PITCHBLACKNIGHT — Private Transmission — 2026
For David
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PITCHBLACKNIGHT — Private Transmission — 2026
Dear David,
I don't normally do this. I'm not someone who writes letters to artists — I grew up in Mexico, Missouri, and we didn't have a language for reaching out to the people whose work shaped you. You just let the music live inside you and got on with things.
But I can't do that this time.
My name is Mikel Rosenthal — I go by the alias PBK, short for PitchBlacKnight. I live in Chicago Heights now with my husband Brandon and our black cat Hexadecimal — HEX — a rescue who showed up on our doorstep three Halloweens ago and never left. An odd number that keeps presenting itself in my life. But that's a whole other topic. We're in a mid-century modern house we were incredibly lucky to find. I produce music and animations. I've loved your music for as long as I can remember.
Everything I make — the music, the art, the design, the way I move through life — is first-try improv. I go back and do a live mastering pass, but I never rebuild from scratch. The first take is the truth of the moment. I think you understand that better than almost anyone. In a world drowning in machine-perfect sound, I want the fingerprints to show.
You built Talking Heads at the Rhode Island School of Design — the same place that trained you to think simultaneously as a visual artist and a musician. I didn't know that when I first heard your music. I just knew it felt like it had been made by someone who saw the world differently than anyone else. Turns out it was.
When Brandon and I got married — during COVID, in that mid-century modern house — we had a live performance of "This Must Be the Place" in our living room. Fifteen friends in the house, the rest watching on a broadcast we sent out to everyone we loved. Brandon's best friends sang it together, as a couple, for all of us. Your song was the one we chose for that moment. I don't think that's a coincidence anymore.
Then I walked into 333 N. LaSalle. And I haven't been the same since.
I need to tell you what happened to me in those first three rooms. Not because I think you owe me anything — but because you built something that reached inside a person who had been carrying thirty years of grief and chronic pain, and pulled out something I didn't know was still buried in there.
What you said about the show — "visceral, immediate and profound" — that's not marketing copy. That's exactly what happened to me. My body knew it before my mind did.
I made you something. A remix — not for release, not for anyone else. Just for you. One copy. The one on this page. It's the only way I know how to say what follows in the language I speak best.
I would love nothing more than even a short conversation with you, David. To hear what you think. To tell you directly what those three rooms did to me. And to say thank you in the way it deserves.
MIKEL ROSENTHAL
PITCHBLACKNIGHT — Chicago Heights, IL
FOR DAVID
PITCHBLACKNIGHT — Exclusive Remix, 2026
This is a remix of your song "Theater of the Mind." No disrespect — I was simply too taken by your sound to leave it alone. Everything I make is first-take improv. No rehearsal, no blueprint. Then I remix it. Then I remix the remix. Then I remix that. Each pass is live mastering — one take, one truth. This is somewhere deep in that chain, and it's yours alone. No one else has heard it. No one else will.
The Funeral Parlor
I walked in not knowing what was coming. And the first thing that hit me — before a single word was spoken — was the light. 2400 Kelvin. That warm amber tone that only comes from real candle-range sources. I noticed it immediately because I notice light the way most people notice weather. It changes everything about how you feel in a space.
Then the music came in.
And it was wrong. Beautifully, intentionally wrong. The tones were off. There was this strange harmonic complexity underneath — dissonance that didn't resolve the way you expect it to. I produce music and animations. I spend my life inside sound. I knew immediately that this wasn't an accident.
And something broke open in me.
I was in the front row. And I want to be honest with you, David, because this is the part that matters: I had lost my father. And my best friend — my best friend killed himself. I had been carrying all of that, compressed, for a long time.
When that music hit and she stood up — I began weeping. Not politely. Not the kind of crying you do at movies. The deepest weeping I have ever felt in my entire life. Like something that had been locked in my body for years finally had a door to walk through.
It felt like I was reaching into something dark and pulling out everything I'd been holding — and dropping it right there on the floor of that room.
My friend Ela put her arm around me. Her hand on my back. I was fully in it — not performing, not self-conscious, just completely inside the moment. I had crossed whatever threshold you built that room to create.
Then I noticed the pillar. Off to the left. A completely different light source — somewhere between 7200 and 9000 Kelvin, cold, almost surgical — and the perspective around it was skewed. It felt like the floor was tilting toward it. You were already inside my visual cortex, rearranging furniture.
I was in the room for only minutes. I felt like I had lived a year.
The Dark Dome
The second room was a large dome. Round seats in a circle. Cameras. And the most extraordinary acoustic environment I had ever stood inside — because when you sat in that circle, you could turn your head and hear every single person in the room almost simultaneously.
I became immediately, totally, overwhelmingly exuberant.
I'm a person who has lived with a nervous system on high alert for thirty years. Chronic pain rewires you. Medication quiets you. I had spent years dampening the signal just to function. But in that dome, in that acoustic space — I was alive in a way I hadn't been in a very long time.
He was worried. I know. I was loud. I was moving. When they did the photo countdown I made the most insane contorted face I could — something I used to do as a kid growing up in Mexico, Missouri, to make people laugh. The staff probably thought I was having some kind of episode. I was just finally, fully awake.
The actor asked: "Have you ever seen something that wasn't there?"
I said no. And then I started explaining why I said no. And it turned into something about molecules — about how two human beings in close proximity are literally passing through each other at the atomic level, and what that means for the idea of a "separate" person, and whether seeing something that isn't there is even a meaningful distinction if—
I caught myself. I was talking over the show.
Whatever you built in that room, it opened something in me that I had been chemically suppressing for years. I'm not on those medications anymore. I made that choice. But that dome was one of the moments I understood, in my body, why I was right to.
The Mission Room
The third room looked like a Cold War outpost. Czechoslovakia, 1953. Screens on every wall — four on the sides, two large ones in the center — all running information, images, data. The aesthetic was perfect. I felt like I had stepped into a classified archive.
The host sat me down at the desk in the front. Right at the center. I felt chosen. I felt like I was supposed to be there, like she had seen something in me and was pulling me into the experience intentionally.
I have a thing with numbers. Always have.
Every number. All threes. I thought it was funny. I thought I was participating. I didn't understand that I wasn't supposed to be touching things — or maybe I understood and I just couldn't help it, because this room felt like an invitation and I am not someone who turns down invitations to play.
They asked me gently if I needed to step away. And I did. I stepped away. I didn't get to see the rest of the experience.
And here's what I want you to know: that moment — being asked to leave, the slight embarrassment of it, the coming back down — that was also part of the experience. You made something so immersive, so real, that I forgot I was an audience member. I forgot there was a fourth wall. I just walked right through it.
I'm going back. Multiple times. I want to see what happens after Room 3. I want to bring people and watch their faces. I want to podcast about it, write about it, tell everyone I know.
You have created something that surpasses every expectation I had of you, David — and I already thought you were one of the most interesting minds alive.
One small practical note, offered only because I care about this thing you made: the lockers in the lobby all share the same key. Anyone could walk in off the street and open every bag in there. It's an easy fix, and your vision is too important for bad press over something preventable.
I want to be clear about what I mean when I say it changed my life.
For thirty years I lived with chronic pain. I was on Lyrica, tramadol, trazodone, tizanidine, Adderall, cyclobenzaprine, mood enhancers — medications designed to quiet my nervous system, stop the signals, keep me functional. I was medicated into a kind of silence.
Theater of the Mind didn't cause all of that. But it confirmed it. It was proof — felt in the body, not just understood in the mind — that the nervous system I'd been suppressing for three decades was not broken. It was just waiting for the right room.
You built that room, David.
Thank you.
