What is “improvisation” if not the sacrament of communion with one’s own (and two’s and three’s own) unwritten work? The People’s U.R.G. is teacher and student and blackboard, Christ and disciple and bread, Shakespeare and Stephen and soap, lone key and synthesiser and rehearsal room. And more. Bluetooth speaker L Boom. Turn it all the way up like a column heater in the kind of weather you only get in a city you moved to for reasons that have never made sense but that you’re stuck with so you try to make the best of by meeting up with various companions scattered across its boring infantile flat surface “improvising” with each one of them capturing the always different always the same audio on iphone voice memo.

As (so the myth tells us) nobody has read Ulysses, the people have formed a Ulysses Reading Group, and they’ve read it for you. And as no audiobook can supposedly encapsulate the cerebral titillation of the Joyce reading experience, they have thus translated Ulysses into a non-novel audio temporeality. On and of the ancient breeze blowing from Sandymount Strand, new life has been breathed into a living work. And you can listen to it. More life. A life of shimmering hums and buzzings fuzzing through clicks and pops and drones and tones as they themselves hum through many a zone. This is the pure sound of the tome interrogated as music from an altogether whole nother angle.

It’s on the internet. Uploading and typing and streaming and beaming next to a flickering candleflame at my ten o’clock that’s interacting, somehow, with the sound, to amplify the hypnodelic frequencies. I haven’t even heard this whole album yet even though I partook in making it and I can’t wait to hear what surprises it has in store for me much like a re-read of Ulysses will be sure to delight with (surprises that is) whenever that day comes and I’d give it a couple of years or so before I’d crack it open again but it’ll definitely happen yes I’ll sit in some comfy chair and dust it off and teleport back to Dublin.

As was the fate of the intellectual precursors to the People's Ulysses Reading Group, Ulysses itself in particular, though that is by no means their only ancestor, it is expected that the academic ivory towers will struggle to understand their work for decades and centuries to come. Dissertations will no doubt be written claiming to have penetrated the meaning and intention of such a work, but this is merely an attempt to catch water in a net. All of these scholars will only have listened to perhaps a minuscule three hours of this composition and proclaim themselves to be experts. This work is not for them, it is for you, the people. Like Joyce before them the People's U.R.G. have erected a grand cathedral whose myriad rooms may never be fully explored or comprehended. Comprehension is not the point of their undertaking, however - life is not something understood but experienced, not rationalised but witnessed. This cathedral is for you, and the people will be its caretakers.