Four O'Clock

Four drums. Four different clocks. One shared beginning.

Four O'Clock opens with a single pulse — steady, four-square, unremarkable. Then three more voices arrive, each keeping its own time: a five-beat drag, a seven-eighths flutter, a three-beat sway. None of them agree. None of them are wrong.

For nearly six minutes they drift — not randomly, but exactly, each voice locked to its own internal law, slowly falling out of step with the others simply because their bars are different lengths. This isn't performed chaos. It's math made audible: four independent cycles, sharing a single origin, guaranteed by arithmetic alone to eventually return to it.

At 5:50, they do. Every voice lands on beat one at the same instant — not a composed climax, but an inevitability that was true from the first note. Then it dissolves.

Part of the ongoing One Track a Day series — Day 8.