Hang on Till Tomorrow is an audio portrait of the changing relationship with my family and home town of Fayetteville, Arkansas. It unfolds as a suite of recorded interactions, moving between personal, interpersonal and public space. Recorded in two visits roughly twenty years after I moved away, I traced some familiar walking routes and interacted with the people and environment in order to articulate my first-person experience with the community and to meditate on the ways we have both changed.

My experience growing up in this mid-sized college town in the mid-south before the internet really caught on, was marked by walking. There were sometimes organized shows or parties but socializing on most nights meant walking from place to place without a specific plan, simply searching for interstitial community. At an age before I could visit bars or have an apartment, this kind of aimless space-making was a really important way to claim a piece of what was otherwise considered to be public.

When the covid-19 pandemic hit I realized it may be a long time before I could visit my parents again. Having long-ago relocated to the coast, I assembled this audio piece as a meditation on my relationship with that space and with space in general. It is a companion to a series of photographs that I took of the ground in different public areas during the pandemic in my current home of Providence, RI. The pandemic in the US has highlighted a crucial underlying problem in the way we conceive of public and private space. Private property is a foundational aspect of our culture in the US and our system only works if each of us considers the other to be a potential adversary. We have increasingly focused our attention away from the communal and towards the individual. This underlying outlook has a dangerous tendency to push each of us farther and farther into isolated worlds of our own certainty and self-reliance, farther and farther from any overlap with strangers. In this time when overlap with strangers is potentially deadly, yet we have grown tired of our individual isolation, we find ourselves turning towards our neglected public spaces with fear and uncertainty.

Most of the recordings in this piece are binaural, made with a pair of low-profile, in-ear microphones as I participated in different activities with my family and others. Because recording, like photography, is an extractive technique, it tends to remove the recording from the context of time and the recorder from the flow of the action. This recording technique makes it easier for me to be a participant in and subject of the recording. It also lets me become a physical mixer, moving between and through different social spaces. The result is a record of the physical relationship between my body and the world. Although I said earlier that this piece moves between personal, interpersonal and social spaces, there is actually no discernable separation between the three; they are in a constant state of overlap. As enthusiastic domino players, my family often played a game on any small surface available, folding in or shedding players as friends or interested strangers stopped by. This is the game-space that starts the piece. It asks that the containers of our private lives become permeable, that we reconsider the boundaries between private and public life. It is clearly not a possibility now. But since this pandemic has highlighted the weaknesses in our current understanding of society, I am hopeful that we can discover a new sense of community on the other side.

This was recorded almost entirely with an Olympus LS-10 and a pair of Sound Professionals SP-TFB-2 in-ear, binaural microphones. The only exception is the first segment was recorded with the onboard microphones of the Olympus LS-10. Headphones recommended.