there are not just sounds and silences, the sounds are stretched over the silence, just barely there. They do not supersede the silence; they are parallel to it, moving along with it. And at times, impossibly, even the silence itself can be stretched too thin. The piece breaks and you are simply, profoundly in the room or in the environment. The tightrope snaps and you can no longer pretend to float above or beyond the world. There are often moments of great beauty in a So piece, but there are never moments of transcendence.〔Brookshire, Madison. ("Uncommon Knowledge: Mark So’s Text Scores" ), ''The Open Space Magazine'', Fall 2010/Winter 2011.〕

Cage made it his project to reveal that music could be any sounds in any order. This involves an equivalence—one thing is like another—that negates value judgment. So goes further: any sounds in any order, but instead of an equivalence between them, there is a radical disparity. Cage famously made an enemy of harmony, but in a sense, he used silence in all of his pieces after ''4′33″'' as a kind of harmony—the sounds of the environment always “fit” inside a Cage piece. In So, the silences are dissonant. There are layers of silence and they are in contrast if not outright contest.〔Brookshire, Madison. ("Uncommon Knowledge: Mark So’s Text Scores" ), ''The Open Space Magazine'', Fall 2010/Winter 2011.〕

For more than four hours, Bahto used two 35mm slide projectors to cast two series of images—of Los Angeles area doughnut shops and cacti—onto walls, floors, and ceiling, in constantly varying rhythms and configurations, while So played a tape (''Twice Around,'' comprising different field recordings) and performed his notebook, ''A Book of Palms'', at the piano. With four tracks of (apparently unrelated) material being activated in different ways, the evening nonetheless created a compelling whole.〔Kotz, Liz. ("Back to Basics" ), Texte Zur Kunst 86, June 2012 (249-52).〕

Several iterations of spring were cropping up: there was the spring that appeared in the essay, and another that So read out loud on the tape as he uttered the phrase (look at this, it’s Spring." ),〔Myles, Eileen. "The End of New England", ''The Importance of Being Iceland'', Semiotext(e), 2009 (189). ISBN 978-1-58435-066-8〕 and the most tangible one that was taking place in real time, on an early Sunday morning at the end of March. Together, they emphasized that coincidence and heightened attention are dependent upon one another, and that in concert they can take hold of the senses and direct them to their own ends, revealing unexpected beauty, symmetry, and congruencies of form. This is the kind of awareness that arises when art is treated as an active agent of simile, a force intent on bringing disparate things into proximity.〔Krimko, Stuart. ("Several Iterations of Spring" ), ''The Miami Rail'', Summer 2013 (51-2).〕