our thousand years ago, three kinds of sound – drums, bass and prophetic echo guitar – appeared in a pool of subcutaneous mud. They grew, and were absorbed, digested and expelled by countless amoebas. Despite the chemical reactions that occurred, the sounds persisted. They were simply vibrations in the internal organs of tiny living creatures.

Hundreds of years later, the imperceptible settling of the rocks and dirt above the pool of mud finally resulted in a cataclysmic event – the roof fell in. The tiny lifeforms suffused with sound were extinguished. However, the sound persisted in the bodies of the crushed amoebas: and the collapse of rocks and dirt let a little sunlight in.

Due to the organic material in the pool, the murky water, and the persistent sunlight, a crust of algae flourished in the places where the sunlight hit. The area above ground was discovered by the algae to be a forest. From the seasonal changes, a variety of spores and seeds fell into the algae, and one species took root: a mushroom.

This mushroom was purple on the stalk, with a brown cap. It sat there, immobile, among the algae. The sound of the bass and guitar and drums were in the mushroom, and in its poison. The mushroom meditated there in the sunlight and in the snow, never noticing the time that passed – it listened to the clear sounds in itself, and it understood them. The mushroom knew that the sounds had reflected off of countless moons, clouds, and mysterious birds. The mushroom sat there in silence, listening to the sounds within.

A starving wild boar wandered by on a Tuesday afternoon in September, and, mostly out of curiosity, sniffed the mushroom, and then ate the cap. The boar’s brain broke. It began to wander aimlessly, as the lights in the forest grew brighter and brighter. The boar could hear the sounds too, the rattling drums, the subtle bass, and the spiraling, convex echo guitar. They rumbled inside the boar’s broken brain, scattering and reassembling.

The boar experienced three decades of pain and ecstasy in forty minutes.

Eventually, the poison of the mushroom got into the boar’s heart. It lay down by a stream that ran through the forest, and it died in convulsions. The boar’s blood and bile seeped into the stream, contaminating it, and a few atoms of the swelling, prophetic guitar were carried away. Two months later, the last traces of guitar echoes reached the sea, and joined the eternal cycle of rain and waves.

Those atoms of flanged, convex guitar cycled through the centuries and the oceans until they reached the Eastern Sea. This year, in March, an inspired Kawabata Makoto ran out into a rainstorm with a blank CD, and let the drops fall onto the disc. That disc was released this year by Strange Attractors Audio House, and the name of the album is Gekkyukekkaichi.