As I write this, a large dying cockroach on a damp concrete slab is writhing in what I imagine to be extreme agony. By the time I finish this entry it will most likely be dead and swept away by some automaton barista, but until then I will sit, saturated with the mugginess of a Northern Florida afternoon, listening to the Penguin Café Orchestra of all groups, and debating the ethics of cockroach euthanasia.

I did not live in a time of Simon Jeffes, creator of the Penguin Café Orchestra. I’ve observed just enough pop culture references to “Telephone and Rubber Band” to namedrop if necessary, but I did not live in a time of Simon Jeffes.

This entry is dedicated to the Penguin Café Orchestra song “Cutting Branches for a Temporary Shelter” from the band’s eponymous album. A simple background check exposes the song as one of many interpretations of “Nhemamusasa,” a Zimbabwean track featured as part of the Nonesuch Explorer Series.

Jeffes said of his music and of the Penguin Café Orchestra, “I write for people rather than instruments.” Before delving into “Cutting Branches,” I think it important to highlight other performers with songs similar in spirit but not in scope.

Mileece’s “Fern” is a calculated triumph of channel work. She writes her music through programming languages (e.g. SuperCollider), and manages to express nostalgia by utilizing technology quite a few paces beyond the Penguin Café Orchestra’s ring modulators. Her music is hypnotic, the kind of music to which my kind say, “You have to listen to it in the dark and with headphones on. Definitely with headphones on.” It is a skillful emulation of a specific kind of humanness processed bit by bit, byte by byte.

Scotland’s Frog Pocket also exudes comparable reminiscence in the song “Mountain Village Jupiter Lady.” The difference? While “Mountain Village Jupiter Lady” carries the kind of physically distant isolation linked to Sigur Ros, Mileece’s flavor of computerized emotional detachment is more on par with latter-day Radiohead. Essentially, the two songs are on the same field, but on separate planes.

But there’s a reason this entry is about the Penguin Café Orchestra instead of the other artists. “Cutting Branches for a Temporary Shelter” is not a testament to human nostalgia or isolation, but to living, to breathing, to writhing, to getting back up if one chooses, to staying down if one can‘t, and to dying of one’s own volition if need be. It thus goes a step past making a statement, synthetically created or not, about the human condition. In the end, the Penguin Café Orchestra is more than music for people; “Cutting Branches for a Temporary Shelter” is just as much about birds and nest building, or beavers and dam erection, and the life and death of all crawlers (yes, even cockroaches) as it is about us.

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