Letters to no one

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.