Behold: the Birotron.

It was an amazing sight. Dave Biro, upon hearing that he’d get to meet Rick after the concert, had run up ten flights of stairs in the parking garage to his car, and dragged down a pile of automotive 8-track players rigged to the middle three octaves of an old piano. Biro had even recorded his own tapes by cracking open a bunch of 8-track cassettes and relooping them with his own samples. Why 8-tracks? Well, 8-track cartridges never needed rewinding. You could set them on an endless loop for notes with infinite sustain. Biro had painstakingly cross-faded and spliced, doubled it up in stereo and patiently sorted technical bugbears like phase cancellation, and then—all this in his father’s garage—he had something the world had never heard before.

An endless cello note.

KHAELA MARICICH: As we recorded [the song], and as I wrote it, I felt really sad, and at the end of the day when Jona was playing the beats he’d made and I was singing the thing, I was like, “It’s sad, isn’t it, Jona? Listen, listen how sad.” It felt like it’d gotten it into my hand, though. It was better to have the sad in my hand than running and not being able to catch it.

MIRANDA JULY: Yeah, I know. That’s often the place that I’m making things from, like, I can’t stand to feel this way. At least if I can have it in my hands, it’s like being sad, but with money.

KHAELA MARICICH: Or the sad is money.

THE BELIEVER: Can you explain your process? Is there a chord progression first, or a phrase, or… ?

BETH ORTON: It works any which way, but the way it seems to work for me more and more is that I get a feeling, on a guitar, and I sort of mess around until something resonates with me, and then I just find that what happens is that a melody comes, and with that, words. But they’re nonsense, they’re gobbledygook, and I’ve sort of ignored them for years. I went through a time when I ignored my gobbledygook. But when you go back and hear it, it makes the most beautiful sense. It’s like the unconscious mind speaking, and it’s coming up with stuff that I would never come up with in my conscious mind. So now I listen really carefully to that, to what I’ve said and I write it down as I hear it. It’s like blowing smoke rings to myself or something, like Morse code to my heart.

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