by Scotto Moore
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for Jen Moon
Track 01
I was home alone on a Saturday night when I experienced the most beautiful piece of music I had ever heard in my life.
Took me hours to even begin to understand what had happened, actually.
Time stopped while I was listening to it. Elation swept through me, as if I could die now, secure in the knowledge that I had at long last heard the most beautiful piece of music in the world and if I never heard any other music ever again, it wouldn’t matter, because all music after this was going to sound like shit anyway.
And then came the secondary realization that I had been listening to this song on repeat for an indeterminate period of time and didn’t plan to stop, really, because it was just so good that nothing else mattered. Sometimes you overplay a song and then you burn it out and you don’t need to hear it again and you’re back to looking for something good like that one used to be, but with this song, you could just keep listening to it forever and your brain would tailor itself to the presence of this song until you literally couldn’t live without it. I could feel parts of my personality dissolving, replaced by themes contained within this music.
And then a part of me realized that I desperately needed to use the bathroom, and I had a crisis of faith.
For the first time in hours, I actually tried to take an intellectual action distinct from listening to the music, and a distant part of me noticed how difficult it was, because the music was all-encompassing. I thought to myself, maybe I shouldn’t immediately start the song over this time, maybe I could pause it just this once so I could stumble to the bathroom. And in the break, after I had finally paused the music, the silence was a deafening, almost maddening roar in my ears. Like the roar of too many decibels at close range. Like cauterizing auditory nerves with lasers. I don’t know, maybe not like that, but it sucked is my point.
And while the music was stopped, I took a look around the room. It had been Saturday night; now daylight was coming in the windows. I was covered in sweat. I was starving. I was exhausted. Some other feeling, too—oh right, panic, which was just getting started. I stood up, wobbly with that “only one foot on the planet” feeling that sometimes comes from too much ketamine on the dance floor, and I hobbled my way down the hallway to the bathroom. I leaned against the wall nearly the entire way until my strength finally reasserted itself. I considered a shower; I thought the sensory stimulus of water pounding on my bare skin might help me regain my composure.
But in the end, the mystery of that incredible music was much more pressing than any other sensory stimulus. When I was finished in the bathroom, I staggered slowly back to my bedroom and sat back down at my desk. My eyes focused on my laptop screen, and I started to piece together what had happened.
* * *
It started with a Google News alert on the keywords “Surrealist Sound System,” which was a band from Madison, where I went to college. This band released several records while I was in school and then broke up; perhaps once every few years since then, I’ll learn about a new side project by one of the band members thanks to this news alert. As far as I can tell, very few human beings who did not live near Madison while the band was active have ever heard of this band. Believe me, I’ve looked—if you Google this band, the top hit is my own blog post lamenting the band’s demise, followed by the rest of the internet not giving a shit. They were a flash in the pan in the early web era, so they don’t even have a zombie MySpace page floating around.
This alert led me to a Bandcamp page for a band I’d never heard of called Beautiful Remorse. Bandcamp lets artists set up their own little microsites to sell their music or give it away if they want; as a music blogger, I go there all the time to check stuff out. Beautiful Remorse tripped my news alert because they claimed their music is “for fans of Ganja Lightwagon, The Alkaloids, and Surrealist Sound System.” They’d posted exactly one track, a four - and - a - half - minute tune helpfully named “Overture.” I was both excited and skeptical—quite a strange claim, to compare your music to a local band that broke up fifteen years ago. Was this a side project I hadn’t heard about? Did these people just happen to have (like me, of course) preposterously good taste in underground eclectic music? I immediately paused the previous album I’d been auditioning in order to stream “Overture” from Bandcamp.
Four and a half minutes passed by in a rush. It was like I took a deep breath as the first notes of the track hit me, and exhaled right as the track ended. Both thrilled and deeply frustrated by the experience, I downloaded the track (offered as a freebie), and put it on repeat.
* * *
But then it was Sunday morning, very early, and as the sound of “Overture” receded into memory during my arduous trip to and from the bathroom, my brain informed me that silence would be good for a while, because I very much needed to be able to think clearly.
I was beginning to want more information about “Overture.” That’s my thing—I’ve been a music blogger since the earliest days of music blogging, and I’m never satisfied until I’ve digested not just the music itself, but all available metadata about the music. I need to place it in the firmament, understand where it came from, how it connects to the vast musical genre tree that defines consciousness as we know it. And this was no ordinary track, obviously, no simple confection—it swallowed you up like a drop of rain landing in the ocean and losing its coherence, its own identity.
The Bandcamp page for Beautiful Remorse was maddeningly austere: no liner notes about the band, no copyright information or label affiliation, a bland and abstract swash of colors for an album image, no further information beyond the “for fans of . . .” line and several genre tags that I found to be laughably inadequate and contradictory: “experimental ambient,” “baroque metal,” “overdubstep,” “sounds of nature.”
