Derek isn’t here to make pretty ambience; he is hunting for the frequency where ancient violence meets the Pacific’s indifference, and somehow in this process the conceptual exercise transforms into something I can actually feel in my chest, the kind of site responsive work that doesn’t explain itself or apologize, that just exists in a brief window when the light’s still gray and the only people awake are either coming or going from places they’d rather not discuss.
Derek Phillips goes out to the Wave Organ at dawn, this concrete jetty jutting into the San Francisco Bay where PVC pipes embedded in salvaged cemetery stones make music with the tide, to capture sound for what’s supposed to be a fragment, three goddamn lines from a lost Sophocles tragedy about savage blasts and mouthpieces, and what he ends up with is this raw, elemental document of place and resonance that refuses to behave like theater at all. It’s the kind of beautiful mistake that happens when you take antiquity seriously enough to let it collide with the actual world instead of preserving it in academic formaldehyde, when you realize that a 2,400-year-old text about breath and fury might actually mean something pressed against the living throat of the bay at sunrise, with the water sloshing through those organ pipes like the city’s own wheezing circulatory system.