by Tim Maughan
“Nah. Well, sort of. Half the memory is fried, I think. And I ran out of discs, so I can’t save shit anyway.”
“Bring it down mine next week. I might have memory sticks that might fit it. Might.” He pauses, investigating a pair of glasses in his hands, turning and moving them about in 3D space as if accessing the integrity of their physical structure. For a second Ty thinks he’s going to sniff, maybe taste them. Instead he just drops them back into the box, continues to rummage. “And anyway, you shouldn’t worry about discs. That’s healthy.”
“What you sayin’?”
“Make your tunes, record ’em, wipe over the discs, reuse ’em. Wipe the samples. Makes you have to find new sounds for each new tune, means you can’t go back after it’s been put down on tape and constantly re-edit everything. Keeps everything fresh.”
Tyrone thinks about this, thinks about the half-broken Akai sampler back in his bedroom. Thinks about the days he spent combing through his vinyl collection, searching for sounds he could take and use, building a library that spans the dozen or so ancient 3.5-inch floppies he spent years tracking down. He thinks about the hours he spends trawling through that library when working on something, trying to find that elusive sound that would make the tune complete, and how often he’d fail. Thinks about how he’d do whatever he could to try to warp and meld those samples into something else; running them through his small collection of effects pedals, recording and rerecording them onto ancient cassettes to make them compressed and distorted, transmitting them over the station’s FM transmitter and resampling them off his auntie’s tiny radio to wrap them in distant hiss and static. And he thinks about his attempts to make his own sounds: drumming on kitchen pots and pans, jacking an old busted set of headphones into the 950’s mic input and dangling them out his bedroom window to catch the staccato rain patterns, the filter sweeps of tenth-story breezes, the shouts and cries of people down in the streets.
Maybe College has a point.
Mike certainly thinks he’s got one. “See? That was the problem. That’s what I’m always sayin’. There was no limits before, right?”
Tyrone looks at him, unsure. “Right …?”
“See … look. Before the crash, right? Nobody was using hardware setups anymore. Everyone was on software. You could get it just by fucking blinking, right? You could get any software you wanted, that’d do anything you wanted. That’d give you any sound you could think of, pretty much. Unlimited possibilities. That was what was wrong, right?”
“It was?”
“Yeah. It was. It fucking was. Think about it. People could do what they liked, anything. It’s why the music became so self-indulgent, so undisciplined, and then so weirdly formulaic. Good art is produced under strict limits. Forces you to work with what you’ve got, to focus, right? There was no focus at the end. No control or vision. Just lots of people fucking about but ultimately following each other’s leads because they were drowning in choices. Unlimited possibilities.”
Tyrone thinks about this now. Sees Mike’s point, but ain’t too sure. Mike annoys him when he talks like this, because Tyrone knows all about limits. He’s sick and tired of limits. “I dunno,” he says. “I’d like just one or two possibilities, you get me?”
College smiles at him, more polite aging sympathy from the first generation that knows they had it better, and can’t muster the gall to deny it. “Don’t worry, Ty, it’ll come together. Just keep at it.”
“Yeah.” Tyrone shrugs. “I guess.”
* * *
Beside him, holding one shell from a pair of discarded headphones to his lips as a makeshift mic, Bags lists off the crews. All the codes, whether friends, rivals, or enemies, must get a mention. They all come together here, no conflict, all locked to the same frequencies, Tyrone and Bags’s transmissions see no borders, no turf disputes. From the battlegrounds of Upper Easton and the hippie slums of St. Werburgh’s, right down to the Land Army camps in Brislington and across to the fortified palaces of Clifton, everyone who cared was locked in. Bags reels off their names, each gang and sound system, like systematic syncopated poetry, each line punctuated with a hold tight, a keep it locked, a shout-out. And then he moves on to the more important callouts, the requests, the birthdays, messages of love, the reminiscences for fallen friends and family, the helpless pleas for the eternally missing to come home. The messages that people have dropped off personally, that they’ve deemed important enough to trek not only to Barton from whichever end of the city, but then to climb up the tower to post directly through their door. When they first started the station nobody came, but then, as they gave shout-outs and people realized they were serious about reading them, it started to grow. Now there are almost too many to fit into the show every night, almost so many notes that he can’t open the door when he gets home. It fills him with some pride, like he’s doing something for the city that few can, but it also fills him with sadness. There’s too much melancholy on those scribbled notes, too much desperation, too much need to be seen, to be recognized, to be heard and a part of something. Too much that now Tyrone can’t look at them anymore, leaves them all to Bags to sort through, and even when he’s reading them out he tries not to listen, focuses on his mixing.
