two quail run

HOW TO DIE IN THE VALLEY
for David Anthony Munnelly
1983 - 2017

I. BLOOD OF MY BLOOD SUSPENDED IN AIR 
       a. TOSS HIS BODY OVER THE LEVEE AND WATCH
       b. MEA MAXIMA CULPA
       c. THE LAST RUNG ON THE LADDER
       d. A MITZVAH
II. PIECE OF SKY BURST FORTH FROM EARTH
       a. WHATEVER WILL BE
       b. IF ONLY IN MY DREAMS
       c. EVEN WITH SOMEONE HE LOVED
       d. IKIRU
III. HIS FACE UNFOLDING IN POSTLIGHT VACUUM, CEREUS BLOOM UNDER WAXING CRESCENT
       a. NUMBER, NUMBER, WEIGHT, DIVISION
       b. BE CAREFUL, BE KIND
       c. BIRDSONG FROM A NEST OF WIRES
       d. BAY LAUREL BURNING IN A HOUSE OF BLACK ADOBE


Both the phrases “two quail run” and “how to die in the valley” are borrowed from Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, a sci-fi novel written as an anthropological study performed on a civilization living amid the millenia-old ruins of a western US destroyed by climate change. The former phrase is drawn from the first of many folk songs introduced to the reader in LeGuin's impactful work. The latter is the title of a chapter concerning the practice of grief and the preparations made for the act of dying by the people in the novel, living in a flooded but nevertheless idyllic Napa Valley.


The novel serves as a deeply thoughtful mirror for our time and place in the universe. It illustrates the shortcomings of our society by showing us something different, drawing heavily from various real-world indigenous American cultures. Nowhere is this more true than in its treatment of grief. Where our materialistic culture turns away from death and our impermanence as living beings in order to placate us into playing the game of consumption (thus disconnecting us from reality, each other, and ourselves during precisely the moments in which we require the most grounding), the people of Le Guin’s book treat the act of dying as sacramental, a universal experience which binds us to the world.

Rather than something to meditate on, or even embrace, we are encouraged in our culture to see grief as a chore, and death as anathema. Funerals in America are often treated like an unwelcome visitor. This is a consequence of our society's prioritization of the extraction of resources in pursuit of material wealth above all else. If we truly understood that everything we love will eventually die, we would almost certainly prioritize meaning over material. We might even demand a different world entirely - one in which we are not forced to sell our time (and by extension bodies) to produce excess value for someone else to keep, one in which we are good stewards of the land, one in which we are more concerned about what kind of world our children will inherit than about maximizing “value” today. When we treat grief as sacrament, we acknowledge our own impermanence, and so we run counter to the values of our hegemons. In this way, embracing grief is an act of resistance. This is the ethos underpinning HOW TO DIE IN THE VALLEY.

The loops you’ll hear in HOW TO DIE IN THE VALLEY are unique. Rather than using a true looper, the artist is using a delay pedal in a manner very much outside the realm of its intended purpose. A delay effect works by making a copy of incoming signal, holding onto it for a predetermined amount of time, and then threading that delayed “recording” together with new incoming signal, which it then makes a new copy of, and the cycle repeats. Where a traditional loop is a fixed quantity, these exist in a constant state of change, taking in new sounds and degrading existing sounds with each iteration. In this way, they have a kind of breath, or life-force, transient by nature and beautiful by way of impermanence. It’s the artist’s task to make each of these “loops” as spirited as possible, acknowledge their grace, and allow them to pass into memory. HOW TO DIE IN THE VALLEY is an invitation to touch a piece of something once loved, to love it again in absence, to demand a better tomorrow.

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two quail run is an experimental music project from Tempe, Arizona-based musician Sebastian Maconi. This music exists at the intersection of grief meditation and artistic practice, and blurs the lines between turntablism, drone, and musique concrète. Sebastian’s musical practices are highly varied, from performing in local art-rock outfit Huemongrel, to composition and graphic scores in small ensemble settings, to collaboration with artists across a wide variety of musical traditions, including drone, free improvisation, drum and bass, and more.