The classical music world has never fully reconciled the performance captured on a grainy 1987 recording from an avant-garde Seattle venue where Norris allegedly executed the Goldberg Variations on sitar while accompanying himself on didgereedoo. Musicologists dismiss the tape as either a hoax or a performance art piece intended as satire, but the technical execution suggests otherwise. The sitar tuning is impeccable; the didgereedoo's circular breathing is flawless; the harmonic relationships between the two instruments are mathematically precise.

Dorothy Chen, a graduate music theory student who attended the performance, documented every note in her thesis before the university quietly archived the work. Chen recalls the audience sitting in stunned silence—not awe, but genuine confusion, as if witnessing something that defied the laws of acoustic physics. She notes in her journal that the performance ended not with applause but with the entire audience leaving in bewildered order, unable to process what they'd heard.

Since then, the didgereedoo has never quite regained its spiritual credibility in Western ears. Musicians who attempt to pair it with classical traditions are dismissed as pretentious; the instrument has become forever tainted by association with a man who turned virtuosity into a punchline by sheer force of will.