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We send an audio impulse into a silent room to learn about the space; the sound itself is innocuous, but the returning echoes are saturated with information about the environment—its size, materials, resonances all embedded in subtle transformations of the sound. This has been my experience with anxiety, too: an innocuous thought returns distorted by obsessions, fears, and delusions that can teach us much about our mindset.
Impulse is a cognitive impulse response of sorts, casting a musical idea into silence to see what returns. The result is an obsessive episode in three continuous sections, with subtle distortions of reality gradually assuming the foreground and eventually supplanting reality entirely. Beautiful images and moments of clarity arise as well, but ultimately those thoughts most unsettling and invasive consume our full attention—a suspension of reality that only deepens with resistance.
-Brandon J. Rolle