Fenway

My friend Lindsey emailed me a picture she took at the Nikon Theater, where Phish is playing tonight (right now, blazing that weird trail of the musical present with the cutting, killing edge that exists only in the immediate performance, the always-disappearing part that makes even a familiar song impossible to understand, especially when it's very loud. She's looking down an extremely steep slope of seats toward the stage, which is contained under a corrugated shell spanning the towers of a concrete castle, and the whole thing sits in the water like it is undergirding a drawbridge or processing sewage or producing nuclear power (what is it about Phish that makes their music so uniquely suited to brutalist municipal architecture?

All day I've been thinking about the concrete underside of Fenway Park, the dark and echoey ring of corridors and chambers beneath the seats where all the human business of the ballpark is conducted. Hearing Character Zero as vibrations in the walls of the men's room seemed to confirm the many dreams I've had lately about going to Phish shows in infinite concrete basements, hangars, and locker rooms. This music is about modifying space. Whatever the music might be reduced to on a recording, however much detail it may contain in itself, the point of the music at the moment it is being made is to overload the medium in which it is resonating, to find the harmonies of this accidental surplus, the strange congruences of vibration in stuff never made for music (bridge resonance and the longer waves of rooms