Sound Collage

How it sounds

It is a quarter past three in the morning in a room where the linoleum wears thin beneath your bare feet. The window blind is pulled halfway, letting in the cold light from a pharmacy sign flickering outside, a rhythmic pulse that no one watches. On the table sits a nineties cassette recorder with scratched plastic and a rewind wheel choked with dust.

Across the speaker, tuned to a dead frequency, a shortwave dial emits a steady hiss, a white rain that suddenly cuts off to yield to the voice of an announcer reading numbers or dates that no longer matter to anyone. With paper scissors, you trim a paragraph from a nineteen-eighty-four newspaper detailing a river flood in another province, placing it next to a polaroid where your mother holds an empty mug in a kitchen that no longer exists.

Around it, magnetic tape stretches and sighs, the dull knock of knuckles against the wooden tabletop, a fragment of opera captured on a wax cylinder that scrapes like sand in the throat. There is no steady beat because linear time has broken down: there are only layers piling on top of each other, a market exchange in an unknown language blending with the dry gasp of a child at a railway station and the hum of an electrical transformer that has droned for twenty years. Everything coexists in the exact same second.

The scissors snip paper and the sound hangs suspended in the air, drifting like dust in a beam of light, waiting for someone to decide which part of the memory was real and which was simply static gathered on the needle.

Palette: sepia / pastel iridescent / gray / color touches