The fireflies were most likely to change their own flashing rhythm in response when the LED blinked almost, but not quite, at the same time as the fireflies. The males would speed up their next flash if the LED blinked just before and waited a bit longer for their next flash when the LED blinked right after.
Durst's second book, " The Four Pillars," was made largely during the COVID pandemic. Its ambiguously staged scenes, many involving a New Age self-help group that Durst had been following since the church-basement days, leaned into the strained artificiality of the period. Taking the pictures in "The Children's Melody" felt like "a return to the world," in all its baffling complexity, Durst told me.