waste knot is a piece about leftovers and how to use them, a serenade to the lost or wasted time of this pandemic spell, to moments squandered by tangled spaces and the fickleness of memory. The text that guides the piece, by novelist Alexandra Kleeman, is an artifact of this period: scraps and sketches that will never be published but find a new home in musical abstraction.

 Throughout the approximately 14-minute piece, soprano Nina Guo uses hand-held analog cassette tape recorders to capture musical moments. These collected memories are shared at the end of the piece, distorted, fragmented, and disordered, a reflection on Kleeman’s observation that while “we read from left to right or right to left,” “when we forget it begins evenly: the sense of a memory urgent but blurred, as if playing from another room…”