He allows his finger to brush against the vinyl, that gentle balance between being able to feel the record spin and affecting it just enough to slow it, to nudge renegade snares back into alignment. Press too hard and it slows too much, everything stumbles, the pitch bending too much, bass and strings detuning. Too light and those snares will get away from you again, and before you know it the kicks start to sound like a pair of trainers in a spin dryer.
Tyrone cuts the bass on the left channel, lets both tracks roll out together for four bars on just their mids and highs, snares in unison, filtered percussion spiraling with anticipation, before bringing back the bass on the new track, a low, slow four-note rumble that shakes the shelves and makes the windowpanes sing. Modulated distortion. Takes the bass out again, just for one bar this time, and brings it back in as he drops the first track out of the mix completely.
It’s that time of night when it’s all about jungle, from now until the end of the show—it’s all about that Bristol sound, staccato vocal chop-ups, reggae pulses, ancient drums dug up from the depths of lost musical history made to sound like the future they’d already lost. A collage of past sounds, most from before he was even born, that together become atemporal, timeless.
He remembers the first times he heard that sound as a small child, before the crash, reverberating out of passing cars like a secret black technology, or cranked from his mum’s cheap hi-fi speakers as she and her friends laughed and drank and smoked in their best dresses before heading out to the club. She’d kiss him and tell him to take care, and then they’d all be out the front door of her flat, still laughing and screeching, and he’d go back into the lounge and turn the hi-fi back on and the beats would be back, rolling and crashing, and he’d push the volume until the neighbors knocked on the walls and ceiling. Nobody knocked now.
Then after the crash, after she’d gone, that sound again. Playing from street sound systems, filling deserted shopping centers and office blocks with partygoers, soundtracking food riots and street battles. It was then he started to really pay attention, to pick out tones and sounds, to understand form and structure. Dark afro futures were made real, musical stories with life breathed into them. Before the crash it had seemed impossible to separate Bristol from drum and bass; afterward the connection was pure logic. A soundtrack for celebrating the urban decay of the twenty-first century, for dancing in the new ruins of industrial civilization, translated now as a soundtrack for everyday life.
It was also the default option now, in many ways, Tyrone understood. He never denied the reality of that, never tried to kid himself. In many ways this was the last music on record, the last throw of urban energy and expression before the shift came. He had everything and anything he could find in his collection of CDs
and vinyl records, from New Orleans jazz and New York hip-hop through to Detroit techno and Chicago house, city names he knew only from atlases and record labels. But the jungle, the grime, the dubstep—that was the last new music that his city made that was committed to wax and plastic, Bristol’s final urban hymns given a physical form before the great shift to digital, and hence the last new music to survive the crash, to be unscathed in the great erasing. They might be relics, these scratched and battered discs, but like the crumbling towers and hollowed-out office blocks where he partied they were still standing when everything else had been washed away.
The beat rolling out now—the one he’s mixing the next tune into—is one of his, a collage of samples from the failing Akai, dubbed down onto ancient cassette. He used to get a thrill when he dropped one of his own tunes, a jolt of excited pride, but now he feels little more than disappointment. It’s cut-and-paste jungle, a break lifted from here, a bass line from there. Clichéd vocal samples reverberating through his tired echo pedal. Jungle by numbers, assembled from pieces of itself. Pure formula, nothing original. Mike’s words echo as Tyrone shakes his head in self-disgust. This isn’t his music, none of it, not even the pieces he’s crafted himself. It’s archaeological echoes of a lost era.
