Noise #92
Waking up to ash and dust
This is it, the apocalypse—these heavy words from my favorite heavy song of the last two decades hit me with fresh impact this week. Because for just a few moments, those words felt true.
I was walking from west to east in New York City, crossing Central Park, talking on the phone about concert tickets or travel or something else fun and low stakes when I noticed that the air had gone from misty to smokey to blood. I’m not sure if it happened over seconds or minutes, but the effect was jarring. I was no longer on 5th Avenue by the Met Museum. I was walking into Blade Runner 2049.
The saturated, sickly redness continued until the sun set. And though the morning after was clearer, New Yorkers like me were still opening our eyes to ash and dust, in our faces like a slap to wake us up. Millions in the western United States and China and India have received this kind of kiss from climate change many times before. But residents of my home city have been spared it until now.
I feel it in my bones, enough to make my systems blow
I wasn’t surprised to find Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive” at the top of my mind when I sat at the piano recently. In that delirious anthem, I hear a vivid sense of a world beginning to twirl off axis, as well as an ironclad resolution to wake, move, and act even as the sky falls.
That emotional imprint, woven through with the song’s melodic and harmonic framework, memories of my walk through Central Park—all were in my heart and fingers when I recorded Noise #92.
While I’ve recorded dozens of Noise improvs based on events that touch me from inches or oceans away, this is my first time documenting echos of an occurrence so enveloping and unavoidable, on a literally microscopic level, even more so than the COVID pandemic. I fear and predict it won’t be the last.
I raise my flags, don my clothes, it’s a revolution, I suppose.
I hope you can find a few moments of peace or catharsis while listening to this music. More so, I hope these plumes of smoke carry winds of realization to those New York and DC power brokers who have proven too stubborn or willfully ignorant to act regarding climate change—and most of whom are personally waking up to ash and dust in their homes and lungs for the first time.
The smoke is clearing now. But until our business and political leaders face its root cause with deadly seriousness, more will come. As the song says, welcome to the new age.
Wishing you peace and health,
Michael
(Noise #92 by Michael Gallant. Copyright 2023 Gallant Music LLC. All Rights Reserved.)