Observation Deck from Observation Gentle by Vireme

# About This Track: Observation Deck

Fragmented beams of sound pierce through dusty light as the first notes of "Observation Deck" materialize. We captured this piece during a three-day lockdown in the facility's central monitoring chamber, where banks of two-way mirrors create an unsettling acoustic phenomenon—sounds seem to approach from everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.

The bowed aluminum emerged unexpectedly when Eliza discovered an old medical cart with wheels that produced perfect harmonics when stroked with horsehair. What you're hearing isn't effects processing but the natural resonance of the chamber itself, with its peculiar acoustics that seem to hold certain frequencies hostage while amplifying others beyond reason.

When we perform this live, we arrange audience members in concentric circles facing outward, while technicians in lab coats silently move among them, taking notes. The piece reacts differently to each space—the prepared piano elements expanding in churches, contracting in low-ceilinged venues until they become almost claustrophobic.

There's something perversely gentle about surveillance when it's this meticulous. The field recordings of shuffling medical charts weren't planned—we simply left microphones running during our breaks and discovered these rhythms hiding in ordinary movement, like the facility itself was breathing.

Luigi Russolo's 1913 noise manifesto hangs above our workspace, his century-old prediction that industrial machinery would birth new musical language serving as both blueprint and warning. But where Russolo celebrated mechanical progress, we've excavated its aftermath—the institutional debris left when progress collapses.

The melody that appears three minutes in came to us fully formed, like a transmission from the building's memory. We've never been able to reproduce it exactly the same way twice.

We scavenge the frequencies others discard. Broken equipment, mechanical failure, industrial decay—these are our instruments. Prepare for sonic trespass as we transmit from the abandoned Loamfold Facility. No melodies, only disruption.