“There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in—and this inverts the schema of the Panopticon.” – Michel de Certeau

This door, heavy as punctuation, calls for a decision. Leave me open or leave me closed. Perhaps all items are tethered to their own binary nature; objects, spaces, hallways, bedrooms, crevices, closets, all beg for decisions of action. They also desire movement, time carved out of their volumes, a narrative, a story acted out on their floor plans to contrast the action and inaction which always average out to zero. The loneliest of these are the ancient spaces that were never named or occupied, they ache and moan for feet and hands. They are ghostless. They lack the residue of the past, of even the smallest of voices, of scrapes of chair legs against the floor, of a dropped spoon, a soft cry for a lost love.

After our 30 hour show we sat in the venue, an empty storefront, listening to what we heard as the deafening silence. The energy, still shimmering like a floating spirit on the back of our eyes or the echo from deep, deep within our skulls. It was as if the walls were charged with this recent memory of the long performance of sounds. Our bodies became electromagnetically changed after performing an eight hour show with twenty four radios and a similar energy seemed to be emanating from the walls of the space. Silence didn’t feel silent at all, but charged. This was a physically tangible residue, or more abstractly, a residue of memory. Having had spent so much time doing one thing in the same place, this space now felt overflowing with the recent past. 

Do we possess a room or does it possess us? We can not adequately or objectively observe our current condition or its possession. At best our understanding is merely a surface reflection on glass, a mere hint of the context we find ourselves in, the edges of our presence. Equally, at the edges of a present, we are not in possession of ourselves, or this room in this time. Rather it is those yet to be born who will look through the glass and its layers of sentiment, untethered to the constraints of our interpretive and analytic constructs. They observe with a bias towards objectivity that shines a light through the clouded glass, casting shadows of a multitude of meanings and meanderings. But in that swarm of gradations, they will find that first whisper, that first scrape, that first note struck and imprinted into the plaster of this room. It will wait for future excavation by these sonic archaeologists, discovering radio vibrations still clinging to the orbits of molecules, still humming some music of our intention.