One of my favorite things: stuff that happens only once, completely at random. Those snippets of found sounds, overheard dialog, or improbable phrasing are a sort of assemblage by accident. Reason and design get lost in the kind of haze that seems to be exactly why the word “ephemeral” was coined in the first place. These things only happen, it seems, when they can’t be captured, whether at the edge of hearing, from the corner of the eye, or in those fleeting moments between waking and dreaming.
And when you try to capture something like this, it ends up losing something in translation. By trying to give it form, make it last, you somehow rob it of its spirit or essence; you end up stripping it of its immediacy, and a large part of what made it special in the first place.
Once in a while you get lucky. Your subconscious mind pulls together disparate elements from your environment, cataloging, collaging, and combining in ways you wouldn’t normally have thought of. Other times, new objects or thought processes come out of random events. I remember one day sitting in a pizzeria when the alarms on three different cars went off nearly in unison. You’d think it’d be a racket, but instead it ended up having a sort of disjointed musicality about it; chords would form more or less at random, and the rhythm of the “piece” kept moving in and out of phase. All that was missing was Bill Bruford sitting off to one side, providing a beat for the proceedings.
Another time, I was trying to tune in a radio station in Pittsburgh. Already I’m not exactly dealing with ideal circumstances, since it seems there are only two radio stations, both of which would play either the Doors or the Eagles (except at noon, when they play “Free Bird” simultaneously). So I’m going through the dial, slowly, and all of a sudden I find the absolute coolest song; some station was playing an ambient/trance thingy, with a tribal-sounding beat and what sounds like a guitar synth playing some droning raga-like lines. I let it play for a bit; whoever they were, these guys were good. I couldn’t believe I was hearing it in Pittsburgh, of all places. The local NPR affiliate, maybe?
Then I decided to tune it in a bit more carefully. And lost it altogether. Turns out that I’d found an odd little suture between two stations, parts of each cancelling the other out. The drones were coming from the background noise and interference between stations. Try as I might, I couldn’t get that sound back.
I learned a few things from this:
1. Watch and listen to everything. You never know when you’ll find something useful or just plain interesting.
2. Some things happen by accident, and they’re just meant to. Let them be; they’re best left alone.
3. Sometimes what happens by accident turns out better than what you were trying for in the first place.
4. Sometimes the very things that allow you to penetrate a work to study it more closely are the same ones that can ruin it.