A room full of stars

It was a weeknight in Helsinki, cold in the way Finnish spring evenings stubbornly insist on being, and I was filing into a modest cinema.

- Sanjoy Narayan

My phone was off. I had no beverage, notebook or recorder in my hands. At the door, I was handed a padded black eye mask. A young man reminded us, pleasantly but firmly: no talking, no singing, no noise of any kind.

The audience was a study in motley fellowship. The majority were middle-aged to senior people who, like me, had presumably spent decades accumulating opinions about music. A couple arrived in wheelchairs. A man with a white cane was assisted by a volunteer. And then, wonderfully incongruously, a young person dressed in full goth regalia slid into a seat near the front.

When the lights went off moments later, it went completely dark. Even the exit signs, with the faint green glow cinema regulations require, were blocked out by the black of the eye mask. Then the music began.