IN 2020 I GOT VERY INFATUATED WITH HALOGEN LIGHTING AND THE LOOK OF 5G BROADCAST TECHNOLOGY…

Extremely, extremely infatuated.

I began to see buildings as externalisations of the human mind and soul, or perhaps the conquering of such things by cloud computing systems. I would wander around the winding roads of Sydney City until 5 a.m. in the morning, caught endlessly in the glow of big futurist monoliths like the International Towers at Barangaroo, photographing every remotely digital thing I saw. Most mornings, towards the end of these night walks, I would come across the same woman outside of the bank near the tram tracks in upper Chinatown. If you’re a 20 resident you might have come across her too—an elderly Asian woman wrapped and bandaged in all kinds of fabric, wearing 90s computer headphones and playing an old, out-of-tune guitar next to a roller bag*.

She would strum in this kind of even, mechanical fashion, her velocity never faltering.

THUNG THUNG THUNG THUNG THUNG.

Sometimes I would stand for hours watching her make this sound—this haunting, imperfect, discordant sound emanating from the scrape of the strings. It is the sound you hear at the beginning of NIGHT SAFE.

It created the kind of volatile street scene that the City of Sydney has continually tried to murder in cold blood over the last 10 years in lieu of livestream pianists and other undesirable people of low decorum. Residents would hear the THUNG from across the road and cautiously approach her. Upon recognising what was in front of them, many rational questions arose:

Could she hear the sound she was playing?

What was she listening to in the headphones?

There was no sign, no clear communication for an expectation of payment.

What did she want from us?

Some residents would laugh, others would turn to their partners trying to make mockery,
some even dropped coins into a small styrofoam takeaway package, but she’d never, ever take notice or change her stance.

Eventually, all of her participants sunk into an unsettling and confused silence as the woman simply gazed through them, and the THUNG persisted.

I visited her again many times over the course of a year, on my night walks and sometimes on the way home from the mall, watching from afar. The aggression of her scraping changed the nature of the chord she played as the strings gradually disintegrated across the change of the seasons.

Eventually, they broke completely—
and yet she continued:

THUNG THUNG THUNG over the splintered body of the old guitar.

Tonight was the night I decided, I was finally going to approach her.

And so I walked over to her, and let her gaze through my body.

My curiosity got the better of me, and I leant down to peer into the contents of her small takeaway bag.

It was filled to the brim, entirely with guitar picks.

After that night, I never saw my muse again.

This short hymn is dedicated to her.