Listening to rubble as a means of rebuilding, “sound piles” is a mix I created for Waste Scenes, an exhibition at the Boston Center for the Arts by the artists Maia Chao and Fred Schmidt-Arenales curated by Laurel V McLaughlin. For the mix Maia and Fred provided sound recordings they found at a Recycled Artists in Residency (RAIR) waste stream in Philadelphia – things once valued in the industrial city and former capital, then abandoned: informational cassettes, home VHS tapes, and CD manuals.

You hear a man ask, “Is our government doing anything about this...?” Static from a degraded tape follows. A coupon machine pulses. Commercial jingles show up alongside instructions on how to unlock a car door, a commercial for a documentary on apartheid, and the clang of tools from white archaeologists excavating in Egypt. The “checkout channel” – that loops for people waiting in line – appears alongside a family adjusting to a new dog, a scientist admitting defeat, and a relative recalling Alexander Graham Bell’s clumsiness. Somewhere, a lone wolf howl emerges from a din of forgotten advertisements, found again. Neglected voices are reassembled into new imaginations through custom audio compaction, fragmentation, and end-of-life redisposal – processes that occur in the waste stream.

While working on this mix, I found the most valuable aspect was that the process seemed to drivel on, with playful nonsense alongside the touch of lives once lived. This mix bears resonances from Ryan Patrick Maguire’s Ghost In The MP3 (2014) and Michael Siegel’s The Sounds Of The Junkyard (1964), which also focus on the poetics of trash.

I made the mix as I watched Bisan’s broadcasts from Gaza and while Donald Trump was inaugurated for the second time, events that further layered the existential state of loss.

Waste Scenes is at Boston Center for the Arts until 25 March