“There’s no such thing as a human, there’s no such thing as a mind, there’s no such thing…” with a dreadful amount of bass, half of my chords muted and a flute solo which had nothing to do with the song, or our music, or music in general, stuck in the middle. B-flat enjoyed herself, A was amused, C looked a bit confused and I fumed.
“You’ll never understand, I never had a life, my mother was a test tube and my father was a knife…” Now it was B-flat’s turn to fume. The Leviathan didn’t change any of her notes, but added a synthesized bass one octave below hers. My keyboard playing became a church organ, but with each note played in a different position in space, bloody surround sound. C’s guitar sounded as if it came through an old walkie-talkie. The drums were left unchanged. So what.
And more, and more. I admit that there is some artistic value in the Leviathan’s work, but no one could force me to love what he was doing to my own music.
“Almost a year ago,” C told the audience, “terrorists blew up the space shuttle Yoko Ono. Twenty-four people were killed. Our next song is dedicated to them.” While he was talking, I tried to catch the Leviathan’s attention by waving my hand. The sunglasses turned towards me, reflected coloured light melting into my eyes. “Listen,” I said, “please don’t mess with this song, okay? Let us just… know what? Let us just sing one verse without interference. Okay? Please.” The sunglasses turned away from me.
“Dead fire licking at my feet, I don’t think I can take the heat…” quietly, soft basses, quiet guitars, almost unnoticeable drums. “The sky is closing on my head…” WHAM! entered the Leviathan, adding something which looked like two philharmonic orchestras and sounded like hell. It was perfectly synched with us, but this song was meant to be quiet. C, bless his stubborn soul, continued singing quietly. “…they’re telling me that I’m quite dead.” We exchanged glances. A raised an eyebrow at me. Really? it said. I nodded. B-flat nodded too and slightly turned her head – when? I raised a finger, tapped twice on the keyboard. During the chorus. All this while playing as if everything is hunky dory and there’s no happier band in the whole wide world.
Chorus: “I fear I am the only one, who thinks they’re gonna shut the sun…”
One more time. C looked at me, making sure I really mean it.
I do.
Switch to half-time.
“I fear I am the only one…”
Out of nowhere, a sudden guitar solo. The Leviathan is expressionless, but my display shows that he’s surprised – for a moment, the briefest of moments, he stops accompanying us. “…who thinks…”
B-flat raises her bass and starts improvising in a different meter. Knowing her, I can guess it’s something like 29 eights, or some other dreadful prime number used for creating unbearable music by frustrated ex-classical or fusion players. Between her and C, complex patterns emerge, floating like dead fish, and then submerging into oblivion, replaced by others. C is still singing, shouting, “…they’re gonna…”
A joins the party, adding truly random beats, a treat which he first developed in order to tease bass players back when he was a teenager. It can drive the average rock musician out of her mind. “…shut…”
I turn on all my outputs at once – two keyboards and one show computer. I’m putting in the equivalent of 48 channels of mess. The display near my right eye looks like Armageddon. The noise is so great that I can hear, despite my earplugs, the actual speakers around and above the stage. C isn’t singing now – he’s waiting. “…the sun!”
Something blinks on the edge of my display. Noise. Recording. We’re drowning in an inferno of dancing lights. The stage vibrates with the bass. The Leviathan is twisted, frozen. His head is tilted, his back stretched to the limit.
Switch to quarter-time.
My keyboard stops responding. It’s not alone in that. C looks confused, B-flat has stopped playing. The noise continues. The Leviathan is still stretched and frozen. He’s not repeating our patterns – he’s creating something new. The noise increases, changes, morphs. It’s incredibly complex, compressed, hundreds of note-signals per second. The signals are so fast they create their own frequency, a meta-frequency, first in the bass region, then rising. The Leviathan is creating his own thing. About time, I think.
Switch to eighth-time.
Silence.
For a moment there’s an illusion of sound, like echoes of a dream. The audience is silent. The stage is silent. A soft rattle from one of the spotlights, hovering right over our heads, suddenly sounds like a machine gun. Purple light floods us. We all look at the Leviathan.
