It’s a Monday evening at the end of May, and three-dozen musicians are warming up for the second, and likely last, public performance of the Human Sensory Society Community Orchestra.
They’re at a Garfield neighborhood church in Phoenix, and they’ve gathered to play a single note for 45 minutes. The musicians range in age from 6 to over 50. Each is sitting in a large circle around the perimeter of the room, grouped by type of instrument, and each has been given a manilla envelope with two timestamped cards sticking out of it. A drummer, bass player and guitar player are in the center of the room, along with an audio engineer.
Guitar player Caleb Dailey, one of the musicians responsible for making this all happen, welcomes the crowd and gives a little instruction to the band, counts down for them to set stopwatches on their phones, and then the performance begins.
At first, the music sounds like what you’d expect it to sound like if a lot of people all played E at the same time. But when Micah Dailey starts drumming, the energy shifts.
Micah and Caleb Dailey are brothers and co-founders of the independent label Moone Records. They’re conducting the orchestra as they play. The Daileys say the idea for the Human Sensory Society Community Orchestra first formed at small house shows they hosted starting in 2022.
“We would have like artists performing and we would ask all the artists usually to kind of like create an experience around this show, like, don’t just do what you normally do,” said Micah Dailey.
“People that are there to just be a part of what’s happening. There’s kind of this like symbiotic relationship between the people that are coming to watch and the people that are creating stuff,” said Caleb Dailey.
Through years of small experimental house shows, the Dailey brothers compiled a list of musicians who would be interested in doing something a little out of the box. Something like playing the same note for 45 minutes.
It’s hard to characterize this style of music, but the closest is drone music. The genre is notable for a minimalist, repetitive, almost hypnotic sound, often featuring long notes with little variation. One of the best known examples of drone music is "Tomorrow Never Knows" by the Beatles.
The Human Sensory Society Community Orchestra’s first public performance was supposed to be a one-off. Sixteen musicians played E for 25 minutes.
“And it was just — it was, it’s just simply moving. It was quite a special experience,” said Micah Dailey.
Micah and Caleb decided they would do it again so they could record the performance. This time, twice as many people have shown up to play.
Josh Casselman, 51, is playing harmonica.
“Having this number of people come together to do something so simple, it’s like, obviously it’s about more than music and what it sounds like, it’s about the people, and it was a really, really beautiful experience,” he said.
Gage Diehl-Gonzalez, a 21-year-old playing upright bass, said, “It was what I imagine playing with toys is like for a five year old.”
Thirty-three-year-old Janie Dailey — Micah’s wife — is playing melodica and Peruvian shakers.
“What I take away from this experience is that you can kind of lay down your ego, lay down, like, any imposter syndrome and just kind of be curious and childlike again with music,” she said.
Audience members — and there are about as many in the audience as there are in the orchestra this evening — are invited to walk amongst the musicians during the performance to experience how different areas of the room sound.
The smartphone stopwatches serve two purposes. One, to make sure everyone stops playing at the same time. And two, so the musicians know when to open the timestamped cards given to them before the performance. Each musician has two cards, and each card has a prompt. The prompts say things like, “try to play with your hand in your pocket for five minutes,” or “make your sound feel like this: La, La, BOOM,” or “feel nervous about being recorded.”
The prompts are meant to reset the musicians’ intentions as they play.
Caleb Dailey said, “Maybe you’re still playing the same, but inside of you feels different.”
It’s unlikely Moone Records will host another official Human Sensory Society Community Orchestra performance.
“It’s hard for us to even think about doing another one because we don’t- like, this is such a special, almost like sacred experience for us that we, we wouldn’t want it to come off as like a novelty thing because it’s not that at all,” said Caleb Dailey.
As the smartphone stopwatches tick closer to the 45 minute mark, the music starts to sound more urgent.
And then, the orchestra stops.
The Dailey brothers plan to release a vinyl pressing of the Human Sensory Society Community Orchestra’s performance.
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