Obsolete Sounds project, the world’s biggest collection of disappearing sounds and sounds that have become extinct – remixed and reimagined to create a brand new form of listening. Explore the whole project at https://citiesandmemory.com/obsolete-sounds