Rafaele Andrade is a composer/cellist/sonologist based in the Netherlands. Her composition Sasando was the inspiration for Tim Horvath’s short story “The Tungsten Record,” published online at Conjunctions in 2020.
Even if we do have a self, all many of us want is to still the music, for a time. Transcend that individual identity, shuck off that convict walk of a mortal coil, to make a new beginning of a pulled-out piece of TV antenna with the glued-on plastic bead. To try and fool my parents and everybody else that I hadn’t gone and broken something in the house, again. That I could save it, fix it, we could fix it, make it new. Trying to quench this thirst for annihilation with the secret machine. Alcohol, sex, love and work wrote the shanties of self before. I lost those full- throated lines. So, I walked the meditation labyrinths. And studied bugs. In silence. Alone.