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Dustin’s perspective reminded me that most music isn’t recorded and every piece of recorded music inherently contains countless versions that went undocumented, offered into the aether. He described playing a familiar song live, over and over, as a dynamic relationship where both the song and the person have room to change and grow together over time, while the recording is a crystallization of a particular moment in that relationship. My friend Dustin Wong, an incredible live musician and producer, once relayed that he felt that playing music live was like a sacred offering, whereas recording was like trying to contain or hold onto something that inherently can’t be owned. The producing process exists outside of time wherein the audio can be edited, processed, crafted, and rearranged ⁠- evading physical constraints of acoustics or human capacity. Recording music is an act of listening towards the future: projecting how others will eavesdrop on the moment, a process of documentation. Playing music with others is sharing a present moment: it’s intimate, dynamic, and leaves no trace. I’ll never know what music we didn’t record. I don’t have enough context to identify everyone, where we were, when this was or why we were together. As this dawns on us collectively, you can hear about four people total (including me) laugh. I imagine us improvising for around 20 minutes, ending naturally at the perfect time and patiently letting all of the instruments ring out, only to discover that none of it was documented, all of it lost. I am with a group of musicians at the end of a session and we have just realized that instead of pushing the record button to end a recording, we actually just began recording. I was listening through this folder when I found this 16 second recording, in two formats: midside (MS) and directional (XY). I’ve tried my best to catalog the recordings but despite my best organizational efforts I have a large folder of untagged, unlabelled audio files with automatically-generated numerical titles. In 2013 I got a Zoom H2N field recorder and have been using it regularly since, recording anything and everything from walks in my neighborhood to live shows.