by A. Sparrow
I froze, torn between tracking them down and running away. Who knew what Nora had become? To what lengths would the beast go to keep her? Coward that I had become, it was enough for me to know she was alive. I got my ass out of there quick. It’s been a year now and I have yet to go back. I stay out of any kind of woods these days. I won’t touch wild fruit. I’ve become a creature of malls and sidewalks, just like the Nora I used to know.
*****
Indigo 823
I am a man of many names. My parents christened me Malcolm Barrow, but noone’s called me Malcolm since the fifth grade. In high school, I had my friends call me Barry. And in my heyday on the internet music scene, my tiny coterie of fans knew me as TK Willow. These days, Lys calls me Indigo, for the song cycle that brought us together. If you want, you can call me Indie.
Before I met Lys, I was between jobs and relationships, living off odd jobs, unemployment checks and annuities from a trust fund. For work, I wrote a bit of freelance code for cash under the table. Python. Javascript. Lisp. You name it.
I know what you’re thinking. Boring. But code was not my be all and end all. Music is what got me out of bed every morning, made my work week bearable, made life worth living, before I met Lys.
I lived alone in a tacky apartment thrown up in the converted outbuilding of a decrepit dairy farm so the owners could make a little extra money on rent. Speakers and amplifiers towered in every corner. Bundles of cable snaked from room to room like pernicious vines. Synthesizers on stands filled the cramped interior.
It was well after midnight. The cows were huddled in the main barn, lowing softly. The lights in the farm house across the road—my landlords, the Watsons—had gone dark. Only when the old lady and her sons are asleep do I dare unplug my headphones and unleash my creations into the open air.
I played my loops through Vandersteen Model 7s—top of the line monuments to sonic fidelity. They looked like the sort of monolith an alien race would stash in various strategic locations around the solar system to pass on information to our species and guide our evolution.
At $45,000 a set, a pair of these slabs had shown up on a truck one day, the gift of some anonymous wealthy benefactor. I have no idea how they found my address. I was a very private person, going to great lengths to cover my tracks on the web.
These babies had hand carved balsa wood cones and meticulously arrayed, minimally diffracting baffles and plinths. Each speaker weighed eighty-five pounds.
All of this gear might seem like overkill for someone who composed music with a menagerie of cheap and obsolete synthesizers, but somehow they made all the difference between noise and magic. Whenever I played some Charlie Parker vinyl on it, I could swear it summoned his ghost into the room. I could hear every click of his fingers on the valves of his alto sax.
I had long stopped performing my creations out loud in public. My music tended to provoke anti-social or otherwise less than desirable behaviors in listeners. Violence. Vandalism. Weeping. Public lewdness. Even spontaneous defecation. Every individual responded differently to my compositions. Rare was the soul who enjoyed a positive experience listening to my work. And never were its effects more powerful than when pumped through those Vandersteens.
My music didn’t need to be loud to be disturbing. The merest perception of it seemed to do the trick. People seemed immune when asleep, thank goodness, which is why I generally chose the wee hours to crank up my speakers. I had some great headphones, so you wouldn’t think I would need to bother, but headphones can’t conjure ghosts the way those Vandersteens do.
Why did I bother? Well, her name is Lys. You might say she’s not from around here. She couldn’t tell me exactly where she hailed from. She called it ‘The Rut’ or ‘Rutland,’ but I was pretty sure she wasn’t talking about that city in Vermont. It was not a place she had ended up by choice. She got taken there when she was small. The Rut, you might say is a different world, connected to ours by bridges conjured by my music.
All of that pretty much summed up all I knew about her, snippets compiled from at least a dozen brief encounters. Summonings, I called them. Though, she didn’t like me to call her a ghost. She insisted that she had never died, so how could she possibly be a spirit? I humored her, but I was pretty sure at the time that she was dealing with some serious denial.
