In 1972, as a freshman at Wesleyan College, I signed up for “Introduction to Experimental Music” with the composer Alvin Lucier. It set the course of my life as a composer. This account of that 12 months is an try and convey the aural and conceptual pleasure—the sheer amazement of listening—to be present in a form of music that even now strikes many audiences as baffling or actively annoying.
On my second day at Wesleyan I met with the college adviser who had been assigned to me. Jon Barlow was an excellent pianist, a Charles Ives scholar, and a polymath of extraordinary vary. He listened patiently as I rattled off a listing of alluring courses from a dozen totally different disciplines, then zeroed in on my point out of digital music.
“Do you know the composer Alvin Lucier?”
I admitted I didn’t.
“Well, you should call him up. He makes music with bats.”
I didn’t know if he meant flying mammals or Louisville Sluggers, however both approach it caught my curiosity. I referred to as Professor Lucier and was invited to his home on the sting of campus. This informal entry was a shock: my father was a professor at Columbia, however no undergraduate had ever set foot in our Manhattan house. Lucier’s front room recommended I had missed one hell of a celebration the night time earlier than, and I famous the absence of the compulsory composer’s piano. We made our introductions. He stuttered, which I naively assumed was hangover associated. After a couple of minutes I proposed that I choose out of his introductory lecture course on the premise of a synthesizer class I’d taken over the summer time. He was damningly diplomatic: “I’m sure you know much more about synthesizers than I do, but I like my students to be familiar with the music that’s already out there. I hate having to say the words, ‘that’s very nice, but it’s been done before.’”
Chastened, I signed up for “Introduction to Experimental Music,” which was held in a big corridor usually used for introductory lectures within the sciences: Lucier’s class was a preferred intestine for pre-meds and athletes. In his opening lecture he spoke about listening to the music of John Cage for the primary time. It was the summer time of 1960 and Lucier was in Venice on a Fulbright Fellowship. He had been writing what he described as “neo-classical music in a vaguely Stravinsky style” and had simply purchased some stunning handmade manuscript paper on which to notate it. A pal referred to as: “Come with us tonight, we’re going to hear this crazy composer John Cage at La Fenice. It should be a laugh.”
When the lights on the opera home dimmed, the pianist David Tudor—a extremely revered interpreter of up to date music—ran down the aisle, jumped onto stage, slid beneath the piano, and began banging on the underside of the soundboard. Some minutes later, Cage rose up on a hydraulic carry, taking part in one other piano after which turning on a radio. “The audience was furious,” Lucier instructed us, earlier than inserting a dramatic pause. “For the next year I couldn’t write a note of music. My mind was a blank. I did nothing but eat pasta and drink red wine.” The manuscript paper sat untouched.
I’ve since heard many tales from different composers of Lucier’s technology about their very own first encounter with Cage and the years of silent shock that adopted. By the point Cage turned fifty, he had challenged basic assumptions about music and the roles of composer and performers. He embraced sounds many would have dismissed as noise. He invented strategies of eradicating private style—the putative locus of creative genius—from composition. He elevated impersonal sounds, like these of the pure world, to the identical aesthetic stage because the violin or piano. He pioneered using electronics in reside efficiency. The listing goes on and on.
Twice every week for the following 9 months I listened as Lucier performed information and tapes, handed round scores, and talked. The fabric ran from round 1939 to the mid-Nineteen Sixties, specializing in the “New York School” of Earl Brown, Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, and Cage. Feldman took subject with the serialist doctrine of octave equivalence (the concept a C is a C is a C throughout the serial rule set, no matter octave) and acknowledged that broadly transposed intervals had been ambiguous by way of their relative consonance/dissonance. The end result was music that—in contrast to Cage’s—all the time sounded stunning. However each lecture on Cage was a revelation, from the earliest works for junkyard percussion to the unexpectedly romantic items for ready piano, and the uncompromising 4’33”. (This “silent” composition had been premiered by Tudor in 1952 in a small chapel close to Woodstock, New York—an occasion Alvin asserted was “the real Woodstock, not all those hippies naked in the mud.”)
