The bucolic serenity of New York City’s Freshkills Park, once the largest municipal dump in the world, belies the multiple timescales unfolding above and below its surface. From the thousand-year decay of consumer plastics and the gradual flow of leachate to the present gathering of clouds overhead, Post-Natural Pastorale transforms time-series data from eight of these layers into musical scores. Double-bassist Robert Black performs the scores at sites throughout the landscape, and the recordings capture the bass along with the human and nonhuman sounds around it. These field recordings combine into a single composition—a journey through the deep time of this mammoth monument to the Anthropocene.

For the forthcoming LP (Infrequent Seams, 2027), the piece will be cut on vinyl made with reclaimed plastic from the Freshkills site.