For Fire Ecologies, Christopher Stark spent months working with field recordings made near California wildfires, and just as much time deciding what not to include. A long recording of an actual forest fire originally closed the piece; he cut it less than a day before final production, leaving behind only indirect traces — water that sounds like fire, a Sierra Nevada power line slowed down until its buzz becomes something closer to marching boots. The same instinct shaped his choices in the field: standing in a town that had just burned, camera in hand, Stark found he couldn't bring himself to record people in front of what remained of their homes, even as a documentary-minded friend urged him to. The excerpt sits inside that tension — between bearing witness and observing from a respectful distance, and what it means for work like this to edge toward activism without losing the line between representing something and exploiting it.

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