She sure did look like a ghost to me at first. Her willowy shape appeared in my living room as a hazy apparition, outlined in swirls of icy mist. She said she could hear my playing in the Rut. It called to her like a beacon, drawing her to a glade in a wood where she could see me and my gear just as hazily as I saw her. She insisted that I was the ghost.
Indigo 414 and its many variants were the most dependable way to summon her, but the visuals were poor and her voice just a buzz. Purple 509 was hit and miss but when it worked, it conjured some crazy sharp silhouettes, but no color or texture. Crimson 511 channeled the best audio but rendered her almost completely transparent.
The robust success of Indigo inspired me to use it as a base for composing something dark and cold, but with a hint of the warmth that seemed to help fine tune the resolution. Indigos are full of microtones and flatted chords. I had a hunch that I could sneak a few bright tones into all that black noise without spoiling the beacon. I figured they’d get swallowed up into the background like a pinch of spice in a pot of stew. That’s a trick I couldn’t pull with a composition that was already too warm or bright.
My works layered live performance over a mix of loops and recorded sequences. I used cheap synthesizers salvaged from yard sales and flea markets—models and brands not hip enough to be on the radar of anyone serious about doing music for a living. Brands like Hohner or Roland or my main ax—a precious Sequential Sixtrak.
I messed with both the hardware and software to warp their sounds to my needs. Playing low end synths through such high quality speakers might seem futile but there was a method to my madness. For my purposes, the unintended artefacts of these crap technologies—overtones, static, clicks—were just as important as the dominant tones they produced.
The foundation of my compositions was a swirling timeless atonal soup of beats and notes triggered seemingly at random. But there was order to the chaos. Strange attractors summoned certain tones more often than others, and there was a pattern to it, not discernable to human ears, but evocative for dimensional bridging.
The timing was a bit loose, the rhythms almost biological in their sloppiness. A steady heart is a sickly one, cardiologists say. A little bit of slippage between beats makes for a much more robust pattern, less likely to be perturbed from its central pulse.
Most people didn’t perceive my sequences as melody or music. It was theoretically possible to write them out on a staff, but every bar would have had a different time signature and you would need a lot more lines than standard to indicate every microtone.
My compositions droned and soared and tinkled and rumbled, but it would have been a stretch to call them melodies. They were abstractions, sonic sculptures, nothing meant to be pleasing to the ear.
As I navigated its layers like a ship on a stormy sea, Indigo 528 rewarded my intuition with the glaze in my vision that told me that a bridge was forming.
Icy particles hovered like snowflakes that refused to fall. My living room grew as cold as a meat locker. The crystals trembled and twinkled as they swept together and apart. Some dropped to the floor and frosted my carpet. Others gathered into clouds with bulges and protuberances like giant amoebas, rooted to the carpet with fleshy stalks.
This was definitely ranking as one of my more impressive attempts. The conjurings were so robust, I could almost reach out and grab them. But I couldn’t stop to gloat or else they would crumble. I can’t think about anything but making them grow.
I didn’t dare glance at my keyboard. I focused on the dance of the crystals, tweaking my performance to keep them growing and propagating. I needed them thicker, denser. I evolved my sequences through a process of
guided natural selection, rejecting any pattern that caused the crystals to waver, reinforcing those that made them sustain and propagate.
And then it happened. As quickly as a camera tweaking its autofocus, the amorphous blobs converged into recognizable shapes. A craggy boulder appeared beside my TV. Stubby plants with fleshy cactus-like leaves sprouted on my sofa. And there she stood, right in front of the end table. Her shoulders sloped. She was sparsely clad. For the first time, dimples below her brow showed me that she had eyes.
She brandished something. A stick? A sword? The resolution was way too poor to make out what she held.
Her outline was sharply defined but her surfaces remained fuzzy. Her skin was a sheet of shimmering static devoid of color, texture or detail.
“Are you … real?” she said in British English, her voice tinny but rarely had I heard it so clear. Usually, an Indigo summoning distorted it beyond comprehension.
“I should be asking you that.”
