THE LAST TIME I was home, I visited the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, California. I walked into a dark room and was met with the splendid, immersive experience of nine larger-than-life projection panels, each of a different room in an old house in the New York countryside, and each inhabited by a different musician and instrument duo. This musical installation piece, “The Visitors,”  was made by an Icelandic group of friends who decided to have a week-long house party, which resulted in this hour and a half long, repeating masterpiece. 

THIS PIECE BEHAVES like a beautiful view out a window that I have been reluctant to draw a curtain over. I have visited this song again and again, struck by not only the beauty of the only lyric as it arcs and swells for an hour and a half, but by the relationships between the friends that slowly emerges, and especially by the evocative imagery of the house itself. 

THE HOUSE ITSELF does present itself more like a set piece than a home—it is apparent, somehow, that this group of musicians, accompanied by a crowd of friends on the porch, are not the dwellers, but neither has the house been stripped of what made it a home, like Hanson’s requiem suggests. This house is full of remnants and residue of the lives lived in it, due to all of the weary yellow lamps, the picture frames, the furniture that is in tact—and the musicians intentionally create a slippage between the ghost of this home and their temporary inhabitance of it, including a real-time bath being drawn and taken, as well as a woman who sleeps in bed, naked, throughout the whole song.