Escape Rites by Austin Wulliman, JACK Quartet

Pressed between bodies heaving to the pulse. The room inside the drum: each of us within its envelope. Sent elsewhere. Stamped to distant locales but together in this resonating box. My wrists were broken. My mind screwed on tight. 
I wake next to a reflecting pool. An inlet. The water here is cool, shaded by trees that lean in to listen, swaying lightly with the gentle breeze, the hairs on my neck alive. I start my own religion here. 
But I ask of the sea: long to see its waves crashing. As I approach, the blue-green colors of my oasis dull to a metallic blur. The wind a knife’s edge into my bleared eyes. From below the surface, shafts of artificial light emerge. Power indicators of unseen machines from another time, rising endlessly…narrow spotlights pushing into the sky. My heart quickens. These climbing pixels build a hard-edged latticework of digital snow, blinding me.
I try to tune it. I look for the one of one. No wiser, I exhale and step into a clearing among the trees: an orderly garden path. I pace slowly among the carefully selected native plants…am I yet awake? Each turn reveals that these rows lead into a deep forest. The roots intertwine with a soil rich in jumbled wiring, broken monitors, cables to outdated devices.
The path opens suddenly onto an outcropping above the sea. From this new vantage, each square of color in the water pollutes its surface with 8-bit splendor. I spin back into the forest, the roots and limbs now formed of telephone cords, drive thru bank tubes, and strings of LED lights. They whirl me into a dance: a rite of doubt and self-abdication.
Awakening from the depths of this wood: a giant stone head. Looming. Impassive. Its face in a half-smile of cool knowing. Its surface like a freshly cut tree trunk, brindled with geological age and the scars of its removal from the earth. I am lifted up and held against it: a familiar texture, its rough beard streaked with aquamarine moss. A deep calm comes over me: of the kind one feels when giving in to the weight of a midday slumber or a powerful drug. A kept beast that loves its strict, heavy-handed trainer.
Below this effigy, an entry to the junkyard earth. I walk myself dutifully down the mossy stairs to my resting place, each step echoing with a memory of an imagined golden age.
— Austin Wulliman


“Activity involving in a single process the many, turning them, even though some seem to be opposites, towards oneness, contributes to a good way of life.”  - John Cage

Violinist, composer and educator Austin Wulliman embodies the imagined and empathizes with the absurd through sounds both familiar and radical, telling stories with a limitless passion for tuning cries from every corner of the human capacity to hear. He is a member of JACK Quartet, called “the nation’s most important quartet” by the New York Times

austinwulliman.com