The otherwise historically geographic specificity of humidity and temperature reflected in the tone and timbres of a culture’s instruments is disrupted by the rapid onset of climate change. Massive damage from unrelenting mega-storms and rising sea waters tatter and flood the reliability of electric grid systems, dampen rehearsal spaces, and toxify public performance. The centuries old expressions of story, melody, and rhythm are equally disrupted by new mediums and technologies. Wax cylinders, wire spools, vinyl records, cassettes, CDs, hard drives, and now the universal jukebox algorithmically broadcasting in the cloud, your disc jockey an artificial intelligence trained on the listening habits of mundanity. 

Welcoming new forms, music transcends far beyond the circle of playback in its current digital space while acknowledging the eternal debt for its existence. To the circle, it will always return. It will transcend the oblongity of crisis, this globe, and its entropic gravity. The circle is the space we gaze into and hope to enter when we meditate; it is the gulf between thought and feeling, object and thingness, and the gateway to a lucid dream state. 

Look in a mirror in a dream and deepen your ability to navigate this state. You might find us there, try the nearby gymnasium. Bleachers accordioned back and stacked away against the wall, the hoops raised at either end like vipers waiting to strike. In the middle of the court, obstructing a mascot painted in saturated hues beneath yellowing lacquer at what is typically the staging ground for a human pyramid, is instead now an assemblage of musical instruments, cords, amplifiers, two folding chairs facing inwards, microphones, tone wave generators, a piece of sheet metal with an acoustic pickup, an old classroom turntable rigged with a folded out coathanger dangling a jangle of keys over an assortment of pie tins, a roll of tape sitting on top of a church basement organ with a broken orange bossa nova key.

You could see us enter from across the gym and approach the center to take our seats. Fuzzy like one of those slowdown videos where movement leaves a blurry trail behind it, an action painting, or multiple exposures on the same negative. A bouquet of sound blooms, a mimic of the Great Animal Orchestra, the sacrament of remembered sounds. A bygone era lost to the devastation of fragile ecosystems, evolutionary branches of species hacked away, and regional musical dialects and tastes dispersed and disappeared. Insects bellow the sound of sound before sound. The echoes of those lost dialects are now only an echo of a memory, a vacuum of loss in the wake.

In the not-so-distant past, inventors tested their theories of flight and learned the beginnings of glide and drag, among countless other things. Our understanding and usage of emergent technologies are not that different from then. In at least one reality, the world is stunned by our efforts.