Adam Chaki

Being a musician means learning to hear. A musician from a northern country can tell you how cold it is in winter by standing near a window and listening to the outside. We learn instinctively to recognize the near total silence of a fresh snowfall or the shattering glass and creaking bough sound of an ice storm. The worst is probably the styrofoam crunch and squeak of -40˚C when you kick a snowbank and hear each of a trillion microscopic shards fall to the ground.
When a January wind wails you shudder even if you’re inside and warm and you worry about the trees even though they’re alright.
Music in winter doesn’t waft out of open windows as it might in Havana or Kinshasa, at best your neighbours will throw a party and you’ll get the bassline through the ceiling.
Usually you have to earn music, bundle up, dodge black ice or walk through slush puddles (which, incidentally, sounds like your grand-dad slurping soup).
You may end up drunk after last call, without cab fare and having missed the last Metro. You walk home, the three inches between your lips and eyebrows – the only exposed part of your body – are getting spanked by the chill. You feel forsaken, condemned to orbit beyond even Pluto where the sun may as well be a hologram – even when you see it, it is still cold.

Being a musician means learning to hear. A musician from a northern country can tell you how cold it is in winter by standing near a window and listening to the outside. We learn instinctively to recognize the near total silence of a fresh snowfall or the shattering glass and creaking bough sound of an ice storm. The worst is probably the styrofoam crunch and squeak of -40˚C when you kick a snowbank and hear each of a trillion microscopic shards fall to the ground.
When a January wind wails you shudder even if you’re inside and warm and you worry about the trees even though they’re alright.
Music in winter doesn’t waft out of open windows as it might in Havana or Kinshasa, at best your neighbours will throw a party and you’ll get the bassline through the ceiling.
Usually you have to earn music, bundle up, dodge black ice or walk through slush puddles (which, incidentally, sounds like your grand-dad slurping soup).
You may end up drunk after last call, without cab fare and having missed the last Metro. You walk home, the three inches between your lips and eyebrows – the only exposed part of your body – are getting spanked by the chill. You feel forsaken, condemned to orbit beyond even Pluto where the sun may as well be a hologram – even when you see it, it is still cold.