This work is for Ian Thorson and Lama Christie. Christie lost her husband during a 3 year, 3 month and 3 day silent meditation retreat at a remote religious compound in Arizona. The couple had to make a second retreat after being expelled from the main group, for what I take as a largely bullshit overreaction complicated by personal matters. After expulsion, the couple decided to move to a nearby cave, high on a mountainside, to complete their temporal commitment. An exhausting part of their experience was the long trip up and down the mountain, to retrieve food and water left by sympathetic members of the monastery. The area had recently seen chilly late winter nights and clement, comfortable days, but as April turned toward May, the malevolent desert heat was returning. The late April temperatures, reported in the 90s (32C and higher), became too much for their weakened condition. Ian had become unable to make the supply run as starvation and dehydration drained his strength. He passed from exposure on April 22. Lama Christie was rescued.

Although some have called the group a cult, I avoid doing so. Theirs is a mainstream religion. There is little evidence of behavior control, information control, thought control, or emotional control. There is no fealty to bizarre conspiracy theories or populist demagogues. But through their beliefs, and an organizational clusterfuck that saw the pair expelled, Thorson and Christie joined a sad list of seekers who paid a heavy price for their metaphysics. Most of this series is about unarguably destructive cults, but in this case I will just describe this particular organization as, cult adjacent.

Ian Thorson was a remarkable human being, a fearless world traveler, seeker, and pacifist. Installing this work actually became quite emotional for me. While on site, I kept imagining he drank and ate less than he needed in selflessly caring for Christie. I felt based on my readings that he was that kind of person. I can’t know if he gave his life in the way I imagined, but I felt that while on site.

I intentionally put myself in a situation where my experience of the place would be slightly analogous to theirs. This felt conceptually important! I fasted during the three days it took me to carry equipment up the mountain, and to build the station. Due to the remoteness of the location, as well as topographic considerations inherent in not trespassing on monastery property, I developed fatigue and dizziness. This minor health impact, the long duration of the piece, and honestly battery life limited the number of recordings I could make at the site. As with all of the work in this series, the Arduino micro-controller will never perform the work the same way twice, so each version is even more unique than any of those famous depressed primate NFTs. As I was unable to make more on-site recordings during my time there, not as many NFTs are available as in previous projects in the series.

This is an experimental electronic music and site-specific work. I imagine it as a musique descriptive representation of Thorson and Christie’s long days and nights against gravity, solar radiation, strong winds, hard sleeping surface, malnourishment, dehydration, and Arizona's wide daily highs and lows. Also the tiring trips up and down the mountain. Then an early heatwave. Exposed, falling into illness, recovering, rising, depleting again. Incessant gravity, increasing heat. The duration and the way this music really beats down on the listener is like the elements beating down on these seekers. I was able to coax two exhausting square waves out of a 2K RAM potato. This work is quite different from the other projects in the series, in that I am not working through conceptual arrangements of traditional liturgical music.

This is a composition. My own liturgical dirge, dirge, dirge. The constraints of the Arduino helped me write this for Thorson and Christie’s sad tragedy.

Proof of work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYCm6RWUTmU