the saw and the song
The garage does not sort its music ...
Carmen McRae and Black Sabbath share a shelf ... Bessie Smith from 1925 stands next to something industrial that was not invented until decades after she died ... This is not a contradiction ... This is how ears actually work when nobody is grading them ...
A waltz by Shostakovich plays while a band saw cuts cedar ... Sly Stone asks us to stay while we sand a thing that does not have a name yet ... Edith Piaf regrets nothing in a language the power drill does not speak ... The drill does not care ... It has its own rhythm ...
Somewhere between Arvo Pärt's silence and Iggy Pop running like a villain ... the work gets done ... Nobody remembers which song was playing when the nail went through ...
Congolese rumba from Kinshasa ... Iranian classical from Tehran ... Sámi yoik from above the Arctic Circle ... Irish drinking songs from a pub that smells like the garage ... Steve Reich pulsing while sawdust settles on every surface at the same speed ...
Fred Astaire dances cheek to cheek in a space where the floor is concrete and the ceiling leaks ... Kraftwerk sends robots to do work that here is done by hand ... Einstürzende Neubauten kisses Glenn Gould and nobody in the garage finds this strange ...
Tom Waits says come on up to the house ... The house is a garage ... The garage is a house ... Bob Marley stirs it up while mortar cures around a photograph of something we will not explain ...
Tangerine Dream journeys through a burning brain ... The brain is not burning ... It is making things ... Which from the outside might look the same ...
Hugh Masekela plays the marketplace ... The marketplace is a workbench with screws and cedar shavings and a cup of cold coffee ...
The Flaming Lips named it ... The sound of failure ... Which is also the sound of trying ... Which is also the sound of a garage in Saint Paul where everything plays at once and nothing cancels anything out ...
A Sámi man named Wimme sings bamboo honey as the last track ... After all that noise ... The throat alone ... No instrument ... A human voice doing what a human voice did before garages existed ...
The saw stops ... The song keeps going ...
Source material: pre-2009 playlist archive
Composed: February 4, 2026
Witness
Methodology: Wonderful Garbage
Style: Noir Chanson
Oyparaploo
