Lying on your back, eyes unfocused on the darkening sky growing thick with Midwestern humidity. Birds and insects calling down the day with the irregular pattern of circuits closing and opening. Trying to locate - in this spatial field of awareness - where these sounds are sourced from. Who is communicating with whom and what are they saying?

This piece of music, recorded live during the summer at The Hexagon House (an outdoor venue run by Liz Wolf in Cincinnati’s Northside neighborhood), introduces the two communicators as Pete Fosco and Andrew Elaban. The dialogue between the two Cincinnati-based artists started in 2021 when the two artists – comfortably making solo music under their own names – began playing together with an unknown expectation as to where these collaborations would take them. Andrew Elaban has been creating patient, unfolding sounds of algorithmic poetry through modular synthesizer since 2015. A move to Cincinnati and the winding corridors of personal connections brought him in touch with Pete Fosco - a Cincinnati native whose exploration of the full sonic possibilities of the guitar range from coaxing strange and distorted sounds from an extended technique to visceral exhortations of the instrument (windmilling arms and structural damage very much in play).
In this recording you hear the two in deep conversation. This performance, like all good conversations, spirals, zigs, zags and loops back on itself – never losing sight that each amble, each digression is in service to the super-structure of the composition itself. Across the 32 minutes you hear a dialogue that slowly melds droning guitar passages into the circadian buzz and chirp of Elaban’s synthesizer, the reverb from the last chord warping into the start of a pulsing melodic phrasing, percussive fragments bobbing and weaving like a rabbit across a thin crust of snow. Like all good conversations, there are moments of passionate monologues, deft parries, and the gradual settling into the natural rhythm of two people exploring new ideas and sharing favorite anecdotes. Fosco’s guitar will roar with minimalist power chords or slightly in-the-red distortion before settling back into a pace with Elaban’s field recordings and gathering electrical storm of tonal fragments. Other times, Fosco’s guitar will sand itself down to a steady drone, etching out room for Elaban’s celestial choir of voices seeking purchase in the material realm.

While it may seem straightforward to classify this as a conversation between two artists carefully composing improvised music, the question of who is speaking isn’t that simple. Surrounding them and echoing back to them in a sort of dialectic feedback loop are the countless insects and birds in the audience that don’t take care to keep their voices down during the performance. Audible in the performance are the sounds of a Midwestern forest settling down for the night – or, perhaps, pre-gaming for an all night rager. In and through this performance is an electrical buzz, aleatoric chirp and call-and-response beckoning from the space around them. This kind of chance encounter between environment and artist can be seen as a happy accident, but an accident stemming from careful planning and preparation from both venue and artist.

Listening back to this performance, the question remains: What are they saying? This performance is a type of full-throated glossolalia where a contentless understanding descends on all living creatures like the Pentecost. An audio field rich with meaning even if no sentences are formed. But that’s how conversations work, right? An entire paragraph summed up in a sigh or a peal of laughter?