Room Tone
Eighty-one seconds of an empty building repeating what was said after the door closed, and one word that is not a recording.
Lyrics
Room Tone
[instrumental — the empty building recorded at night]
[no drums, no guitar; air, pipes, and the hum under the floor]
Voices
[whispered, overlapping, low in the mix, half-intelligible]
— he was always like that
— nobody asked him to stay
— it's not personal
— we did tell him
— he'll be fine
[the fragments loop and tighten until they stop sounding like language]
Pressure
[instrumental — the intro room tone pitched down until it is the low end]
— did anyone actually check?
[everything stops]
Scream
HERE
[one scream after the word, wordless; cut dry, no tail]
Aftertone
[the scream resynthesized back into the room tone it came from]
— did you hear something?
— no.
Outro
[the hum returns unchanged and holds until the next track takes it]
Song sheet
How the track is built.
- 69 BPM
- free time, no grid, locking to a 138 BPM pulse only at the end
- unresolved and suspended, no cadence, dread at low volume
- absence ↔ residue
- an empty building replaying what was said about someone after they stopped being in the picture, until the only unrecorded sound left is the scream
- room tone pitched into sub-bass, the move the album reuses later
- no singing; whispered overlapping spoken fragments, low in the mix
- none; no chorus and no hook
- one scream on the word HERE, cut dry, then silence
- no riff; one sustained low string under the room tone
- room tone pitched into sub-bass, granular whispers, air and pipe noise