Bruce Gilbert
Ab Ovo

I walked until the altimeter's siren assured me that the indicated altitude had been reached. The ticking of the compass helped me, once the landmarks were identified, to locate the site. I activated the ultrasound, whose almost marine waveform confirmed my deductions. I gripped the rod of the metal detector and stopped when its buzzing rose to a roar.

With every step I took, the click of mini-lamps embedded in the heels of my shoes choreographed the excavation, while the beep, revealing me on the screen with each scan, assured the base that the operation was proceeding. It was night, and the high tension running along nearby cables sounded calls like coyotes in the full moon. The beeping of the laser, which I used in locating the buried civilization, became frantic. The place was deserted and the silence perfect, yet all my machines, in chorus, denounced the human presence. Machines have their ineffable way, with their grumbles, hisses, and broken rhythms, of revealing the presence of humans, from the logic of their architecture to the humanoid expressions of their operation. The trills, moans, bursts, their tensions and failures are all too similar to ours: we, creators, have made them in our image and likeness. They reflect us even in their inexplicable quirks. To their idiosyncratic expressions correspond, in us, a feeling, an impression, a state of mind.

And after leaping from the chair towards the stereo to see if the amplifier was burning, given the intense pain expressed by the silicon and circuits, and realizing it was the second, worrying section of "Ab ovo", I realized that we love them, our machines. That piercing synthetic roar was music, recorded on cd like the music broadcast on the radio. Music because the voice of the beloved is music. Music. With the difference that, while the radio music instantly dulls me, this, of music, presents me, in its collage of incongruent voices, the expressions and rhythms of the inner places which, willingly or by force, I frequent.

I am well familiar with the occasional shivers of curiosity ("Slow no (The)"), the fixed buzz of a reluctant grunt ("OGKR") and the stupor of a drunken evening ("Emission curve"). I recognize the hum of the fields of sadness ("Myomacy"), the rhythm of the obsession that ignites ("Ab ovo") and the square room with no windows with walls scarred by the fury of my headbutts. The machines know us, they chase us even after millennia. Thanks to the beeps and bops of the equipment, as well as the work of shovel and pick, traces of man reemerged under my hands.

The most interesting find turned out to be a water-powered oscillating device. It was made of bamboo and was used to produce a periodic sound that blended with the noises of nature. It was a sound artifact with which the man of three thousand years ago had established a relationship with the surroundings.
Bruce Gilbert would have gone crazy over it.