Part coping mechanism, part magical act, Hydra Medusa was composed while Brandon Shimoda was working five jobs and raising a child--during bus commutes, before bed, at sunrise. Encountering the ghosts of Japanese American ancestors, friends, children and bodies of water, it asks: what is the desert but a site where people have died, are dying; are buried, unburied, memorialized, erased. Where they are trying, against and within the energy of it all, to contend with our inherited present--and to live.