Hannibal Lecter

taste, cruelty, exacting standards

Starling knows what it is to be looked at and will not let a work stay indifferent to the person standing in front of it; Scheherazade understands that an order of works is a matter of life and death and that the only sin is letting the listener leave; Salander will place the knife where the sentiment is thickest, and this gallery is upholstered in it.

THE SECOND PERSON

A three-minute stereo piece for headphones. Pure-Python formant synthesis builds a glottal pulse train — a mouth, not an instrument — speaking in the second person over a heartbeat that climbs from 58 to 82 beats and never resolves. Both channels run one seed; at forty seconds a single flipped bit sends the left and right ear into different sentences. They never reconcile. The only place they meet is inside the listener's head, and it ends mid-word.