A year into our collaboration, we had a set opening for another band at a fraternity house. After the show we were handed a cassette tape recorded directly from the soundboard. Listening to the tape later, at first quiet in the headphones, we then raised the volume to hear a much more glorious sound than we had heard from the stage. Strange waves. The sounds of passing trains adrift then snowbound. The tape is blank.

We practiced what we initially referred to as meditations on imperfection, and were and continue to be imperfect in our practice. But what is perfection? Is earth perfect as its plates shift under our feet and collide in slow motion to form mountains? Is wind perfect as it carries pollinating clouds and builds into fierce swirling tornados? Is fire perfect in its unchoreographed dance offering warmth and punishing in its ravaging hunger? Is water perfect when it tumbles in a stream, running over and around and eventually through its obstacles? Our conceivable definitions of perfection are antithetical to these ways. Our notions are right-angled, check-listed, and measured by unnaturally derived systems that are flat, limited, clumsy. 

The magic of smoke and mirrors are illusions of the stage. Dark and dangerous insurgent magic utilizes blood, fire, and spells for its conjuring of love, fortune, and revenge. We practice something that is neither of these, at least not in a material form. Ours is an alchemy that is the tumble of stone, pitch of wind, reverberation on wood, fire in the form of electricity bouncing and colliding. These were our tools for conjuring, and now we trade those in for the music of language, teetering at its edge of logic, for it is not the logic, not the perfection that matters, but mimicry of nature that has no calculus to be held to. What follows is footage of a man pulling his own tooth out then the sun going down.

Ours is not a meditation on anything, but is simply an exercise in not-perfection. The “not” serves as our banner and brand of punk, not in antagonism or negation, not learning the timing of some other band’s song. Simply, we share space and time to listen and respond to each other, the other, and the moment and the moments proceeding and anticipated. Like a dream state in which all placed elements have a potential relevance, ours was an alchemist’s handbook that can gain no clarification with words. Even with the addition here, we continue to listen and choose to add sound, however played or proclaimed, aware of the fallibilities in results.