Worse than that: Beautiful Remorse maintained no other presence on the internet beyond its Bandcamp page. No interviews, no photos, no fan forums, no tour listings. No Soundcloud, no Spotify, no YouTube. I searched the Gmail account for my music blog, where hundreds of messages arrive each day from artists, promoters, publicists, and record labels, but no one claiming to represent Beautiful Remorse had ever bothered to contact me. I jumped onto Hype Machine, an aggregator of music feeds from all over the world and a great place to see what other music bloggers are talking about, but no one had ever posted about Beautiful Remorse.
I cracked open the MP3 itself to check the ID3 metadata. Sometimes bands will accidentally leave a paper trail in their early promo tracks, and you’ll see comments from the recording engineer about the mix or alternate album art or something like that.
Track: 01
Title: Overture
Artist: Beautiful Remorse
Album: I Shall Not Get Caught a Second Time
Comments: Track 01 of a 10-track album. Check back daily for the next track!
Daily? If their Bandcamp site went up yesterday, triggering my news alert, then I was going
to get another track today! This was worth canceling today’s plans (which at any rate involved staying at home and being antisocial).
However, there was definitely one thing I could do while I waited. No point keeping this music a secret. I jumped onto Tumblr and prepared to post “Overture,” quietly giggling that I would be the first to notify the blogosphere about this insanely good new track, certain that fortune had smiled upon me by alerting me to the existence of Beautiful Remorse. The only challenge: trying to describe “Overture” in words, trying to identify the genres that “Overture” at once mastered and transformed into something new, something far beyond what anyone expected any form of popular music could accomplish.
I decided, as I often do, to coin a new genre name for this music and let my readers fend for themselves. I called it allurebient and published the post.
Track 02
After a brief nap, I hopped onto Maxnet, hoping to brag about my latest musical discovery.
Maxnet is a darknet operated by Maxstacy, granddaddy of music blogging. Maxstacy was the first person to publish an MP3 on a blog and say, “Hey, check this shit out!” (He was more articulate than that, but you can look it up yourself if you want a history lesson.) Music blogging soon exploded but he was there first, and in a flash of inspiration, Maxstacy created Maxnet: an invitation-only darknet solely for music bloggers, for those Maxstacy deemed to be the cream of the crop. I’ve always felt like I lucked into my invitation; when music blogging was in its earliest days, I happened to post about Maxstacy’s favorite pop band before anyone else (but him, of course), and my golden ticket to Maxnet was the result. He rarely hangs out on Maxnet anymore, of course; now he’s actually working for a major label as a talent-spotter, but he’s still blogging and he keeps Maxnet alive to ensure that his elite brand halo among the rest of us lesser bloggers never fades.
I hopped into the central video chat room and took a look around—Sunday afternoons were always slow, but I saw a few familiar faces pop up. Mocha in Mexico City, Ricochet in Baltimore, William in Austin. I waited patiently for a few moments, and then Imogen Sweetness popped online from New Orleans. She has a script that lets her know when I join and she must have had some free time so here she is. Imogen Sweetness and I have the kind of perfect internet flirtation that comes from knowing I will never leave Portland and she would never agree to meet me in person if I did. I don’t know, it works for me.
“Where did you find that track?” she exclaimed immediately. “That is some seriously sick shit.”
“Just doing my part to enlighten the kids,” I responded with genuine faux modesty.
“Their second track is even more amazing,” she continued.
Second track? Shit—was I suddenly an amateur? I refreshed the Bandcamp page for Beautiful Remorse, and there it was: a new, six-minute track entitled “The Awakening.” My heart started pounding in anticipation. I popped over to Hype Machine and learned that “The Awakening” had already been posted by about fifty different blogs. Imogen Sweetness posted it first. Which is a little weird. Every music blogger has a different beat; my beat is completely eclectic, so this music makes sense on my blog. But Imogen mostly posts J-pop and obscure ’80s covers. Mocha has a deep fascination with Americana and twang, but she posted both “Overture” and “The Awakening,” one right after the other. Seemed like Beautiful Remorse was that rare kind of band that truly transcends tight genre definitions.
Ricochet chimed in, “Sounds like ass to me.”
I wasn’t surprised that Ricochet was not jumping on the bandwagon. I’m not even sure he actually likes music. His blog covers a genre he calls “inverted retro”: he believes that there are bands making music that is so terrible that they must be doing it as some kind of practical joke on the music industry. Each of his posts attempts to prove that a given band or artist must know how terrible their music is because no sane artist would otherwise make music that bad. And he believes that the only reason these bands have fans is because they’re all engaged in some kind of weird performance art to see just how much torture a person is willing to endure in the name of music. It’s actually pretty funny when his targets try to defend themselves in his comment threads, since of course anyone making “inverted retro” music would deny it by definition.
“Correction,” Ricochet said, “it sounds like cats undergoing explosive decompression, in slow motion. But with a singer.”
