In 2013, Chicago cassette label, composer/performer collective and theatrical-event producer Parlour Tapes+ released their second album, *AND. Each track on was is a collaboration between an artist who lived in Chicago and one who lives elsewhere. The first track, It’s hard even to say it., is the work of me and Boston-based composer Jenny Olivia Johnson.

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Jenny and I have spent a lot of time talking about the unreliability of memory. For this piece, we each spent weeks repeatedly recording ourself describing a memory that was particularly uncertain and disorienting, and then sent each other the results to be chopped up and reassembled. For the most part, the gritty, lo-fi first half of the piece is mine and the lush, expansive second half is hers, although there are certain sounds that show up in both parts.

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Since part of the Parlour Tapes+ ethos involves resurrecting the cassette format, I created a lot of the distortion in my half by recording sounds from my computer onto old cassettes that I’d been holding onto since the mid-90s, using a boombox that I’d owned for just as long, and then transferring them back onto my computer.