It was Cage’s Cartridge Music (1960) that resonated most profoundly with me. Earlier digital music, like that of Pierre Schaeffer or Herbert Eimert, had often been made by recording varied sounds, slicing up the tape, and stitching it again collectively in a studio; performances, akin to they had been, consisted of taking part in the tape again from audio system on a stage. Every part, with the potential exception of the machine breaking down or an viewers member coughing, had been decided prematurely. There was no drama, no threat, no visceral proof of considering on one’s toes.
Cartridge Music was the other. Instead of refined studios or synthesizers, Cage tailored the stylus cartridges from report gamers—one thing nearly each American house had on the time—to behave as contact microphones, and instructed gamers to interchange the needle with something that would slot in the opening: pipe cleaners, straws, guitar strings, Slinkies (this final was later adopted by Ben Burtt to create the enduring lightsaber sound for the primary Star Wars film).
Just like the “instrument,” the rating was constructed on the precept of adaptability: twenty sheets of paper coated in amoeba-like blobs, and an array of transparencies bearing types like a clock face, polka dots, little circles, and dotted traces that may have been lifted from a pirate’s treasure map. By superimposing these sheets the performers created graphic charts that indicated when to insert and pluck on the pipe cleaners, springs, or no matter; the right way to regulate the loudness of every cartridge, and when to make use of one other microphone as a secondary sound supply. The quantity may generally ratchet up loud sufficient to generate suggestions, however Cage’s directions dictate: “All events, ordinarily thought to be undesirable, such as feed-back, humming, howling, etc., are to be accepted.”
As a substitute of papers or exams, Alvin required every scholar to arrange a fifteen-minute realization of Cartridge Music and carry out it reside, which we did within the Wesleyan School Membership shortly earlier than Thanksgiving. It was my digital music live performance debut and the efficiency verged on chaos. I beloved the sounds, I beloved Cage’s acceptance of the participant as a companion within the preparation of the rating, I beloved his opening of the stage to nonmusicians by exchanging typical devices for shopper expertise. I now understood that digital music may very well be a carried out music relatively than the recorded output of a studio course of.
Wolff intrigued me nearly as a lot as Cage. I used to be smitten together with his “coordination scores” akin to For 1, 2 or 3 Folks (1964), which “reduced the tempo to zero” (his phrases), changing tempo-based notation—the acquainted array of entire notes, half notes, quarter notes, and so forth—with graphic symbols that specified when a musician may begin and cease in relation to others: for instance, “play after a previous sound has begun, hold till it stops.”
Dwelling for the vacation, I rattled on to my mother and father about this thrilling new music and talked about that Wolff had, as a highschool scholar in New York, approached Cage for composition classes. (Cage later instructed me that they gave up after three classes as a result of Wolff “didn’t want to follow my assignments.”)
My mom glanced up from the turkey. “Not little Christian Wolff?”
A quick genealogical tour of her German-Chilean household ensued (her ancestors had emigrated from Hamburg to Valparaíso within the nineteenth century to determine an import/export enterprise). Christian’s mother and father had been the eminent émigré publishers and editors Kurt and Helen Wolff. My nice aunt Ena in Santiago was Helen Wolff’s sister, making Christian my cousin, at the least by Chilean requirements. When my mom had come north to america to check within the late Forties, she had seen numerous the Wolffs and their then-teenaged son.
I used to be impressed and charmed by this connection, although it didn’t forestall me from misinterpreting Christian’s work. Youngster of the Nineteen Sixties that I used to be, I noticed the conductor-less democracy of his ensemble interplay as a harbinger of the left-wing texts and employees’ songs he started incorporating in his music quickly after. Later, after I started studying laptop programming, those self same items struck me as a form of proto–laptop music, given the similarity of his directions to logical operations. Ultimately, Christian kindly disabused me of each concepts: he had developed his notational system when a time-strapped scholar at Harvard, in search of an environment friendly method to produce a rhythmic complexity that might in any other case take hours of painstaking work to attain conventionally. It was simply considered one of my many misunderstandings—some helpful, some not—that first 12 months with Alvin.
