As the stars draw the light of my eye

The title of this piece was inspired by my recent visit to the La Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona. Upon entering the cathedral, one is met with these flowering spirals that cover the entirety of the ceiling and seem to draw your eyes in; hence the name. And while they are not explicitly stars, that was what they reminded me of. I found it a compelling image: We usually associate stars with expulsion; they radiate and explosively push light out into empty space. Instead, the stars were now depicted as something that attracts. There is a sense that gravity is inverted as one almost falls into the ceiling. Indeed, the cathedral was famously conceived upside down in Gaudi’s models: Both figuratively and literally, the ceiling draws you in. As symbols of pure extent, the stars are small gateways into the cosmos; to the eye they are essentially infinitessimal points on a plane. The sky becomes nothing but abstract geometry and surface that witness how shallow everything is in spite of everything.

This recording is a live performance from RDAMs Pulsar Next Generation 2025.