This piece uses buzz sampled from a Shona mbira, an instrument that in ritual context is used to guide listeners into a trance-like state that both relaxes the individual and allows ancestral spirits to possess and speak through the body to the community. Bottle caps, metal ringlets or, in the past, shells, are affixed to the sound board of the instrument as well as to the outer rim of a calabash resonator; this buzzing is of paramount importance to the functionality of the ritual and the correct performance of mbira music. Musical traditions around the world have long used buzz to illicit psychological and physiological responses from the listener. It is when we tune out the prominent melody, pitch and rhythm and pay attention instead to what is not the melody, pitch and rhythm-what we might call the melody, pitch and rhythm of buzz, so often filtered out as noise, ignored by the consciousness-that its historical connection to ritual and trance become apparent. Sitting in a quiet room, one is likely to hear the humming and buzzing of any number of electronic devices and machines. Many of us mistake this sound for silence. Given the powerful affect of buzz for meditation and spiritual practices, it is not outrageous to suggest that the affect of this, for many of us, constant buzzing and humming (computers, refrigerators, automobiles and so on) is not innocuous and affects significantly our composite experience of the world.

Notes by Hillary Overberg