Eric Lyon

In the center you’d sit like the core of the Earth, a child in the womb, the bulls eye in the target, the belly of the beast; waiting in soft yellow light with a collection of eccentrics and other mouse-like people who’d think of only the breath and the momentary sonic perceptions for the rest of the night, or the rest of the time you spent there together, at least. He talks and talks – a gushing phonetic waterfall that feels like it’ll never end but you want to be polite and you suspect there’ll be something to learn so you try to listen and you think that maybe you’ll like this artist a bit, even if he is a little too fond of the sound of his own voice. Then moving to the suggestion of the distinguished man with ashen hair and a youthful soul, everyone closed their eyes and in a moment they melted into the comforting embrace of soft, warm clicks and infinite explorations in time and space. They let themselves go.

Having nothing much in my own history to compare to this experience, I wondered how to receive these dancers who moved in disjointed spirals of contrasts and change. It felt like I was going to get whiplash trying to navigate such unfamiliar territory of the somewhat dissatisfying, random worlds of sound with nothing seeming to connect them at all. I thought to myself, it’s a particular kind of person - someone curious and adventurous, maybe scientific even, someone with the heart of a child - who would like this kind of thing. Unfortunately since I’m not so much of that kind of person, it took me a while just to relax into it and allow the music to take me wherever it wanted to go. Initially the severity of this extravagant game of tension and resolution was very frustrating but I came to recognize a similarity of sorts between these irrational sequences and the nature of life and the universe: always changing, often abrupt, and you won’t enjoy it if you try to swim against the flow. Maybe the type of person to enjoy this is actually the one who can completely stop trying to control what they experience, so I found the best solution is as with everything else: to just accept what is happening and let yourself be in that moment.

As he pressed play on the last song my heart warmed to the sound of sepia film, of a unicycle, of circus animals in mute moving around from the height of my ears to the floor. Until now the spatial format seemed like a cute novelty – something fun to explore and maybe use but not as big of a deal as everyone was making it out to be. But as I heard the movement between different levels, I found they were right and actually it feels like more. That the beat felt alive and I could see it and feel it, I heard it all completely different - it was brilliant and then in an instant, as usual, it was pulled away from me, it changed again and it was gone. Replaced with characters more jarring to your circuitry. So I waited, growing again restless and bored in the sweltering chaos that blurred together all the blocks of complex nonsense until I remembered and I took a deep breath and it wasn’t so bad. Just as my pulse slowed and my mind moved back into it’s point again, another wave hit me and it was beautiful and nostalgic like old dinosaur reels and sci-fi films and it enveloped me, and I wish it could have stayed like that forever.