The second time period introduced us from the Sixties to the current day, inspecting composers of Alvin’s technology who had been affected by Cage: Terry Riley, La Monte Younger, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, David Behrman, and Alvin. Postwar European music was higher documented and extra broadly taught, however Alvin targeted on the New World, particularly the New York “Downtown” music (largely carried out in lofts beneath Fourteenth Road) in distinction to the fare I had encountered in my New York uptown adolescence. Many of those composers had been described as “minimalist” for his or her penchant for stretching a small quantity of musical materials to excessive lengths (an inclination I interpreted as a response towards the overwrought complexity of late serialism). A main instance of durational minimalism is La Monte Younger’s Composition 1960 #7, whose rating consists, in its entirety, of the interval of an ideal fifth and the instruction “to be held for a long time.” The instrumentation downtown usually deviated from the traditional ensembles of the time: electrical organs as an alternative of pianos, home made circuits in lieu of violins. Most of what we heard that semester had been composed throughout the earlier 5 or ten years. This music was not simply new to me, it was new, interval.
Alvin was a member of the relatively grandly titled Sonic Arts Union, a quartet of composers that additionally included Ashley, Behrman, and Mumma. That they had joined forces in 1966 however had by no means been an ensemble within the regular sense: they didn’t carry out repertoire as instrumentalists. As a substitute, every composer introduced his personal work, generally solo, generally assisted by the others. They shared tools like amplifiers and audio system, however in contrast to the Beatles or the Budapest String Quartet, their collective identification was secondary to that of the person members. Lucier’s music revolved round acoustical phenomena akin to architectural resonance; Ashley labored with voice, giving equal weight to its physicality and the literary content material conveyed; Behrman used easy circuits and suggestions networks in group performances that balanced management and chaos. Mumma constructed complicated circuits that may work together with typical devices, producing intermittent shrieks, as an illustration, in response to his French horn taking part in.
Photograph: Marc Grafe
The writer serving to arrange a live performance of Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York Metropolis, 1975
For an adolescent with adventurous ears, it felt like browsing the crest of a paradigm shift within the very concept of music itself. As Behrman defined, “established techniques were thrown away and the nature of sound was dealt with from scratch.” The strategies fascinated me as a lot because the ensuing sounds. I heard it as an open name for invention.
In speaking about the numerous younger composers whose conservatory-instilled cosmologies had been shattered by Cage, Alvin pointed to a collective impulse to “return music to the year zero”—to scrutinize music’s most basic assumptions. He provided a parable about Philip Glass. After graduating from Juilliard and receiving a Fulbright scholarship, Glass went off to France to check with Nadia Boulanger, the legendarily demanding instructor of formal compositional method. Within the midst of his struggles he was employed to assist with the rating Ravi Shankar was writing for Conrad Rooks’s movie Chappaqua (1967). Glass’s job was to hearken to Shankar and tabla participant Alla Rakha carry out, and transcribe what he heard so that they may very well be recreated by a French orchestra. Like most Westerners on the time, Glass knew nothing about Indian music, and his makes an attempt to pin down the intricate rhythmic constructions utilizing conventional workers notation had been irritating for everybody till he lastly eliminated the bar traces between measures. For Boulanger this could be an unthinkable act, however Glass may now see the repeated patterns endemic in Indian music. He has spoken concerning the liberating affect this had on his personal compositional trajectory.
Alvin’s model of this story added (or probably invented) a element lacking from Glass’s personal account. The foundations of Western counterpoint had been laid down by Johann Joseph Fux’s 1725 textbook (adopted by Boulanger and nonetheless in use right now), during which some of the necessary guidelines was “no parallel fifths.”1 Noticing the prevalence of these intervals within the orchestrations Shankar recommended, Glass identified that this wasn’t allowed, and Shankar responded that Indian musicians had been taking part in parallel fifths for 1000’s of years.
Glass requested himself what would occur if he went again to Fux’s directive and did the other: as an alternative of no parallel fifths, use solely parallel fifths. He derived a brand new compositional method from this contrarian place to begin and, in 1973, launched an LP with the primary outcomes, Music in Fifths (1969) and Music in Comparable Movement (1969). The story of how these items happened could also be apocryphal, however it aptly illustrated the willingness to reinvent musical assumptions in that heady time. Glass rewrote counterpoint from its personal 12 months zero and let a brand new species evolve from one important mutation.
Alvin’s 12 months zero had brought about him to rethink not simply what constituted acceptable intervals or instrumentation however probably the most fundamental phenomenon of aural expertise—the assembly of bodily acoustics and organic notion. His 1969 composition Vespers carries a poignant and expansive subtitle:
For any variety of gamers who wish to pay their respects to all dwelling creatures who inhabit darkish locations and who, through the years, have developed acuity within the artwork of echolocation, i.e., sounds used as messengers which, when despatched out into the setting, return as echoes carrying data as to the form, measurement, and substance of that setting and the objects in it.
