This issue’s aural contribution makes sound look like a sphere with one weird edge. Its four short tracks — by New Zealand-based electronic musician Haast – Hāwea — are porous and annular: soft, silent thresholds to things we should hear. Sometimes, as at a bird’s chirped invitation, we can almost cross right into the music’s fold; at others, its slow synthetic arcing feels hermetic, like the harsh and fragile haptics of a blown bubble’s skin.

An accompanying illustration by St. Louis-based artist Lou Vinarcsik registers joyfully the odd realism of these found sounds and fractured field recordings. Beneath the ominous trail of an airplane looking to land (it seems) on a carpellary receptacle, cows graze on the venous pads of a lotus. Of this flower’s many charms, the most magical is its ability to make the photosynthetic process burblingly visible: in the hot sun, water poured onto a pad’s center begins literally to churn and bubble with all the plant’s cosmic vitality. Here, that process is hyperbolized into so many spheres casting their forms across an already oneiric scene — like this, they’re perfect analogues to the many otic orbs that bob through Haast – Hāwea’s soundscape.

—The Editors