Memories from analog undergrounds (I)

By ogitrevrm

Górecki’s Third was playing at home because my father liked it. I was a child of the nineties, clean of context, of history, of defenses. But the body started to register it before the mind did.

The violins moved without moving. A funereal step, thick, always in the same place. The harmonic texture repeated itself like a slab dropping again and again, each time with a millimeter more weight. Time stopped being time and turned into accumulation. Every second added pressure. Nothing opened. Everything closed slowly.

Anguish began to build in the chest. Breathing became short, uncomfortable, monitored. The space around me seemed to shrink from the inside, as if the walls were shifting with a cruel patience. This was pure confinement. A physical claustrophobia, prior to thought. My small body searched for an exit and found only more density.

Then the female voices appeared.

And there everything became even more unbearable. Those voices floated like a promise that never reaches the ground. Something human, elevated, fragile, suspended in the air. A form of hope that, instead of relieving, added a new layer of pain. Because it suggested another possibility, another plane, another height… while offering no access. Like extending a hand where the ground has already vanished.

The violins remained there, immobile, digging into the same spot. The voices layered themselves on top as a constant reminder that something stays alive even in the most closed place. That combination was devastating. Absolute darkness would have been bearable. That minimal, useless light made the confinement complete.

Time hung suspended. Each second weighed more than the previous one. The body began to prepare for something final, irreversible, without knowing what. A strange closeness to death, lived without words, without images, without narrative. Pure sensation.

I knew nothing of wars, of camps, of mothers singing to absent sons. The body was already doing that work. That music came from a place where air runs thin and the future is cancelled. Listening to it meant entering that place.

My father listened to music. I was inside the space that music opened.