www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-dO6x-oPs4

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I began this song with simply the concept of stability and nature's tendency to find it. It amazes me that the universe is stable enough to support things like orbits, but not so stable or chaotic that life as we know it would be impossible. We sit right in the goldilocks zone. Despite this, or maybe because of it, we largely take the systems that enable our existence for granted. Stasis is intended to show why we shouldn't.

I thought of our orbit around the sun, the changing of the seasons, the moon, the tides, and how the delicate balance of so many interrelated systems makes our planet habitable.
The concept inevitably brought me to the water cycle.

The hum at the beginning is a recording of the sun, yeah you read that right. Well full disclosure, it's sped up 42,000 times faster to be audible to human ears. Close enough for me.
Here's NASA explaining how they got it. www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/...

I set it on a tilted orbit around the listener's head. The cycle coincides with the 4 note melody you hear in the beginning. The four notes represent the seasons and four stages of the water cycle. Virtually the entire song is made out of this melody. It plays against itself, forwards, backwards, upside down, and at every speed from 1/4 to 4 times as fast. Like the water cycle, it's superimposed on itself at every scale.

static.wixstatic.com/media/05...


The song is obviously jam-packed with natural soundscapes. I resonated pitches in all of the recordings, turning them into instruments instead of just noise. It seemed fitting that they're in literal harmony with each other. Over the course of the song, the main recordings follow one trip through the water cycle. It starts with the sun hitting the ocean (0:30), reversed rain and wind representing evaporation and clouds forming (0:41), rain falling (0:55), a stream (1:07), a river (1:20), and finally the ocean again as the full cycle comes into view (2:05).

The climate has been remarkably stable for all of human civilization, but emissions of greenhouse gasses threaten the stability at its core. We sit on the precipice of an exponential collapse of weather systems, unimaginable suffering, and mass extinction. I wanted the sheer dread of this potential future to feel overwhelming and inescapable. It's not only possible, it's on our doorstep.

The instruments and resonated pitches slowly start to rise in pitch as the cacophony of human activity grows, throwing the entire harmony out of balance. The dissonance increases exponentially until reaching a point of pure chaos i.e. total environmental and societal collapse.

Snap back to today, and the exponential decay is beginning to ramp up. There is still hope, but we're dangerously low on time. It will require a massive re-evaluation of our societal structures, and collective values, to take the necessary initiative.

Chaos is unsustainable, and compensation for it is inevitable. We're left with a simple choice: mitigate the consequences of our impacts, or be crushed by them.