When taking on my latest for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, I immediately had a problem: how the hell do I get there?
The story is about a new sound art installation in the Outback of Australia called the Cobar Sound Chapel, a collaboration between composer Georges Lentz and Australian Pritzker Prize-winning architect Glenn Murcutt. In a remote old mining town called Cobar, 400 miles northwest of Sydney, Murcutt restored an abandoned water tank to house Lentz’s “String Quartet(s),” a 24-hour, classical-meets-electronica composition inspired by the Outback sky. The artists’ hope is that the piece will prompt visitors to meditate on our place in the universe. It’s a mesmerizing project, but of course, no one is visiting the hermit nation of Australia any time soon. Sorry, Djokovic.
Alas, in the age of pandemic, some journalism has its restrictions, and remote-reporting is common now. All the same, I still felt like I had to do something creative to overcome the distance. Given the time I’ve spent out there, this didn’t feel like a stretch. I’ve never been to Cobar, but I spent two weeks traveling around nearby bush towns (Walgett, Lightning Ridge, Come by Chance) while reporting a Time cover story on the drought, and later visited Broken Hill, another mining town even deeper in red-dirt hinterland (for Mad Max fans, Fury Road was filmed in nearby Silverton). It’s powerful country out there. You feel naked and alive and completely vulnerable, and I love that landscape deeply. As Murcutt put it, “It gets in your blood, and when you leave, it’s like a drug. You want to get back to it as quickly as possible.”
I did everything I could to teleport myself there. Lentz gave me a virtual tour over FaceTime. Murcutt sent me dozens of photos and videos. The project’s documentarian, Catherine Hunter, shared a trailer of her upcoming work. I spent hours on the phone with seven people familiar with the piece and/or music, who described every minute detail for me, from the way instruments were held in rehearsals to the type of gravel on the site (chosen to ward off brown snakes). Everyone spoke about the chapel with such profundity—long pauses, searching answers—as if it really did carry some sort of spiritual power.
Yet that still didn’t feel like enough. I became obsessed. I wanted to feel what they felt. Lentz’s original idea was to build a place where his music could live alongside its muse: the sky. So I decided I would try to replicate that experience of stargazing in the chapel as closely as possible. The first idea that came to mind: finding a water tank. They’re all over rooftops around New York. I totally considered trying to reach one until I realized that would probably involve drowning. Also light pollution is terrible in the city. I quickly scraped the tank idea, checked the lunar calendar, and waited for the new moon to try the clear skies at home in Connecticut.
On the Monday after Thanksgiving around 9pm, I ventured to the highest hilltop I could find with my Mom’s noise-canceling headphones, and laid down on the grass. It was freezing. I affixed the headphones, and I clicked play on a 12-minute sample of Lentz’s night music. I listened three times. As I stared into the black sky—fantastically clear save for the glimmer of the Long Island sound on the low horizon—the wave-y sound of an empty basement drifted into my ears. It was very isolating, as if I was floating in some gravity-free space. But in that hollowness, a procession of shiny plucks trickled in, filling the void with an endless shimmer, just like the night sky. It was alien but ethereal, eerie but magnificent. The sky felt massive, and I felt small. I felt extremely lonely, but I was with the stars, so it was okay.
Of course, to hear the music inside the chapel, awash in its sonic vibrations, would be an experience of an entirely different magnitude (I'm told the feel of the sound reverberating inside the chamber is bone-shaking). But the music opened a floodgate of memories, transporting me back to the truest sky I've ever known. I cried a little. It felt cleansing, just to spend some time looking up, and how wonderful it is to just be. So, maybe physically I couldn’t get there. But emotionally, it’s like I never left.
