Of Fire and Fragments
By Chris King
October 27, 2026
The climate calamities in the national news when the Unheard-of Ensemble performed Christopher Stark’s Fire Ecologies on Sunday at the National Building Arts Museum were floods rather than fires. California is finally sliding into the ocean as the mystics, statistics, and Warren Zevon said it would. The museum is located on a flood plain, the American Bottom, in Sauget, Illinois, so barren there are hardly two trees growing close enough to set each other on fire.
Yet the music was performed outside, more or less, in a sprawling museum with more roofs than walls. This museum for buildings is not notable for its own buildings. So, this six-movement meditation on the composer’s native Montana going up in flames was experienced in an elemental environment. Stark’s electronic fires crackled in the open air. The strings, clarinet, and keyboard of the Unheard-of Ensemble breathed as a fire can only dream of breathing.
The National Building Arts Museum performed as a fifth musician (or sixth, if we credit the composer for performing the pre-recorded electronica). Since exhibiting entire buildings is not practicable, this is a museum of fragments. The curatorial strategy is akin to an architect building his own house around himself in fits and starts. Exhibits mix with materials on their way to becoming exhibits or storage. Storage is itself on exhibit. Several open-walled buildings feature crates of building fragments stenciled with the names of their source buildings. The crates are piled too high and too low for a visitor to peek into all of them, and anyway, each crate just has another chunk of another vanished building.
In a museum of ruins, rust rules. We heard Montana burn surrounded by the craters of orange decay, not the gleaming silver of typical museum metals. The creative live music just adored the chaotic sonic environment of open-aired salvaged ruin. There is no denying this was a transcendent experience of cataclysm and the ends of things. We sat in an uninhabitable post-industrial landscape of dead buildings and listened to the music of forests consuming themselves with fire on a mild Sunday in Sauget, Illinois, while California slid, off-stage, into the ocean.
This performance was part of the Coyote Time Convening presented by Counterpublic. See https://counterpublic.org and https://web.nationalbuildingarts.org.