Twisted, frozen.
A slight move, as if letting go.
Falling.
The purple light vanishes.
Switch to real time again.
White sunglasses on the stage. A tiny spark of light reflected from the fish in the pocket of the white pants. Red eyes, open wide. The thinnest of smiles on the lips of the Leviathan.
He died of overload. He knew what was happening to him. He knew who was doing it to him, and he knew why. Millions of viewers heard and watched his dying spasms, but none of them knew what it really was.
Only later – after the audience was evacuated, some people on foot, some in ambulances; after they shot the rogue spotlights, which went crazy after their control unit went offline, out of the sky; after they cleared the stage and sent us home – only then I found it, inside my show computer. The Leviathan’s legacy.
He sent a recording command to my computer. Every note, every sound, every signal emitted from his decomposing nervous system, was saved. The first, last and only original composition by the Leviathan, a magnificent opera, transmitted at the speed of light.
He won.
I erased it all.
Musicians
- Martin Millar -
Forty years after their deaths, which was no time at all in the next world, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, tiring slightly of the light, departed for a while to a dark cellar beneath a bar in Memphis, Tennessee. There they drank, and played poker with a pack of cards once used by Jesse James to while away the hours before his assassin arrived.
“Mind if I join you?” said Howlin’ Wolf.
“You’re welcome,” replied Jimi Hendrix. “Provided you have something to stake.”
Howlin’ Wolf laid a harmonica on the table.
“I learned how to play that from Sonny Boy Williamson,” he said.
“Which Sonny Boy Williamson?”
“I forget. But they were both good, so I figure it will do.”
The others agreed that it would. Janis Joplin placed the original design for a poster onto the table. It read, “I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!” Jimi Hendrix nodded and put in the canister of lighter fuel with which he had once ignited his guitar.
“You come down in a Cadillac?” asked Howlin’ Wolf.
Janis nodded. “Pink Cadillac. How about you?”
“I still like my old Pontiac.”
Janis Joplin dealt the cards, which were old and creased. The barkeeper placed a tray of beer and bourbon nervously on the table and departed back upstairs. As he opened the door Jolene was wailing from the jukebox.
“Dolly Parton,” mused Jimi, and tapped his fingers in time to the rhythm. “Good singer. Your bet, Janis.”
“Half a bottle of bourbon,” said Janis, laying it down. “Belonged to Hank Williams. I believe it was the only one he never finished, due to him dying before he got much past the label.”
Howlin’ Wolf raised the stakes a little with the memory of a night spent listening to Charlie Parker at Minton’s Playhouse in 1944.
“Three butterflies released by the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park in 1969,” offered Jimi Hendrix. “For the death of Bryan Jones.”
Janis sipped her beer, and thoughtfully rubbed her glasses while considering her next bet.
“The feelings of the man I first loved,” she said, but this was a very small amount, and she needed more, so she added to
it the feather boa she wore when revisiting her hometown after becoming famous, and the adulation of the audience at the Monterey Pop Festival.
Howlin’ Wolf wore a sly expression. “I’ll raise the stakes,” he said. “This accordion was played by Amédé Ardoin, back in 1929. First Creole music ever recorded, I believe.”
“You’re bluffing.” said Jimi Hendrix, and matched the bet with the wave of emotion raised by his distorted, psychedelic rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner.
The room grew darker, which suited the players, as they were often in brightness these days.
The high stakes made Janis Joplin pause, long enough to finish her beer and take a hefty swig of bourbon.
“This,” she said, finally, and placed on the table her tears after the day she was voted the ugliest person in her high school.
“You think I can’t match that?” Howlin’ Wolf grinned. “Right here I got a knife and some poison, and between them they done for Robert Johnson.”
There was silence for a few moments.
Jimi Hendrix looked vacantly at his cards but his mind was on the planets he had once sung about and had now seen for himself.
“I still think you’re bluffing,” he said finally.
“Well put something in.”
“Try this.”