Utilizing “Sondols” (echolocation units developed as navigational aids for the blind within the Nineteen Sixties), the performers in Vespers navigate a darkish room by sound whereas blindfolded (therefore the bat allusion in my first advisory assembly). Lucier had taken sound again to earlier than a composer’s 12 months zero, earlier than human notions of music, to its use by prehominid flying sonic virtuosi.
The bodily construction of any area, indoors or out, is friendlier to some frequencies of sound than others: some are absorbed and die away shortly, others ricochet longer. If you maintain a conch as much as your ear, what you hear is the white noise of wind and surf filtered by the shell’s cavity to emphasise sure resonant frequencies.
In his best-known work, Alvin defined this phenomenon whereas permitting it to subsume his voice. I’m sitting in a room (1969) bounces his recorded textual content backwards and forwards between two tape machines, taking part in and rerecording the sound by a speaker and microphone in a room, recycling the phrases because the resonant frequencies of the structure reshape the speech into mellifluous gongs and whistles—“musical” sounds for positive, however as a lot “echoes carrying information” because the minimal clicks of Vespers—whereas on the similar time charting the inexplicable journey from prose to track, from rationalization to expertise.
My childhood had concerned little musical coaching—no piano, no church choir—however I had spent innumerable twilights in Chilean Aprils and Cape Cod Augusts observing bats with fascination. In New York there was a household sport (each my mother and father being architectural historians) of recognizing the distinctive terracotta tiling and listening to the distinctive acoustics of the architectural vaults constructed by the engineering agency of Rafael Guastavino.2 Alvin’s instance affirmed the recommendation I had acquired from the one composer I knew in highschool: “There is no ‘correct’ musical background.” It was potential to make musical—or at the least sonic—works concerning the issues that fascinated me. I wished to be a composer, and Alvin handed me a toolbox I understood.
He taught me the right way to hear—not simply to music, however to the acoustical phenomena that underlie and precede it. By the tip of the 12 months, at any time when I entered a rest room I may hum its resonant frequency, little doubt from recognizing, subconsciously, the filtering of my footfall in a hard-tiled area. My mother and father had taught me the significance of recognizing particulars: a herringbone sample in masonry, the trifoliate horror of poison ivy. Alvin shifted my consideration from seeing to listening to.
Even now, regardless of the declining high-frequency response of older ears, I discover I’m ever extra delicate to architectural interference with ambient sound. After I lie in mattress within the morning I discover the acoustic adjustments that accompany my spouse’s closing the door to the adjoining toilet. On the touchdown outdoors our house I hear the area develop when the elevator door opens. Clicking the automobile’s key fob in a parking storage, I visualize the wave entrance of the beep because it spreads away, rebounds off distant partitions, superimposes on itself, then slowly decays into the ambient noise, just like the ripples in a pond or physics lab wave tank.
Alvin’s method to instructing—drawing largely from his personal experiences—dovetailed properly with the oral pedagogy of Wesleyan’s World Music program. There have been different universities across the nation the place you can examine the musicology of India or Japan or Indonesia from books and recordings. At Wesleyan, nonetheless, you can be taught to play the sitar, shakuhachi, or bonang by one-on-one classes with a grasp musician, whose personal coaching had usually been primarily or totally oral. After I started learning tabla, Sharda Sahai instructed me by reciting bols, the North Indian rhythmic equal of solfège.
Alvin illustrated his first-hand accounts with tape recordings from his personal assortment, usually given to him by fellow composers, since there have been few information obtainable. He handed out scores photocopied from hand-drawn drafts. Within the absence of textbooks, he handed round problems with Supply: Music of the Avant Garde, a journal revealed irregularly from 1967 to 1973 that featured scores and essays submitted by rising artists. Most significantly, Alvin organized for different composers to go to, deploying his college students to fulfill them on the bus station, drive them round, tech their concert events, and hearken to their tales. (The one common protection of such work in mainstream media was Tom Johnson’s column in The Village Voice, which I learn religiously.)
