Side Two Never Ends

More about Side Two Never Ends

A Planetary Improvisation

No one remembers when the music began.

Early survey logs describe the phenomenon cautiously—persistent atmospheric
harmonics, standing resonances of unknown origin—the sort of language used when
instruments detect something the mind has not yet agreed to hear. Later expeditions
stopped pretending it was incidental. The sound was not emitted by the world. It was
the world, expressing itself under tension.

The spire was the clue. Not a tower in the architectural sense, but a standing
waveform given form: a planetary-scale instrument grown rather than built, its curves
tuned by erosion, pressure, and time. Wind through its hollows. Thermal currents
along its skin. Tectonic stress resolving into tone. Each force added a layer. None of
them ended.

Visitors initially searched for the source, then for the control. There was neither. The
music did not repeat, yet it was never new. Themes emerged, wandered, returned
altered. Harmonics drifted across the plains, folded into the canyons, and
reappeared days later with unfamiliar coloration. Some said it resembled the deep
cuts of forgotten eras—too long for radio, too patient for audiences trained to expect
resolution. Others said it resembled nothing at all, which was closer to the truth.

The indigenous life—those luminous, watching forms along the cliffs—showed no
sign of reverence. No ceremony. No pause. They moved and lived within the sound
the way fish move within currents: shaped by it, indifferent to it, utterly at home. That,
more than the scale or the color or the impossible geometry, unsettled the first
human listeners.

There is no first track here. No overture. Arrival is always mid-phrase.

Most offworlders report the same delayed realization: hours after departure,
sometimes days, they notice the absence. A silence that feels incomplete, as though
something essential failed to follow them back. A few return. Fewer leave again.

The spire continues. The skies continue. The harmonics adjust minutely to seasons
no one has named yet. Nothing concludes. Nothing resolves.

This was never a performance.

This was never meant to end.

—Field Notes, Cultural Acoustics Division