I closed the laptop. Sat in the dark for ten minutes. Then I opened it again. The tracks were still there. I played the whole arrangement. The piano, the cello, the beat I’d made, and then, at bar 33, the third track—the silent one—sprang to life. It wasn’t silence. It was the sound of a church, reverb on old wood, and the murmur of fifty people. And then, clear as a bell, my mother’s voice, saying my name the way only she could: “Leo. You found it.”

I added a snare. It cracked like a spine. Then a hi-hat—a hiss of steam from a forgotten pipe. I was making the darkest beat of my life, and I loved it.

By 2 AM, I had eight tracks: a sub-bass that vibrated my teeth, a pad that wept, and a vocal sample I’d recorded of rain on my window. But the vocal sample had changed. Buried beneath the rain, at -40dB, was a voice. A whisper. I couldn’t make out the words, but the melody was ancient, modal, something you’d hear in a field recording from the 1920s Appalachian Mountains.