A singer! I could contain my curiosity no longer. I muted the video chat and pressed play on “The Awakening.”
A gorgeous voice filled my ears and a warm ecstatic rush overwhelmed me. My mind filled with visions of swirling stars and lattices of energy. I tried to concentrate on the vocals—she was singing in a made-up language, but I still felt like I could understand her. Not that I could translate her meaning exactly, but somehow I knew she was transmitting and I was receiving. Six minutes rushed by in a heartbeat.
I wiped the sweat off my face and opened my eyes. It took me several minutes before my eyes could focus on my laptop screen. Imogen was actually waving at me, trying to get my attention, and I saw multiple private chat requests from her had piled up. I connected privately, unmuted, and said, “Hey.”
“What the fuck kind of modern dance was that?” she asked. “You shouldn’t pull that shit on camera—Ricochet says he’s going to put the capture up on YouTube, but set it to bad Bolivian psytrance.”
Before I could cleverly respond with “There’s good Bolivian psytrance?” Imogen said, “Let me show you.”
Playback began in her window—it was me, from six minutes ago, starting to listen to “The Awakening.” The video chat software had caught my reaction, which Imogen (and Ricochet apparently) had started recording. I watched a smile spread across my recorded face and then suddenly I was squirming around and flailing in my chair, laughing out loud and then shrieking with delight, eyes squeezed tightly shut, until the song ended and I regained some semblance of awareness.
I rubbed my face repeatedly, trying to stave off the urge to listen to the track again. Something about that singer’s voice—I felt like I recognized it. I felt like I needed to hear it again to be sure. I felt like I needed to hear it again regardless. A lot.
“That reaction . . . it’s not normal,” I said.
“Not exactly, no.”
“Did it happen to you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Mocha said she fell out of her chair when she heard it the first time.”
“Shouldn’t we tell someone?” I asked wearily.
“We are in fact telling people. We’re telling thousands of people on our blogs. Well, in your case dozens, but still.”
“It’s more than dozens, and I have the easily hacked JavaScript hit counter to prove it.”
Then a flash of inspiration struck. In hindsight, this inspiration could be traced back to the original invention of sequential storytelling, but to me, in that moment, it felt like pure genius was flowing through my veins.
“These two tracks are part of an album,” I said. “They are intended to be heard back to back.”
Imogen’s eyes lit up. “Pipe the audio through your chat client and we can listen together.”
You would be correct to ask yourself why the two of us would knowingly repeat a listening experiment that had previously caused documented spasms and collapses. Totally legit question—for someone who hasn’t heard this music. It’s like asking a junkie if she wants more smack right after watching her girlfriend OD. The answer, sadly, is always yes.
A familiar warm rush swept up over me as the music started up, but the difference this time was I was also hearing Imogen’s voice in my headphones at the same time. “Overture” had no vocals, so instead I was hearing Imogen moaning softly, and maybe I was moaning too. Our eyes were locked on each other—well, on each other’s chat windows, anyway. Her chat window was maximized on my screen, and for a few moments I thought I could just reach through that window and caress her face, absorb her skin into mine�
�and then “The Awakening” began, and Imogen and I fell immediately silent.
Because Beautiful Remorse had a singer, and her voice was glorious and immense. Her voice lit up a circuit between Imogen and me. An unstoppable flow of psychic information passed between us. I knew Imogen and what she felt and who she was, and because I knew these things about her, I knew she also knew these things about me. And I began to be terrified, and I knew she was too.
Then the song was over. I was breathless, covered in sweat, shivering with fear. Imogen looked flushed, like the color saturation on my screen had suddenly red-shifted.
“God, I feel so stupid,” she said. “I had no idea.”
“Is that cool?” I asked.
“I mean, sure. Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be?”
“I’m just—I’m still figuring it out myself.”
“That’s totally cool,” she said, and it wasn’t awkward at all.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I just—sometimes living clear across the country from you is not my favorite thing.”
“I know the feeling,” I said, which wasn’t a giant cliché at all. “Listen, you wanna hear those tracks again?” I was asking a question, but I was already starting the music.
Track 03
I knew a product manager at Bandcamp. Not in person or anything, but we got to be email buddies after I became one of the first bloggers in the world to start paying attention to his site. His name or handle or whatever was Carlos at Bandcamp dot com, and after the first few times I linked to some new band on his site, Carlos at Bandcamp dot com emailed me to say thanks and would I help him test some new embed code, which got me onto a private chat channel for Bandcamp employees, just for the duration of the project. But by the time the project was over, I was one of the gang and they never kicked me out.
I jumped online that Monday morning, exhausted and exhilarated after the weekend’s adventures, saw the random chitchatty chitchat of a bunch of developers and music nerds, and could barely comprehend how mundane everything seemed in light of the absolute lightning this company had on its unwitting hands. Carlos at Bandcamp dot com was usually late for work and today was no exception, so I had time to kill.