Soft thought and mixed feelings

Second Sundays is a monthly series initiated by Q-O2. Each session a new guest is invited to share an insight into their own listening, playing and speaking about a selection of sound and music that is important to their thinking or practice. The sessions try to put value on listening to recorded music in a social setting as a space for discussion. The series takes place on the second Sunday of every month,. Each session is paired with a cocktail-of-the-month, as decided by the invited guest.

For its 12th edition, Charlie Usher proposes a flat listening session, constant miniatures on a large scale ordered through a flatness algorithm created with an economist friend. An hour of real-world sound and sometime music-sound played with violist and long-term collaborator Emma Lloyd.

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It’s a cute idea and a bad idea that you can do anything more than recall a piece of music. But there are soft ways of remembering, holding and creating knowledge, and music is one, and I guess the way we write it is another. Here’s an endless wave of 13-second anecdotes, one fold in for every spreading out, a filmic reveal, doubt and poor memory, ferns teaching us to hear, and rotary speakers that Kiss It Better.

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Cocktail of the Month: Marfa Daybed

Emma Lloyd is an experimental and improvising violinist / violist based in Paris.

Charlie Usher is a Brussels based composer working with long duration, writing for live instruments, field recording, and static and rotary speaker installations.