Dear Arthur Russell,

Let’s pretend it didn’t happen. That it just… didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, it was a good documentary and all. I enjoyed the whole thing — the flannel, the fluorescence, the frustration. Your parents and boyfriend are adorable and the clips of you playing guitar in that puffy winter jacket — black and white bliss, my man. But I’d rather wipe the mnemonic slate clean.

Let’s pretend that I’ve never known anything about you, that my first and last encounters with you are Another Thought spinning humbly in the dark. That I know nothing of your beatnik exodus from Iowa, nothing of your camaraderie with Allen Ginsburg, nothing of your disco prowess, nothing of AIDS, nothing of nothing. That all I know, not just of you, but of the whole world, is this supine posture — lying face up — is this cello echoing and squealing into the shadows, is your voice lilting and reverberant, sure as soft cotton on bleeding skin.

Let’s pretend that there is a city even Italo Calvino, the famous writer, hasn’t conjured, one where your lyrics are law, where your melodies are weather, where your atmospheres are public housing policy, where your four-track is the key to the courthouse. Let’s pretend I’m bedding down in the tenement of your sadness and hope. Let’s pretend the headline of the “Russell Daily Register” says “Lucky cloud in your sky, Brother.”

Let’s pretend I still listen to music more than I catalog it. “The birth of the moment is never ending.” Let’s pretend I believe that because it’s you saying it, singing it in loops of noise. Voltaire said that the only things too stupid to be said are sung. I want to be stupid with you.

Let’s pretend it’s the ghosts who have to believe in us for us to be real. Let’s pretend it’s you listening to me. Let’s pretend it’s you reading this letter, you smoothing the creases of this with your palms, you smearing newsprint into the whorls on your fingertips.

This is how we walk on the moon.

-Split Foster

One of the reasons I adore ambient music is that it can draw your attention to a whole medley of sounds whirring along in otherwise complacent spaces. To capitalize on this ability of ambient music to sensitize listeners to sounds they usually ignore, I’ve invented a game. It’s called “We peeled the wallpaper from Brian Eno’s skull and guess what we found? A crude pencil sketch of your brother performing a carnal act with the neighbor girl! On top of an oscillator!”

Rules:

All players must listen to at least one recording from any of the following: Stars of the Lid, Fennesz, Tim Hecker, Potpie, Belong, and/or Stephen Vitiello.

Players find rooms in which nothing is happening. Players must identify as many discrete sounds audible within the room as possible, write a short description of each sound and enumerate it.

Player with the most sounds identified at the end of a half-hour wins.

Here are the results of my first round:

A clock shaped like a soda cracker ticks and tocks above the sink.

The neighbor’s wind chime jangling. Sounds like car keys.

A cyclical warbling sound. Source: unidentified. My first guess — overhead lights in the kitchen — was wrong.

The sound from the fan on the back of my laptop, which occasionally reaches a pneumatic intensity evocative of airplane engines, thanks to the fact that said laptop is old and infested with myriad species of malware.

The refrigerator. A very humble humming.

The 500 bus line runs just a block behind the Family Dollar that’s in my backyard, so occasionally a bus glides past and I hear the woman’s voice announcing the name of the line with the weird, Stephen Hawking-ish elocution that occurs when words are pasted together from separate recordings of their constituent phonemes, e.g. “Five. Hun/dred.”

Treble gurgling in the radiators along the floorboards.

The cat, when he wakes up, is very whiny. So his meowing…

And scratching at the door so he can go down to the basement and smell that spot in the paint closet where the neighbor’s cat urinated — copiously — last week….

And crunching of the last remaining bits of his Purina Kit ’n Kaboodle.

-Split Foster

As of this writing it is 9 °F outside. According to weather.com, it “feels like 1°F.” The difference, at least to this author, seems entirely academic. On the bright side, we have only 49° to go until Celsius and Fahrenheit coincide and only 468° to go until the heat death of the universe.

Here are some of my favorite ice albums:

Terje Isungset — Iceman Is

So it probably won’t surprise you to find out that a lot of these albums are from Scandinavia. You know your geography. This one comes from Sweden. The group recorded in a studio carved beneath the famous Ice Hotel of Jukkasjärvi, which is sculpted entirely from ice every year and subsequently melts in the spring. All the instruments used in the recording were made of ice. The studio itself was made of ice. The album sounds like a gloomy pagan moon festival.

Elegi — Varde

Norwegian composer Tommy Jansen uses synthesizers, violins, and field recordings to represent the frigid travails of the first polar explorers. This is one of the bleakest things you may ever hear in your life besides, of course, the death cry your rabbit, Mr. Bingles, uttered when the formerly senescent family dog, Turbo, rediscovered his carnivorous impulses on a throw rug in the living room in 1993. The way Jansen toys with scale is amazing — sometimes you feel stranded amid expansive slurries and floes, other times it’s as if a spoon is tapping on a tin plate within the confines of your own tent.

Thomas Brinkmann — Klick Revolution

This album actually has very little to do with ice. It’s by a German who does peculiar things with turntables, most of which take away any desire you ever had to dance, or otherwise engage in club-related activities. Think of the sounds ice cubes make when you pour tap water on them. Now think of them splayed across a dark matrix of rhythm and radiant knife wounds. N-ice!

Douglas Quin — Antarctica

Quin got a grant from the National Science Foundation in 1996 to go to Antarctica. He used microphones and hydrophones to record Weddell Seals, Emperor Penguins, and the very glaciers themselves. This is a fieldwork of peculiar beauty and intensity. Sounds like ice because it is ice.