The living room became the rehearsal room and the broadcast studio. Kevin could live with his drum set for the first time. People came to the house to play; we tested, wore masks and sent the music out through the internet.

I told Martin Longley, “music tastes better when u cook next to the piano.” There was a daily relationship with the instruments, with people visiting, and with the work of keeping music going when the audience could not be there.

In the fall of 2021, I worked with a high-school art class in Moers. Their own lives and the town became the material. I offered a framework for making the work; their pieces went in and around a four-meter geodesic dome built from wooden dowel rods.

The individual artworks became part of a shared structure. One student added color, light and reflective panels, then told me, “you have given me the confidence that I am too, an artist.” I want to keep building domes as places where students can make work and recognize themselves as artists.

January: getting to Moers. These arrival-video stills begin a year that accumulated in photographs, rehearsals, recordings, shared meals and broadcasts. Eddie Bolger’s film below follows the other end of it.

Eddie Bolger stayed with the unfinished business of leaving: Kevin and me, the end of the residency, and an attempt to play one more public concert. Last Days in Moers is his nineteen-minute documentary, released in 2022.

Martin Longley asked us about the first months in the house, playing without a roomful of listeners, and how two people who had already spent years in Talibam! could keep surprising each other. The conversation was published while the year was still happening.