He hits the STOP button on the stereo wired into the DJ mixer, a fifty-year-old cube flecked with dull LEDs. With his usual concerned reluctance he reaches out his hand, his finger hovering on the molded texture of the EJECT button, and draws breath, closes eyes, tries to block out nightmare visions of disgorged black guts, coiled flat ribbons of magnetic entrails spilling out over his hands.
He pushes the button in, just enough force to defeat its spring-loaded resistance, opens his eyes as he hears the click.
The tape deck slides open, with machine grace, and away from the hi-fi’s flat front panel. Tyrone’s hand instinctively grabs the top ridge of the cassette, gently sliding it out, not allowing himself to exhale until he can see it’s safely free. Relief. No tangled intestine, no writhing mass of dead, flat worms. He holds the cassette up to the light, peers through its little transparent plastic window. The tape looks a little baggy around the right-hand wheel, but nothing major—he sticks the tip of his first finger into the hole, feels the spokes gripping his flesh, and with the slightest, most gentle effort winds the tape on half a turn; just enough to tighten it up so it clings to the wheel, just little enough that it’s not too taut. He can’t remember an exact figure, but he knows this cassette has snagged at least five times, each time his heart dropping and the breath forcing its way out as he slid it out of the deck and watched it leave strings of what looked like melted black tar in its wake. The last time it happened was back at his place, some radio show after-party, the flat full of randos and smoke, and they’d all crowded around him to see what was going on, trying to help but giving it too much volume, pushing and prodding and jostling as he knelt on the floor, his hands trembling with panic as he tried to untangle the mess, and it all got to be too much and he freaked and threw everyone out. Just like that, no exposition, just get the fuck out—puzzled looks, screwfaces, stoned confusion—threw them all out into the corridor so that it was just him on the stained carpet, alone in the silence with his tears and the tape, turning the wheels so gently, threading it back in, checking it for kinks.
Maybe it’s time for it to break, he tells himself. Time for his work to be lost, like so much that went before. Wipe it all, erase it. Make something fresh, something that matters. Make something new.
He slips the next record from its sleeve, slides it onto the spinning platter, gently drops the needle. Bursts of static and dust in his headphones, and then high-speed tones as he uses his finger to spin forward through the record. Finds the first beat, pulls it back, cues, lets it go.
A five-note sub-bass rolls out, distortion, skittering beats—some long-dead session drummer’s handiwork compressed into a groove, filtered, distorted, pitched up to near twice its normal speed—at once both impossibly fast and monolithically glacial in its relentlessness. Sonar blips, piano hits, bird chirps all wrapped in the infinite space of reverb, eternally echoing through waves of distorted air, filter sweeps seemingly pulling new frequencies from the silence, from the gaps between the sounds, making the sparse complex and the crowded empty. Decades of history, long lost elsewhere, but spoken on vinyl in the machine language.
The door behind them is hurled open, a voice shouts his name. At first he ignores it, lost in touching the groove.
It shouts again. He looks around. Angelo shouts at him over the relentless percussion.
“Yo, it’s broken, man.”
“Huh?”
“It’s broken. The transmitter. It’s down.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Nothing, man. Just static.”
Bags looks at him, rolls his eyes, and they sigh as one. “You want me to go?”
“Nah. You stay here. Just make sure it keeps rolling.”
* * *
Piss-stink stairwell. Squeak of kicks on laminate. Knocks on door.
Tyrone braces himself.
Shouts from behind the plywood and chipped orange paint. Bolts drawing back. The door opens an inch or two, expelling ganja-tinged air. A face he doesn’t know appears, one of Grids’s boys.
“Easy, Ty, the music’s stopped, innit.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s why I’m here.”
Blank look. Hint of shade.
“To get on the roof ?”
“Oh, seen. Come.” The door pulls back, and Tyrone follows him in.
People, maybe a dozen of them, are crowded around a low table. Grids is there. Mary, too. Faces turn to look at him, nod.
