Light Through the Mirror — Sound

Letters to no one

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The building I live in has a stairwell with a reverb tail of nearly four seconds — a fact I discovered by dropping keys and stood there afterwards, listening, like a man who has found money. These four pieces were recorded there over a spring of late evenings: a felted piano on the landing, one microphone two floors down, and the stairwell doing what four seconds of stone does to a held note.

Every piece began as an actual letter — drafted, addressed, and then played instead of sent. It is not sublimation, or not only. Some things want to be said at a pitch that words can't hold, and a stairwell at 11 p.m. turns out to be exactly that pitch.

Dear silence is the oldest and simplest: nine notes, patient. Second floor, evening has the neighbours in it — a door, a dog, a kettle — left in deliberately, because a letter with no world around it is a lie. What the radiator knows is built on the pipes' own E-flat. Unsent is the long one, and the only one I still can't play straight through.

The excerpt is synthesized placeholder audio, generated from code in this release’s key; the remaining durations are final and await their masters.

The quiet machine

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 12:00:00 GMT

A modular synthesiser is a machine you negotiate with. You patch an intention, and the machine returns an interpretation, and somewhere between the two is the piece. On the twenty-first of June I finished a patch I had been circling for a month — a slow six-voice drone that breathes at roughly the tempo of sleep — and decided it should run through the shortest night, once, with no overdubs and no second chances.

The take runs from 23:40 to a little past midnight, twenty-five minutes in which nothing happens twice. The patch drifts the way analogue circuits do when a room cools: oscillators settle, a filter opens by a hair, and by the end the piece has moved somewhere I did not send it. That drift is the performance. My role was mostly to sit still and not intervene, which is harder than playing.

Patch notes is thirty seconds of me explaining the signal path, kept because listeners asked. The morning reprise is the same patch, powered on again at 6 a.m. — the machine remembering the piece slightly differently, the way you remember a dream at breakfast.

The playable excerpt is synthesized placeholder audio until the masters arrive; the other durations are final.

Tape loops, vol. 1

Fri, 02 May 2025 12:00:00 GMT

The four-track was ten euros at a flea market and broken in the only way that matters: the capstan drags, so everything it plays back comes out slightly seasick, and everything it records degrades a little with each pass. A sensible person would fix it. I recorded three pieces with it instead.

Each loop starts as a short phrase — piano, a bowed note, half a chord from a choir record — dubbed from tape to tape until the copy of the copy of the copy begins to bloom. Tape degradation isn't subtraction; it's a slow trade. You lose edges and gain fog, lose pitch and gain weather. Around the seventh generation each phrase stopped being a recording of an instrument and became a recording of the machine remembering an instrument.

The titles are honest: these are functional loops, made for specific situations. One for washing dishes in the evening. One the exact length of my old bus ride. One for the hour when the building goes quiet and you can finally hear how much sound "silence" was.

Volume two exists already, on three cassettes, waiting for the machine to break a little further. The playable excerpt is synthesized placeholder audio until the tapes are digitised.