I Should Have Known a Certain Romance

I Should Have Known a Certain Romance is an eight-minute fixed-media piece released on the second Noise Ground compilation by the Istanbul label Sanri Records in March 2019. It is the electronic twin of the trio …I Should Have Known a Better Romance…, written the same year.

Where the trio replays a scene and flinches, this piece stays inside it. It is made from a single vocal take — a melody sung once, plainly, into a close microphone — which is then treated the way memory treats an evening one would rather forget: slowed until the words lose their edges, cut into loops that start in the wrong place, pitched up into something childlike and then down into something that is barely a voice, and buried under a wide, warm field of noise that is not unpleasant but will not go away. Now and then the original take surfaces, whole, for a bar, and is pulled back under.

The title is a line from the same unfinished sentence as the trio’s, and the two pieces are meant to be heard, eventually, as one.