“Easy, Tyrone.”
“Yo, Tyrone.”
“Hey, Ty, the music stopped, man.”
Tyrone just nods back, points at the ceiling. “I need the keys. For the roof.”
“In the kitchen. Drawer next to the fridge.” It’s Grids’s voice, but Tyrone doesn’t see his face. “Put them back when you’re done, yeah?”
* * *
The smell in the kitchen hits him hard, stops him in his tracks. He feels his face burn, some complex mix of shock and anger, hunger and jealousy.
The fatty aroma of meat, stewed—goat or lamb. Curried with thick, sweet spices. Turmeric, cumin, chili; words he hears Grids’s boys whisper on the corners. Rice sits in a half-full pan. Clean, white, sticky. He fights the urge to jam his hand in and force it into his mouth. He can’t remember the last time he saw rice.
He knows where the spices are from—the hydroponic farms in the old buildings at the back of the Croft, the ones left over from before, the ones the old hippies used to grow their vegetables before the crash. When Grids took the Croft he put them all over to growing ganja, until he realized he could get a higher price growing herbs and spices—the things the Land Army didn’t provide through their tightly controlled rationing, the things everybody wanted. Illicit flavors, tastes, and smells.
Now less than half of the farms grow weed, most of them concentrating on spices. The people that used to live in the buildings next to them were all evicted to make room for the cramped sweatshops, where Grids’s boys watch over the women and children that endlessly clean, slice, prepare, and dry them for sale, cloths wrapped around their mouths and noses, goggles shaped from ancient landfill plastic strapped across their eyes. Tyrone and Bags snuck in there once, just to take a look, and the dust was everywhere, staining the surfaces of everything red and orange just as it stung his eyes and burned his nostrils, so much that he could barely breathe. He felt like he might die, but it was so intoxicating a poison—so vivid, so delicious—that he felt like he never wanted to leave.
The other food—the rice, that meat that isn’t rat or chicken—he knows where that comes from, too. From bribes and backdoor deals, from illegal trades and illicit privileges. From power and significance.
Rage snaps him back into action and he turns away from the food, ignoring the
growl of his stomach. With the hint of tears in his eyes, some shadow sense memory of the spice sweatshops, he rummages through the drawer next to the still-working fridge until he finds the keys, and stuffs them into his hoodie pocket.
* * *
It’s cold up on the roof, the night air biting his cheeks, and he pulls his hood over his head as he makes his way between the jury-rigged solar panels. Another spoil from the Croft, dragged up here to Barton Hill by Grids’s crew. The lights always stay on in the tower. He keeps his head down as he walks, watching his feet, so as not to trip on the mess of cables that webs the panels and batteries together.
The transmitter nest is a mess of scaffolding and dead technology, aerials and faceless microwave transmitters, the short, stubby alien monoliths of cellular base stations looking out across the city, all covered in graffiti and bird shit. Once they were some vital node, a keystone of some invisible infrastructure, and as Tyrone stares at them he imagines he can hear the network traffic bustling through them, pulses and clicks, syncopated bleeps and sine-wave sub-bass, the high-pass-filtered scatter of drum breaks.
Now the networks are gone, the technology silent, apart from the few hours every night when they hijack the infrastructure for themselves, taking over this weathered, twisted monument to beam out their own traffic.
He drops his backpack to the floor and reaches inside to pull out the small windup radio. He gives it a few cranks and turns it on, placing it next to his bag. The static of dead airwaves leaks out into the cold night sky.
He pretty much already knows what’s up. The cable carrying power from one of the solar batteries to the FM transmitter slung underneath the nest—a ramshackle old Tupperware box that College filled with scavenged cables and components—is always coming loose in the wind. He’s always promising to find some way of making it more weatherproof, but he’s always too tied up keeping the panels and the hydroponics down at the Croft running. For now it’s held together with some unlikely conception of string and decade-old sticky tape, and Ty fiddles with it incessantly until the radio behind him starts to splutter, the static breaking up to give way to the occasional snare and high hat.
