Self-Portrait as a Meditation on Something Else

Written in 2024 for fixed media 60 minutes

"As a fifth-generation Nebraskan, growing up on the native lands of the Chatiks si chatiks people (Pawnee), this project is a part of my process of learning, listening, and developing a relationship with the land and its stewards in my home state: a beautiful place with a rich history that is as much a part of me and my family as it is part of the settler-colonial project of displacement and genocide"
• Kory Reeder, March 2025, revised August 2025.

Self-portrait as a meditation on something else is the third entry in my ongoing series of hour-long fixed-media soundscape compositions built from deeply personal relationships with place. This iteration turns inward to my home in Buffalo County, Nebraska. 

My roots go very deep in my home, and the story of my family follows the history of the Great Plains. My family arrived in Nebraska in the 1860s in Wood River, Nebraska (30 miles from where I was born); while not homesteaders themselves, census documents and Reeder Family lore tells a story of German immigrants in the 1860s, meeting a branch of my family that traces its roots to the Pennsylvania Commonwealth census of 1765. Since their arrival, my family experienced the highs and lows of working-class, rural life, from settling and working as farm laborers, struggling through the dust bowl, apocryphal prison stints during the depression, building bombs during WWII, working as appliance repairmen, grocery store clerks, and nursing home custodians, all to establish a life that is rooted in earth.

In many ways this piece is an ethereal address, a meditation on belonging and an elegy to the process of growing up, family, leaving home and the loss of naïveté that comes from age: my Self, shaped through an imperfect recall of family, history, and geography.
I made recordings around Shelton and Kearney Nebraska, including recordings from the rural cemetery where several generations of my family are buried; the now-abandoned storefront of my grandfather’s old appliance store; my childhood home; outside venues I frequented as part of the Nebraska DIY scene; schools I attended; places resonant with my own Deep Map of Buffalo County.

Embed in this, buried in the mix are recordings of my acoustic compositions, sine waves, pink noise, etc., blending the concrete field recordings of my lived experience with the abstract “memories” of my creative life, juxtaposed to collapse timelines through sound, to summon domestic detail and ancestral echo in the same breath. As with earlier works (Meditation on Someone Else, Meditation on Somewhere Else) this composition invites listeners to inhabit the tenuous space between place and memory, between the concrete and the abstract, and to listen for the thread that holds past and present together.
By shifting the lens back to home, Self-portrait as a meditation on something else becomes both an archive of belonging and a sonic exploration of what remains when memory fractures and the process of learning and listening reforms previously held truths in unexpected ways.