Jimi laid on the table the huge batch of samples of his guitar sound now still spinning round the world.
They sipped their drinks and gazed at the table, now crowded with artefacts and samples of pain and joy. Marvin fingered the denim shirt worn by Elvis right before he swapped it for Liberace’s gold lame jacket. The door above them opened. Dolly Parton still sang on the jukebox, a sad and hopeless song about a husband who never would come back. The barkeeper appeared, and he spoke nervously.
“There’s a pink Cadillac outside for you.”
“Time to go.”
“What about the game?”
“We can finish it tomorrow. You’ll keep the room for us, won’t you, barkeeper?”
The barkeeper swore that he would.
“Want a lift?”
Holwin’ Wolf shook his head and said he’d just wait here for a while.
Janis and Jimi wished him goodbye till tomorrow, and made their way out to the Cadillac.
“Should we be leaving all these things here?” said Janis Joplin, her voice a little doubtful.
“It’s okay,” replied Jimi Hendrix. “Anyone’s welcome to use them. They’ll all come back to us in the end.”
Flight Path Estate
- Tim Maughan -
The first time I met her it was between the towers she was fighting to save.
It had been an irritating easter-egg hunt. Standard procedure apparently, according to my research, for making it to a flash-party. You found, or were passed in my case, a geotag on the timelines, went to that location where another geotag appeared, a translucent globe floating in the air, and then let your spex guide you to the next place. Repeat four or five times. After the third one I nearly jacked it in. Felt like I was too old to be fucking around, but the money was always at the back of my mind. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a fortune – words were cheap back then – but Tamsin at Interrobang was still paying me more than the minimum I made filling driverless cars with recycled cooking oil for a week at the Tesco garage.
Of course, when I hit the final geotag the joke was on me. It was Barton Hill, naturally. There was no flash-party either, just a bunch of teenagers hanging around in the playground that cowered between the half-century-old towers, leaning against the climbing frames, legs dangling from swings. Unpixelised eyes watched me from under hoods and hijabs, caps and shemaghs. It seemed a pretty even mix of races and genders, and the air was thick with the smell of high-grade GM skunk and cheap supermarket cider.
Teenagers.
But there, in the middle of them all, her head totally uncovered, the breeze gently nudging her oversized gold hoop earrings against her black skin and rippling stray hairs across her forehead, sat Melody12. She smiled at me.
It should have been intimidating – it was at first – standing there as her crew circled us, silently watching me. Listening, recording. Two of the crew’s own cheap, toy-like micro-drones circled above us. Children that had lived their whole, brief lives under surveillance, that had always struggled to find privacy and space of their own, turning that feeling back on the adults who watched them.
It should have been intimidating, but when Melody spoke everything else faded away. She made me welcome, made me feel safe. She was polite, articulate, poetic – her words peppered with Bristolian and Jamaican slang, tech-jargon and favela speak, but always clear, measured. She spoke purposefully.
We talked for nearly two hours. I started with the basics. How old was she? 16. How long had she lived here? All her life. How had she got into music? Her mother’s hip-hop CDs, reggae at the community centre, illegal dubstep raves on the industrial estate. She blinked me across some tunes – I’d heard her stuff already, but this was new material – almost painfully slow synthetic beats, decades-old dub sirens soaked in so much reverb they sounded like an inorganic breeze, sampled, disjointed, context-less consonants echoing through simulations of antique tape-delay machines, pristine numbers being crunched to birth, virtual crackle and dust. Sparse, minimal, stripped down. It wasn’t the beats that mattered, she told me, but the spaces in-between. My spex’s bone-conduction speakers filled my skull with her bass.
As it faded out I asked her another question, another obvious one. Why was she fighting for this place? Why protect this troubled estate? Wasn’t it every resident’s dream to escape from here?
She paused, and looked up at the towers that filled the sky around us, their matrices of windows almost vanishing as they climbed up in to the permanent drizzle. Her eyes widened as one of the drones dropped in low, hovering and twitching its camera-ball to catch her close-up, and for the first time I wondered if they were streaming all of this, as if even at that point her life was already a global performance.
