BOOK ONE : LISTENERS AND READERS

:: SPRING 2001

45 :: what we sound like to god :: 5/21/01

The air of the room is solid with sound. A dymaxion map made of triangles of indigo cloth covers the gallery floor; Thomas and Lydia sit at its edge, immersed in tones. Surrounded by a dozen speakers. Phill Niblock sits at one end of the room. An avuncular figure despite the array of machines within his reach. The piece that he is playing is made of human voices. It sounds like hundreds. A man at a microphone, Thomas Buckner, sings, adding a live voice to the blend. Niblock's music is thick and layered, made with adjacent, sustained tones originally played on conventional instruments. He records these minute pitch differences and then overlaps and multitracks them. It sounds like every vowel in the world sung simultaneously.

Thomas is happy to be here, happy to be spending face time with Lydia again— their e-mails of late had felt a little strained to him. Over the past few weeks he's thought a lot about their first date and tried to figure out what he wants to see happen next. He has tried not to let that show through in his e-mails to her, and the effort on trying to write casually while secretly agonizing over the relationship had begun to wear on him. Now that they're together again in person, his anxieties and split feelings don't seem to matter as much: he finds it easy to just be himself around her. Perhaps because they're out listening to music, and going out and listening to music is something that he knows how to do, a role that he can perform.

A handful of people are moving around the room. The harmonics sound different depending on where you are positioned. Lydia touches him on the shoulder and stands up, begins to walk. Thomas watches her make her way around the perimeter of the textile piece on the floor, smiling.

After a few minutes she's standing by the gallery entrance, listening. She's found a particular spot where the music rings around her in a particularly beautiful way. Thomas gets up and begins to move slowly towards her; she watches him draw near. Before long he is by her side again; she feels that she has drawn him to her, along some invisible thread that she has successfully wefted in amongst the warp of sounds in this room, in this building. She looks out the gallery doors, out into Cobb Hall: the sounds seem to fill that space as well. She leans over to Thomas.

—Do you want to listen to it out there? she says, pointing.

Thomas thinks of a drone as altering and augmenting the environment it exists within; he believes that the outer radius of this environment begins at the outer points where the drone first becomes audible. For him, then, this piece is rightfully "happening" not only in this gallery, but anywhere else in the surrounding environment where it can be heard.

—Yeah sure, he says.

As they move out into the hallway sound continues to richly envelop them. This music touches not only the head and the nerves but also the skin, the body. Thomas can feel the hum in his very heart.

—How about out through here? Lydia says, and she pushes through a heavy door into the building's main stairwell.

They go down a few flights of stairs and stop on a landing which opens out into the building's massive entry hall. They lean on the railing and look out into five stories of open space. Voices flow through it. The entire building acts as an instrument.

—It's lovely, Lydia says.

—Unbelievably lovely.

—This is what we must sound like to God.

Thomas doesn't believe in God. His parents practiced a loose mix of Shinto and Buddhism until they left Japan— there was no formal religious guidance from his parents while growing up. And yet he agrees with her. (He's not sure whether she believes in God or not.) He is reminded of Rory Hamilton's portrait of what the planet might sound like from space: the world's national anthems all played simultaneously. But this music has a beauty, a certain calmness, that Hamilton's piece doesn't have. There is a kind of perfection in its polyvocality.

He looks at her and she looks back at him. Perfection; yes, the moment is perfect. He leans in; she tilts her head back. They would be foolish not to do what comes next. They kiss. He is timid at first, but her kiss has a certain thrust, a daring pulse to it; her hands find his belt loops and she pulls his hips against hers, play-fierce. Two minds, two evanescent assemblages of fragments, thoughts and taste and memory, given form: two bodies, joined at mouth and hips, hands on ribs and neck. Voices are everywhere around them. They are kissing. Two people kissing in the midst of the world.