Since the mid-20th century, the region of Magallanes and Chilean Antarctica in southern Chile has existed as a hotspot for the extraction and refinement of crude oil by the state-owned company ENAP (Empresa Nacional del Petróleo). As a result, the masculine-coded figure of el petrolero (the petroleum worker) has emerged in regional arts, including musical productions. In this presentation, I reflect on the disjunct and overlapping ways in which we might read el petrolero’s relation to climate within sonic contexts based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in southern Chile. First, I analyze the musical works al “Cantata al Petróleo” and “Petrolero” through a traditional, petrolero-centric lens. I demonstrate how, in an anthropocentric reading of the songs, the petrolero’s relationship to the climate serve as an embodiment of frontier nostalgia. I then place the first analysis in juxtaposition with an analysis that takes climate itself as a main actor, employing Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobject (2012, 2013) to highlight issues of scale beyond human conceptions of gender and place. By bringing these two perspectives into dialogue, I show how both gendered and scalar value systems are reflected in human acoustemological practices. These overlapping and contradictory interpretations of the songs also examine how decentering the human can reconfigure understandings of sonic phenomena to include massive space-time scales. This presentation contributes to current ethnomusicological discourse on acoustic ecologies and anthropocentrism, suggesting a novel frame for hearing climate change and extractivism.

In a short documentary released in 2023, Mawiza, a Mapuche Ül metal band from Santiago, Chile, stated “If we are Mawiza (mountain/forest), we have to be more deafening than the noise of the city. There may be giant skyscrapers and constructions but always mountains and volcanoes will surpass them, resist to the end, and roar louder.” As the band highlights diverse contexts, activities, and ecosystems, such as subpolar and alpine regions, their statement conveys an intriguing conceptualization of nature’s identity and its sonic capabilities, one where metal music's transgressive sonic elements (i.e., loudness, distortion, and screaming) seem not only compatible, but emerge as guiding aesthetic features. Mapuche’s history in Chile has characterized itself with a continuous colonialism, one that has only worsened with the implementation of neoliberalism during the 1980s and the exacerbation of extractivism in the following decades (Cárcamo-Huechante 2019, Svampa 2019). Within this history, metal music gradually became a tool for facing settler-colonial dynamics, Chile's and Chilean Antarctica's ecological situations, and extractivism’s social impacts. Though ethnomusicologists concerned with the intersection between settler-colonial dynamics and environmental issues have studied how music mediates and informs connections to land and the manifestation of environmental resistance, there has been a tendency to focus on traditional, folk and acoustic musical genres. Consequently, this presentation aims to expand the scope by exploring how distortion, loudness and screaming can work as modes to think, listen and perform new senses of place, ways to relate to our surrounding environments, and paths to overcome socioecological issues. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEWQZxbrhms