Crushing lines at the supermarket and the shelves are empty. The streets hum with a hunter-gather energy like the days before a hurricane. Except there is no storm, only the prospect of staying indoors.

The stock market crashed again, its worst day since 1987. Sports leagues have canceled their seasons, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art is closed indefinitely. Canada’s prime minister is in self-isolation. News anchors deliver frightening pandemic updates against a swirly purple background with tumbling microbes. This is not helping my feverish state of mind. I carry four gallons of water to an elderly woman’s apartment down the street, just in case. Then I watch footage of monkeys rioting in a park somewhere in Thailand because there are no tourists to feed them.

Abul Mogard – Slate-Coloured Storm

From Circular Forms | Ecstatic Recordings, 2014 | Bandcamp

A beautiful song of suspension. And maybe the story is true, that Mogard is a Serbian metal worker who began building synthesizers during his retirement, hoping to recreate the acoustics of the factory floor. Either way, this is the soundtrack of myth.