The icy mist pulsed, alternately thickening then waning, oscillating like ripples lapping at the shore of a pond.
“Pease … don’t stop,” she said. “I can … almost … see you.”
The cloud eroded as it built like a closely watched cumulus in a desert sky. The balance was tenuous. The particles that shaped her form were on the verge of losing their attraction and blasting apart. I tried to stoke my sequences to favor building, but entropy always wins in the end.
The phone rang and it was like a bomb going off. Crystals clashed, collapsing, melting. The fog was gone. All that remained of the summoning were the rivulets trickling down the walls and a damp carpet.
I switched off my loops and answered. I didn’t have caller ID but I already knew it was my land lady.
“Don’t you realize how late it is young man?” said Mrs. Watson, in her creaky drawl.
“Um. Sorry. I … uh … lost track of the time.”
“Listen. That … music, or whatever you call it. I realize it’s not that loud. My boys tell me they can’t even hear it. But the cows can when they’re in the barn and it upsets them. I’m afraid they’re going to hurt themselves kicking at the stanchions.”
“Sorry ma’am. I didn’t realize. I’ll stop.”
***
I remember checking my MySpace page and finding a message from a fan wondering when my next track will be uploaded. I tried to release at least one new recording per month just to keep my fans happy.
It wasn’t easy finding people with whom my tracks resonate. To like my stuff, something had to be very wrong with your brain. Few humans seemed capable of discerning any structure or pattern in my compositions. Those that could, became my fans—all fourteen of them, scattered across the globe. Six Americans aged twelve to eighty-two. Two Brits, a Canadian, a German, a Filipina and three pre-teen siblings from Iceland. I wondered if they were the same sort of people or if my music the only thing they had in common?
I knew them all by their login names. Few had ever attempted to communicate with me. I’ve never met a single one in person, and I hope I never do. They were loyal and demanding and scared the hell out of me.
Some tended to be fanatical to the point of not listening to any other music. The responsibility of being the sole musical outlet for this tiny subset of freaks was a heavy burden to bear. But they were rare, almost mythical beasts. I would have hated to lose one.
To have an actual live audience to interact with in real time while I’m performing, that would have blown my mind. It had been years since I dared perform any of my music in public.
I wondered sometimes what it would have taken to make my music more accessible to the masses without sacrificing the elements that made it unique. I guess I was searching for the perfect gateway drug. It could be hard to take the plunge if you’ve never been exposed to anything like it before.
Noise, most people called it. White noise, if they were being especially kind. To most ears it sounded like sheer chaos—Captain Beefheart on mescaline, minus the blues chords, progressions or anything with roots in Western or Eastern music. It wasn’t industrial. It wasn’t natural. It was something new.
The extremity of my music was the property that attracted my hard-core followers. They let me know whenever I strayed too close to the beaten path. I could even tell what would disappoint them before I even released a track. I always made it up to them by uploading something more pure and radical the next time around.
I hadn’t always been such an artistic freak. I had played mainstream alternative rock with seven different bands across upstate New York before I went solo. Before the internet, music like mine could never find its audience. But now social networking makes such discoveries inevitable, no matter how small the appeal. My music appealed to the most distal tip of the long tail of the distribution.
I never expected to make money. Before the summonings I saw it merely as therapy for my soul, my temporary cure for depression and insomnia and whatever else that ailed me.
But then my fans started reporting unusual phenomena. One devout Catholic Filipina lady insisted that my music brought her visions of an apparition she was pretty sure was Mary, mother of Christ. An octogenarian from California told me that holding her hands close to a speaker when Indigo 709 played eased the swelling in her hands. To some guy named Jeremy my music brought voices who dictated stories to him that he then went and self-published on Kindle. Nobody ever bought them because they were too weird, but that’s beside the point.
The point is, I never believed in any of this mystical, new age crap until the ghost of a girl outlined in icy mist began to appear in my apartment.