Missing any unifying theoretical dicta about this music, we had been left to our personal units to attach the dots—to contemplate how (or whether or not) works akin to Music in Fifths and Vespers linked to one another or to the bigger histories of music. We had been requested to hear, understand, and assume for ourselves. I used to be fascinated by the query of how composers made choices, how tightly or loosely they tried to manage what occurred, how they envisaged (or not) the possible end result. I got here to see every bit of music as arising someplace on a spectrum that runs from aspirational randomness to unfettered private selection. Cage’s use of probability strategies (shuffled transparencies, star maps and, most famously, the I Ching) to take away private choice lived at one finish, whereas on the different lay the form of “free improvisation” I’d come to know by the performances of the British guitarist Derek Bailey or the AMM group. Terry Riley’s In C (1964)—whose rating is a single sheet of paper bearing fifty-three brief riffs that may be repeated any variety of instances by every of the gamers earlier than continuing to the following—sat someplace within the center, evoking a jazz chart and a skipping report in equal measure.
Close by Riley lay constructions like these Sol LeWitt alluded to when he wrote “the idea is the machine that makes the art”: mechanisms and strategies that time to themselves, not simply to their output. Fugue, serial type, and twelve-bar blues are acquainted examples of machines for making musical artwork (admittedly with appreciable human intervention), however the music Alvin performed launched a panoply of recent ones—programs and processes that stepped as much as change the previous engines of intuition, style, and custom, with which I had all the time felt uncomfortable.
There was music with no discernible melody, concord, or rhythm (akin to Behrman’s Wave Practice, 1965), and music that used impossibly lengthy sounds (La Monte Younger) or equally all-consuming rests (4’33”). And whereas music is reflexively celebrated for its manipulation of emotion, this new music allowed for goal and perceptual phenomena—physics, zoology, neurology—to inspire constructions, as in Maryanne Amacher’s use of psychoacoustic results, like “difference tones” (phantom pitches produced by interference between loud sounds) that induce music for the internal ear.
There have been “task scores,” from which music emerged because the byproduct or hint of a seemingly arbitrary course of, relatively than because the intentional output of inherently musical actions: in Vespers, for instance, the sounds come up from making an attempt to keep away from bruising your shin, relatively than play a fantastic be aware. There have been “impossible scores” the place sounds emerged from the failure to execute a tough act correctly: Tom Johnson’s Dangers for Unrehearsed Performers (1977) equipped instrumental virtuosi with a sequence of directions that escalated in issue till ability reached its inevitable restrict and the participant was pressured to surrender.
In “circuit-as-score” compositions, musical choices had been shared with digital circuits (exemplified by the work of David Tudor, who finally gave up piano to dedicate himself totally to digital work). New musical types may come up from capabilities and limitations intrinsic to a chunk of expertise and later be extracted to reside on as impartial sonic constructions—for instance, Steve Reich’s compositions for tape loops akin to Come Out (1966), which led to his part music for purely acoustic ensembles (Piano Section, 1967).
Alvin’s Vespers was composed for the conduct of sounds after they left the devices, attuning audiences to how sound propagated and reworked in area. In her Sonic Meditations (1971) Pauline Oliveros turned listening itself into an immersive exercise that erased the excellence between performer and viewers. Notions about the place and when music occurred had been being challenged by the rising fields of sound artwork, installations, and video, led by artists akin to Annea Lockwood, Max Neuhaus, and Nam June Paik.
Lots of the scores we studied didn’t let you know how issues would sound. Studying the rating of a Bach prelude, a musically literate individual can think about the moment-to-moment development of notes of their thoughts’s ear, however the magic of I’m sitting in a room is that the stream of sounds you’ll hear can’t be predicted from its directions. Most of those items had been lumped beneath the label “Experimental Music,” differentiating them from the dominant types of “Contemporary Music” akin to Karlheinz Stockhausen or Charles Wuorinen, and on the similar time acknowledging their openness to the arrival of the surprising, even from a set set of directions. Some composers took exception to the time period, coined by Cage, however to me it made sense. Clearly this music was not experimental within the scientific sense of pitting a longtime speculation towards a neatly delimited set of variables, however within the woolier sense of “and what if…?”
