After a year away, I returned to my homeland, Italy, in the summer of 2022 - which has been known to be particularly hot. During my month-long stay, as part of the Twisted Spruce Composition Symposium and Competition I was attending, I was supposed to compose a new piece for solo guitar, but I couldn’t concentrate: the scorching heat, no air conditioning, a fan that broke after a day... it was truly insufferable - all I could think about was the drought, the policies to curb water wastage and the 15-day forecast always well above 40°C. I imagined an arid, deserted, dull world where what I regarded as am unfortunate ‘summer interlude’ was an everyday thing, a world where the night brought but a faint refuge from the sultriness - distant songs echoed in my mind, not of sadness but perhaps a little melancholy, chants from a barren land.