I still don’t know.
When she spoke it was more slang poetry, both nuanced and brutal, reasoned and free-styled. I can’t repeat it here, I won’t, ever, I’ll say that to you now. If you’re reading this to try and extract some of her words, to try and hear what she actually said, then look elsewhere. Her words belonged to her, they should only be heard from her mouth, I realise now. And now that’s impossible, now all the recordings are gone… I won’t try and offer you some pale substitute, some hand-scrawled-in-biro simulation. I can’t.
She told me about the corridors, the stairwells, the entry halls. About how there were no cameras in there. About how it was their space, where they could move, talk, fight, love, play. Unseen. Unmonitored. Unrecorded. Of the many hours – of the many days – of first/third/drone person footage they streamed and posted of her, none of it was inside those towers. It was a statement: she only ever recorded herself in places where she knew she was being watched anyway, where the CCTV cameras and the ever-circling high-altitude drones could track her. She wouldn’t give any more away than that, and when she entered those towers she disappeared. She was invisible.
The place they wanted to move her to, her and all the residents after they’d ripped down the towers, was some new-build estate out by the near-deserted airport, an edgeland construct 10 miles out of the city. A sparkling new ghetto of identical buildings, as if they’d all been popped out of the same mold in some giant’s sweet factory, topped with solar panel frosting and pumped full of generic, IKEA filling. The council had made this huge deal, she explained, out of keeping all the residents together, of “preserving the community.” Learning from past mistakes. But that wasn’t the point; every inch of this new estate was under watchful digital eye and ear, dome cameras on every street corner, keyword-triggered microphones embedded in the walls. For their own safety, naturally. But their community wasn’t as obvious as that. It wasn’t the people that mattered, she told me, but the s
paces in-between. The hidden spaces, the communal secrecy, the unwatched places. The spaces that belonged to them.
So what if they did stop the demolition, I asked her? What then? What next for Melody12?
Fame, she answered.
I won’t lie, it surprised me for a second. But then something flickered across her face, something I’m sure she would later edit out, that made it make sense. It was a look of quiet desperation, of concerned longing, a look that made everything she’d said about not wanting to escape the shadows of these towers seem like a lie, a carefully scripted performance.
And then it was gone, the confidence returned, the now brittle, questionable authenticity with it. I asked her if she wanted to be a pop star.
She said yes.
No more than that?
Yes, more.
I didn’t understand what she said next, and I wouldn’t until two years had passed.
She told me she wanted to be the last pop star. That she wanted to turn off the lights.
I followed her and the crew around for a few weeks, showing up at flash parties whenever I got the viral nod, the whisper turned howl in the timelines.
I have to say most of it seemed pretty tame to me, edgeland bass rumbles and groups of kids dancing, getting high and occasionally fucking in disused spaces, the abandoned Royal Mail building in Temple Meads, an old glass factory in St Annes, the never finished Bristol stadium. A line I’d spun to Tamsin before meeting Melody12 – about music as protest and communal dance as a statement being very 1990s – had been meant as a joke, but the more I saw the truer it started to feel. Of course the main difference from the 1990s was almost half the kids weren’t really there, they were just avatars dancing and posing, global cool-hunters drawn by the trend chatter. I tried to talk to some, but invariably they didn’t respond, leaving me to blink their minimal public profiles – Shanghai, London, Tehran, Chiang Mai, Barcelona, Cardiff, Seattle. Either I was just another point of inconvenience on their agenda, or they weren’t even paying attention, and had just left their avatars to dance by themselves, following some semi-reactive autoscript mash-up of motion-captured exuberance and simulated nonchalant posturing, while their owners paid attention to something else, some other example of fleeting, trending shared experience. Take your spex off and the crowd around you thinned out to the extent it started to push qualifying for that definition; put them back on and it wasn’t really clear anything fundamental had changed. But still, always, there amongst it all was Melody12.
Adventure Rocketship! Let's All Go To The Science Fiction Disco Page 12
