“You broke my heart into a million pieces,” sing-says the voice. The voice is itself divided into many pieces, if not a million then certainly hundreds, perhaps approaching thousands. At a macro level it is a fifty-fifty split between sung and spoken. The phrase, however, is splintered further, courtesy of a musician seen seated in this video with her laptop perched on a folding table. The location and date, plus her name, provide the context in the form of the video’s title. It’s Erika Nesse at Firehouse (firehouseworcester.com) in Worcester, Massachusetts, on January 1, 2018, New Year’s Day. (The YouTube channel is that of Samual Hadge, who recently uploaded a slew of live sets from Firehouse, as well as from venues in Georgia, Florida, and elsewhere). Judging by the winter date and the puffy outerwear of the members of the audience, it is also very cold. Nesse is a poet of sonic fractals, of not just splintering sound into little piece but having those piece play out in patterns, systems, and processes, all of which entice the ear’s imagination. If we’re used to pop songs where the chorus takes on new meaning as it is repeated, one verse after another, here the phrase — “You broke my heart into a million pieces” — becomes its own meaning: the more the voice is disturbed by Nesse’s digital intrusions, the closer the listener comes to experiencing its truth.
Video originally posted at Hadge’s youtube.com. More from Erika Nesse at fractalmusicmachine.com and erikanesse.bandcamp.com.