B2 by Reece Cox

B2 was recorded in the winter of 2016 at EMS in Stockholm Sweden. It was originally released under the name F1k on cassette released by Anathem Archive.

This single take recording was the first made at Cox's stay at EMS after a torturous trip to Europe from the United States. Before reading this story please be aware of the extreme content - consider this a trigger warning.

"My first night in Stockholm I had forgotten to plan a place to stay in the frenzy of preparing for the residency and the tour following. I would be arriving in the city rather late at night but I managed to find a place via a couch surfing website on very short notice. While I didn't like the idea of staying with a stranger with all my equipment I had no clear alternatives and it was far too cold to wait out the night in the city. After a day or more of flights and trains, I arrived late in the evening to a man who welcomed me into his small apartment. Happy to get some rest I sat down just when the man began talking in a brooding and serious tone, expressing increasingly pessimistic and hateful views and attitudes towards society. It occurred to me that I wouldn't be getting to sleep anytime soon. I looked around the tiny one-room flat as he spoke. it was covered in exercise equipment, miscellaneous trash, and far-right political literature. The man expressed his sympathies for the Nazi's. He spoke of intimate encounters with other couch surfers. I looked at my heavy bags full of valuable and sensitive equipment I had carried with me from thousands of miles away. I looked at the man sitting between me and the door. I thought of the morning where I would get keys to my studio at the residency - the whole point of traveling to this country. I wondered what might ensue if I attempted to leave just as much as I wondered what would happen if I stayed. Finally, after an hour or more, he suggested we sleep. The apartment was too small for anything but a large bed and the small loveseat I was sitting on. There was no floor space. He suggested I sleep in the bed with him and apologized for the size and state of the place. This was the only viable option for my long body. It was late in the night and I was exhausted. I got in the bed and so did he, continuing his rambling. When he began to speak about his encounters with other couch surfers again I thought about the neighbors and whether the walls might be concrete or hollow. Sleep was not even a remote option. In an act of instinct, I pulled out my phone, turned the brightness all the way up, and began texting a half a dozen friends. Everyone hates a conversation partner who insists on looking at their phone, especially when said person is held hostage. Miraculously this worked. He said he had to go to the gym before work and got up. I saw him walk into the bathroom and realized he was not wearing any clothes. I got up and got my coat and boots on, wondering if I should rush out. I thought it best not to cause a scene - what might this man do. We left the flat at 6 AM. He offered I stay another night while in Stockholm if I was in need of a place and gave me his metro card. On the way into the city, I reported him to the website where I found him. I sat in a cafe and stared blankly at a cup of tea until it was time to head to the studio. I arrived at the warm and welcoming studio and was given a tour of the facilities. I gladly said nothing of the night I'd had. My studio was a beautiful, soundproof room with a very old Buchla synthesizer that looked like a filing cabinet - not one of the later designs with the vast sloping and colorful interface. As I settled into the studio I began patching my Paia synthesizer into the Buchla and hit record on the studio computer to capture the first sounds produced during my week-long stay. As sound came out of the machines and filled the dark warm studio I found myself nodding in out of sleep. I felt like a conch shell, hollow but spiraling inward and outward infinitely. Jet lagged, sleep-deprived, without sunlight in the nordic winter, struggling to comprehend the night before, my body hung on its frame, and my mind slipped in and out of consciousness - all the while the machines ran, producing sound captured by the computer. Numerous times I jolted awake with my hand holding a patch cable suspended over an input or resting on a knob, unsure if I had just opened or closed an envelope and for how long - perhaps for minutes at a time I'd hovered in place, unaware of anything. It's rare in life to enter such an active and loaded state of hypnagogia and the recording produced is something of an incidental diary entry from this moment."

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