Writes Merrell, "Earth: Summer, 2011 is a new work commissioned by the NOW! Concerts series for software instruments, field recordings, shortwave radio, and processing. Inspired by the idea of reconstructing the present in the future, it is a kind of musical archaeology, describing what it felt like to be alive during Summer of 2011 on this planet, but from the perspective of the future. A series of vignettes, it is a nostalgic look at something very recent, as if it had been put back together many years hence, with the inevitable errors of anachronism, and hypotheses filling in missing information. Stylistically, the piece is an amalgam of many recent and contemporary electronic music styles, including Jamaican dub, downtempo, ambient, drone, glitch, and microsound. This work is a paean to our world, now, and a celebration of being in it."