You slide the first record from its sleeve. It is heavier than it looks, vinyl warm from some other hand's fingers. The label is simple: a spiral of coordinates and the word VERIFIED in capital type, the V slightly askew as if someone had applied the stamp in a hurry. When the needle drops it opens like a door cracking, a low-frequency thrum that you feel in your teeth and in the bones behind your eyes. There is no melody at first—just texture, as if someone had stretched the air taut and then skidded a thumb across it. Then voices, or fragments of voices, come through: an old radio broadcast, a field recording, a child laughing far away—threaded, spliced, saturated with a gentle, deliberate decay.