Even inside experimentalism, foundational ideas arose that a number of individuals adopted. Massive concepts like “take a sound from one place and put it in another,” “do one thing for a very long time,” “slow something down a lot,” and “do something backwards” had been handled as workout routines, factors of departure, or new types to interchange extra acquainted ones just like the sonata or blues. Simply the way in which many alternative items of music may share the identical type, devices, key, or time signature, Amacher and Lockwood and others all made items that transposed acoustic environments with cellphone traces. Often somebody may lay declare to considered one of these large concepts as a private invention, however most understood that it was all the time going to be the particular manifestation of an concept—what it appeared like, the way it performed out—that counted. (As Robert Ashley as soon as instructed me, “I’d rather see an old idea done well than a new one done badly.”)
After I was a child I had beloved the wayward machines of Jean Tinguely and the mechanistic mayhem of Rube Goldberg. These novel musical strategies had a equally willful indirection, upending effectivity within the identify of shock and discovery. Furthermore, many of those “machines for making music” had shifting components that may very well be noticed, and there was pleasure in that. I’ve all the time been a reasonably monophonic individual. Musically, I believe by way of horizontal traces, not vertical harmonies. Most of those compositions made some extent of unveiling their construction and content material in a linear method. I may comply with their bare causality extra simply than I may the artfully shrouded voices in a fugue. This music put me comfy.
After all, issues weren’t fairly so simple as I assumed that inspirational first 12 months. What I took to be a world of recent musical thought was the product of a remarkably small group of individuals—nearly all the similar intercourse, ethnicity, social class, and academic background. The truth that Pauline Oliveros was the one lady whose work Alvin performed or mentioned that 12 months was one thing I solely seen looking back. I had little to go on past what Alvin instructed me, what I learn in Rolling Stone or the Voice, and what I heard on weekend jaunts to The Kitchen in New York, and these all strengthened the identical unremarked systemic disparity. I just lately dug out the 1972 class roster for Alvin’s course: it was 90 % male and fully white. I didn’t ask why experimental music seemed to be a largely white male scene till years later.
My different belated, road-to-Damascus second needed to do with my basic assumption about experimentalism itself. Sure, you can also make a chunk “about” something, but when it’s going to work as music you can’t ignore musicality—these ineffable traits that make one piece reside on in reminiscence whereas one other is forgotten. Numberless pop songs from my childhood share related chord progressions, however just some are nonetheless being whistled by me now. When Alvin spoke about taking music again to the 12 months zero, he didn’t imply it needed to keep there: Glass might have thrown out the previous guidelines of counterpoint, however he created new ones, mapping a recent fork within the musical street and following it. Everybody was in search of a approach by the rubble left by the soundless explosion of 4’33”, however probably the most profitable pathways retained some axiomatic musical materials underfoot: the harmonic sequence, a rhythm that conjures up a bodily response, a perceptible construction, a well-known sound—a hook. The conceptual artist Mel Bochner as soon as identified, “there is no art that does not bear some burden of physicality.” For composers it’s a burden of musicality.
Alvin wasn’t involved with the creation of sound inside a circuit or laptop; he was targeted on what occurred as soon as it was shifting by the room, when it was tougher to manage or predict. “I’m not so interested in sounds themselves,” he as soon as mentioned. “I’m interested in their reflections.” The clicks a Sondol emits are boring, he admitted. The music lies of their reflections, and the soul of Vespers is discovered therein: an homage to the pragmatic sonic genius of the bat, for whom the returning echo incorporates what actually issues.
Likewise, the sonic and literary qualities of the preliminary studying of the textual content in I’m sitting in a room are unremarkable, however the phrases’ cumulative reflections finally yield a musical masterpiece. In Music for Solo Performer (1965), Lucier’s breakthrough composition after his publish–La Fenice deadlock, tremendously amplified mind waves are channeled by quite a few loudspeakers positioned on drums. The twelve hertz alpha waves are barely audible themselves, however as they bounce off a drumhead they play the instrument like a stick would.
Years later, in John Lanchester’s brief story “Reality,” I learn this memorable evocation of the ability of such acoustic reflections:
Ilona’s father had been a poker participant in his youth (an excellent one, in keeping with him), and he had as soon as mentioned that the easiest way of telling whether or not somebody was telling the reality was to hear to not what they had been saying, and even the tone of their voice, however their echoes. The voices would usually be lifted, shiny, completely happy, joking. The echoes sounded flat and angular and filled with silences; filled with holes, contradictions, meanings that weren’t imagined to be there.
