This work combines my earliest substantial piece of tape music from 1983 with a video made by Denise Hawrysio for a collaborative installation we developed in Bangkok in 2000. The installation in Thailand, entitled Grasping and Clinging, was inspired by a text by Buddhadasa Bhikkhu which deals our sensual attachment to transient objects and desires.  Hawrysio made a series of videos depicting various absurd or pointless tasks such as combing your hair in the wind, stacking unstable objects or, in this case, trying to hold something that will inevitably melt away.

I chose to work with this video because it relates to the other work I was showing in Frise Gallery, Cold Atlantic, and its use of feedback, which Nic Collins has described as 'the zen-like amplification of nothing’. When I found a copy of my early tape piece made in San Francisco, I was delighted to discover that it was very close to the the same length as the video, roughly 36 minutes. Both sound and video consisted of a single unedited take: they seemed made for each other. 

The sound piece is made primarily with a plastic organ I found on the street, decontructed and recorded onto ¼” magnetic tape using a classic Nagra reel-to-reel recorder.