A brief reflection on Bon Iver’s visit to CERN.
One of the more adorable and innocent things on Wisconsin Twitter this week occurred when Justin Vernon and several of his Bon Iver bandmates, in the midst of a European tour, took a field trip to the Swiss-French border and checked out the Large Hadron Collider. Vernon urged his @blobtower followers to “Look it up!” and posted a few photos that show various components of the behemoth particle accelerator, including an “antimatter factory” and what he described as “1/2 of the cpus the internet was invented on!”
Went to the Hadron Collidor today … most unique and special place on earth. So thankful to see this place in person. Thank you to Cern. There are people doing incredible things in this world!! Best field trip of our lives!!! Look it up! pic.twitter.com/Qsh5xhpK7z
— blobtower (@blobtower) July 8, 2019
One panorama photo Vernon posted shows Madison-based guitarist/synthesist Andrew Fitzpatrick staring into some of LHC’s dense inner workings. All that inscrutable gadgetry held together with multi-colored cables can’t help but remind me of Fitzpatrick manipulating his modular synth rig during his performances in his excellent solo project, Noxroy. I asked Fitzpatrick, via Twitter, whether he could incorporate some of this stuff into his rig and he wrote back, “Verrrry incompatible with my current setup.” Well, if anyone can get sound of that thing, he can. Surely someone in Geneva can work out how to fix up a MIDI port and some audio outs? If Fitzpatrick can figure out his way around an OP-1, surely he can be trusted not to create a black hole. Let the man play!
