Paul Kayhart’s Night was completed at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) in 2013. The broad intent of the work is to evoke a psychological sense of nighttime. With threads running through the piece that are mystifying, forlorn, frightening, or intriguing, the soundscape aims to conjure a sense of interrupted dreams, nightmares, and the rush of thoughts and worries that often accompany a sleepless night.

The making of this piece was influenced by the occurrence of a derecho (a straight-line storm with hurricane force winds and accompanying tornados) that passed through the American South that July and arrived without warning at VCCA during an artists’ gathering in the studio complex on the third night of Kayhart’s stay at the residency. The sounds of intense wind, flying branches, and trees falling were remarkable, and suddenly VCCA was without power. The temperatures were in the high 90s to low 100s, so the lack of fans and air conditioning became burdensome. The outage was widespread, and it was 10 days before power was restored at the location. Kayhart worked on the piece for the remainder of his stay, recording and editing everything on portable equipment. He and his fellow residents scouted the nearby towns during daylight hours in the hopes of finding public buildings that still had power or had power restored so that they could charge their batteries. The power was still out when he departed on the train for home. - Reprinted from http://theradius.us/