I was at work, going through my email and trying to plan my day. About ten feet away, Erma was chatting on her headset to folks on a Skype meeting. Erma was getting somewhat agitated about something and getting louder and more shrill.

I found this to be pretty distracting, so I put on my headset and looked for some ambient music to drown out Erma’s complaining.

I figured that Philip Glass would do the trick and selected his Knee Play 1 from his Einstein on the Beach. I clicked Play and got back to work…

…or at least I tried to go back to work. Knee Play 1 completely melted my brain. As I described in Einstein on the Beach , the piece starts with a male choir chanting numbers:

1 2 3 4,
1 2 3 4,
1 2 3 4,
1 2 3 4 5 6
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

I found it difficult to work the email client that I was looking at. I found myself counting along and this seemed to push the bits of my brain in charge of pointing and clicking and reading out through my ears onto the floor.

Knee Play 1 then added a woman’s voice reading nonsense phrases in the left speaker. I mean, the phrases like “wind for the sailboat” and “these are the days” sorta made sense but they were jammed together randomly. As I tried to make sense of that, the same voice reading the same nonsense started in the right speaker but it was offset by a few seconds. It felt like the auditory version of crossing your eyes.

I pushed the Stop button. I thought “What the hockey sticks just happened?” Everything looked familiar again and I could hear Erma getting herself into a tizzy.

Did I just imagine that I’d lost my mind? I pushed Play again. Nope. I’d lost my mind all right. I pushed stop again…

…and looked for something a bit more “ambient”.