::::::

It didn’t matter anyway, for X had evidently been dropped from the séance, at least audibly. She continued depressing the keys for a short time out of amusement before attending to perplexing asymmetries between space and sound. X discerned how with each time-shift the character of The Brown Study mutated, differentially informed by local conventions, its ever erratic boundaries further deferring any prospect of totalizing comprehension. The operative injunction to deviate could force any notated program to abdicate from causally guaranteeing a specific musical consistency.

This version…she couldn’t think of a more suitable word. It was like navigating a continuous, transtemporal substance on a mixer with infinite channels, switching periods via subtle, ably dissimulated crossfades. Though musical logics didn’t reorganize with the same starkness as affected locational transformations, each “version” valenced things in a particular way. For instance, the occasional chordal change covering a precisely delineated area was routinely being extended far beyond its purview in a more overtly willful manner rather than lagging due to productive incompetence of one kind or another. (To boot, the changes as such arrived unwarranted and in misalignment with the underlying melody, deforming and reforming it—another eldritch design bent on coaxing reorientational effects.)

Moreover, harmonic stopping points now tended to just happen, even without specified changes. And once harmonic motion transiently slowed, jazzy extemporization axiomatically entailed. At least it did here. Quick digressions into unreconstructed lick territory mobilized as soon as a lick-like figure appeared on the near horizon, nervously impelling anticipatory fibrillations. The newly reconstituted—chronoportationally remixed—assembly of musical lineages had led proceedings afield. In effect, the swingier orientation currently being seduced out of the budding egregor that was and is The Brown Study flagrantly underlined the latter’s unswinging use of so-called irrational subdivisions of the beat, however rhythmically alluring in themselves. In this gathering, even straight successions of quarter notes incurred studied divergence, evoking a palpable tension in the more straight-laced readers who had to slacken hopelessly chimerical notions of fidelity to accommodate.