this talk presents a strategy for computational wave propagation that consists in decomposing the solution wavefield onto a largely incomplete set of eigenfunctions of the weighted laplacian, with eigenvalues chosen randomly. the recovery method is the ell-1 minimization of compressed sensing. for the mathematician, we establish three possibly new estimates for the wave equation that guarantee accuracy of the numerical method in one spatial dimension. for the engineer, the compressive strategy offers a unique combination of parallelism and memory savings that should be of particular relevance to applications in reflection seismology. joint work with gabriel peyre.