Minyan of One and Many is a recording project and performance piece investigating the somatic manifestation of grief through sound.
[Photos by Elijah Stone Edwards]
After the death of a close friend, Charlie, a daily meditator, adopted a new mantra for his practice. “Breathing in, I know there is grief inside me,” he repeats silently, lying down, eyes closed. “Breathing out, I am holding it with love.” Long entranced by the sound of human breath, Charlie has set out to record these once daily meditations for 97 consecutive days to honor his friend (who died two months shy of her 97th birthday).
On the first day of the project, Charlie recorded himself with a stereo microphone on his chest, capturing the rhythms of his heartbeat and breath as well as extraneous sounds within the room. While capturing the second day’s meditation, he played a cassette recording of the first day’s session through two active speakers placed behind his head. After each subsequent recording, he rewrites the same cassette to include the latest day’s meditation, rerecording the previous days’ sessions.
On Tuesday, August 11, Charlie invites New Yorkers holding grief, love, and every emotion in between to join him in a recorded community meditation, the 97th and final performance of Minyan, hosted by SHEA Tree Center in Campbell Hall, NY.
The project will later be presented as a seven-day sound installation (also in Campbell Hall), mirroring the week-long Jewish mourning ritual of Shiva. Beginning at 11:59pm on the evening of Wednesday, August 19 and continuing until 11:59pm on Wednesday, August 26, the original cassette featuring all 97 recordings (the first of which will have been rerecorded 96 times) will loop for 168 consecutive hours in a secret forest locale using an auto-reverse cassette deck.
Largely inspired by the teachings of Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, Minyan challenges our collective perception of birth and death through both the technical processes of tape degradation and sonic facsimile as well as emotional connections that transcend the physical realm.
