A thirty-second field recording of crickets plays forwards five seconds, backwards four seconds, forwards five seconds, and so on, gradually winding through the full thirty seconds of the original recording. Every noise is repeated numerous times, many of them in reverse. Because of the ambient, complex nature of the sounds recorded, "forwards" and "backwards" have no perceptible difference from one another, and the piece sounds at first to be one extended field recording. Closer listening reveals the pops, skips, or repetitions inherent in a poorly edited sound-sample.
Based on the idea of a musical palindrome, I recorded the sound of crickets and overlaid them with sounds produced by a car engine. The natural field recording and the mechanical sounds of the engine fuse and compliment each other. These tracks were edited into short samples (roughly twenty seconds each), and then copied, reversed and spliced to create an array of seamless loops. The full track, which runs at 7:45, is then played in reverse, making the entire work one complex palindrome that contains numerous smaller palindromes.
