* Making field-recording in the underground parking garage of Memphis International Airport was a somewhat conspicuous activity. In addition to numerous cars swinging back and forth like hungry sharks hunting for a spot to park and flocking crowd passing through with “huh?” expression on their faces, I felt emotionally naked as my mind was oddly colonized by acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton’s remark that “silence is not the absence of something, but the presence of everything.” I stood still like an armless medieval sculpture and pointed my field-recording device upward to capture this alien sonic discovery. The mammoth mechanic device for air circulation, nicknamed the Cave of Robot Bats, unceasingly produced boisterous and piercing sound, while I continued my anomalous meditation on the subject of the essence of silence.

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