***
You don’t have to drive far out of Ithaca to reach the boonies and Turkey Hill Road was definitely qualifies as the boonies. My apartment was a single unit shoe-horned into a complex of barns and outbuildings that used to be part of a working dairy farm. The Watsons still kept a few cows for old-time’s sake, as the grown boys worked other jobs now, for Tompkins County public works and at the Cayuga salt mine in Lansing.
Old lady Watson had a cardiac problem that put her in and out of the hospital, sometimes for weeks at a time. I took advantage of her absence from time to time to play live. Like I said, headphones are no good for a summoning. Those vibrations had to interact with matter beyond my ears.
The boys, Chuck and Neil, stayed out late when she was gone and then it was just me and the cows. They were both fortyish and single but acted like teens when their old lady was not around. They never seemed to notice my music, especially when they were drunk. To them, it might as well have been a dog whistle. They pretty much left me alone as long as I kept taping a rent check to their front door on the first of the month.
As for the cows, well, they were starting to get used to my stuff. They didn’t fuss much as long as I didn’t play anything that sounded much like Coral 313. That one made them scream like they were getting butchered. Not a problem. That sequence had long been deleted from my drives.
With the cows in the field, the boys at work and the old lady at Tompkins County Medical Center, daylight might have seemed to be the best time to do my thing, but I could never seem to get inspired in all that bright light. Darkness and shadow made the mysteries in my music come alive. The night did something to my brain, the way it boosts those AM radio signals that bounce around all the way down here from Quebec.
My creative process went like this:
1) Retool one old school analog drum machine. Reprogram the microcontroller with some machine code that randomizes the spacing between the beats. Looping ensures there will be a repeating pattern but chance determines where the beats actually. Selecting a rhythm track is like rolling the dice. I sometimes have to click through and listen to hundreds of patterns before find one that has the right feel.
2) Seed the resulting rhythm loop into my array of old sequencers. The beats interact with triggers. Sometimes, I run the beats through a filter so that the triggers don’t always fall on the beat b
ut the pattern has some fixed mathematical relationship to the rhythm track.
3) Layer loops of melody. I use ‘melody’ for lack of a better word. These are single note runs and embellishments. Sometimes busy, sometimes spacious. I go layer by layer, saving those that work, erasing those that don’t.
4) Improvise. This is the top layer. Free form. Single notes and chords. This part I play live on my Sixtrak over all that has come before. All of the prior work gets played out my Vandersteens while my solo emanates through an old Walter Woods tube amp meant to amplify an upright bass.
Nine times out of ten I’d end up with something devoid of any magic. The one in ten is what made it all worthwhile. Even my keepers didn’t always provoke the physical effects that some of my fans report. Sometimes all I got as reward was a tickle in my brain—an intellectual orgasm, you might say.
When the weird stuff happened, it was pretty obvious. Albino squirrels from all over would converge on the farm. Winter moths would crowd every inch of my window panes. Strange objects and substances showed up on my carpet. Pine cones from trees that don’t exist on this planet. Pink sand made up of thousands of tiny shell fossils. Icy mists. Female ghosts.
Some of these things I could do without. But no biggie. When something undesirable occurred, I just deleted the track and made sure I never tried anything like that again. But an icy fog that summoned ghosts was another matter entirely. This one involved a girl.
The night I conjured Lys in the flesh, I was only trying to ease an ache in my bum knee. I had been limping around for a couple days after slipping on some wet leaves.
It made me think of Mrs. Watson, who was back in the hospital with severe edema in both legs. I was tempted to offer her a free performance of Indigo 709, the track that helped that California lady’s arthritis, but I knew she wouldn’t understand. Still, it got me thinking about music as therapy, so I decided to be my own guinea pig.
You might have noticed, my songs have names based on colors and numbers like Blue 1004 or Taupe 111. To me, the colors are shorthand mnemonics portraying the relative coolness or warmth of their tonal structure. The numbers are simply the date I composed them. Only my best tracks qualify for names. Most get tossed by the wayside.