A Slight Delay

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. (more…)