I half-remembered this sound as I was driving home from the grocery yesterday, and it took a little digging to find it again. I heard about Pekko Käppi via Warren Ellis’ blog back in March. Käppi has my number. If I had even more ears, they’d be listening to him too.
He wakes where he always wakes. He has slept in his clothes, and he smells like a fermented towel.
His mother looks in and shakes her head. He blinks at her and pushes off the sheet as she turns away. These gray socks are what’s wrong. Maybe if he could just…
Sleepy. Crazy. Not yet with the world.
The water from the tap is cold. Colder than makes sense, from up there in the tower, exposed to this same summer air, pipes under the lawns warming in the sun, up through the walls…
He leans forward and places a palm on the plaster. The plaster is cool. He wonders why it doesn’t sweat. He wonders whether there’s any coffee, whether his mother will complain as he drinks it, as if it would stunt his growth, as if he were a child.
I like everything about this.
The headphones are getting uncomfortable, but something is going on.
He nudges the tuning knob and the hiss intensifies, pulsing, like the breath of a predator. Deep in the background there are tiny irregular clicks—faint, frightened: the prey? And the hum? The hum is constant over this whole portion of the spectrum, no matter which way he tunes: the night? The sea?
He pulls off the headphones and pushes back the chair. His ears feel like boxers’ ears: hot, flat and raw.
There is motion outside the window. Something in the sky.
He eases the door open, applying a lot of muscle for extra control. The hallway boards want to creak as he bobs silently along with deep knee bends. He’s all joints tonight. He’s all joints every night.
The stairs flex. The front entry holds its breath. The door lets it out. The porch paint peels.
Up above the northern lights are swarming and searing, although this is not the North and it’s the humid heart of summer. Up there must be far from here. Cool, dry and highly-charged. Ionized. Electrified.
The sidewalks lead to the streets. The streets lead to the roads. The roads lead out of town.
The soles of his shoes are vulcanized.
We ended up getting 140 groups to do readings of Boggle and Sneak, for a total of close to 300 people. I’ve been saying that the story of this Maker Faire for me will be that 300 people walked up and knowingly did me a personal favor (and this was on top of the giant-sized favor that my crew of Ed, Andrew, Will and Susan all pulled out.) My main reaction is basically stunned and bewildered gratitude. People can be pretty great!
Ed, Will, Andrew and I spent the day at Maker Faire asking fairegoers to read pages out of Boggle and Sneak in our time machine. Each person or group read a single page, and we’ll be editing all the the pages into chapter-length videos. The readers were great! We had individuals, couples, parents and kids, moms and babies, groups of friends, and a man with the devil on his back. We’re still hoping to get R2D2, but we haven’t been able to get his attention yet.
It’s getting dark.
“Trains,” she says. “You can’t trust ‘em.” She drops sticks on the pile and slowly begins to pace, eyes on the ground. “Just when you think you’re gettin’ somewhere, you end up stranded for half a day.” She sees a stick, and picks it up. “And your feet get tired.” Another stick. “And your legs get tired.” And another. “At least it ain’t rainin’.”
She carries the sticks back, kneels, and sets them on the pile. The crickets seem extra-loud tonight. And the trees. She pauses for a few moments, listening to the dark.
A quarter-inch of cool red flame hunches in the tinder. She purses her lips and blows out a stream of air, and the flame turns orange, and yellow, and begins to spread. “You there?” she asks. She looks around at the empty clearing. Maybe they won’t come.
The fire snaps and a wet branch begins to hiss. A circle of wan light begins to expand. At its edge, a wrecked leather shoe begins to appear, and a sock with a hole, and a toe. “Evenin’, Harry,” she says.
Another shoe appears, and filthy cuffs, and a pair of boots, and ruined overalls, and another pair of shoes—freshly shined—and neatly-patched trousers, and a jacket and a shirt, and a coat and a shirt, and a shiny blazer and a faded white shirt. Three noses. Six eyes. A pair of glasses. Thirty fingers, five of which are holding out a flask. She takes it and raises it. “Seems like forever,” she says, and takes a long drink.
I just finished reading a taped-up, yellowed paperback copy of Forfeit by Dick Francis. The setup for the climactic chase sequence starts with the antagonist threatening to kill the protagonist’s wife and ends with his forcing him to chug twelve ounces of whiskey. The point of the whiskey is explicitly ambiguous:
I didn’t know whether Vjoesterod had made me drink for any special purpose or just from bloody-mindedness. I did know that it was a horrible complication to what I had planned to do.
Exactly! It’s a sack race: an arbitrary handicap to make the sequence more interesting. Diabolus ex machina. Does for the third act what a MacGuffin does for the first. An excellent device! Stowing it in my tackle box now…
My mother-in-law won a copy of The Coasters’ Greatest Hits* last Christmas in a white-elephant exchange, and she re-gifted it to me in my stocking. I threw it on in all innocence just now, thinking it would contain anodyne 1950’s R&B. Of course it turned out instead to contain studio confections of the most premeditated kind. Thus false-footed, I misapprehended the album as en eerie artifact from the future:
I. Pre-irony resembles post-irony.
From my generational vantage, nothing is ever so disorienting as the deployment of humor that doesn’t depend upon irony.
I suppose it’s a common characteristic of novelty songs that they contain actors shouting commentary in funny voices, as with the well-known collaborations between Sonic Youth and Mel Blanc. Considering that I wrote my college comprehensive exams on the uses of romantic irony in German literature from 1790 to 1990, a little more romantic irony really shouldn’t surprise me. Even still, I thank god that Clarence “Frogman” Henry doesn’t follow me around all day yelling things like, “You call those shoes?” or “Tongue-tied, mister?”
III. Alien Technology
Advances in digital music production have been accompanied by the near-extinction of instrument-playing studio musicians. Digital simulation and manipulation have become banal, while actual musicianship has become a form of alien technology.
*Those who prefer the formulation “Gnu/Linux” to “Linux” will probably also prefer the formulation “Lieber/Stoller/Coasters” to “The Coasters”. I prefer the term “Gnu/Coasters,” and in particular the old, wooden style of gnu/coasters. Something about the rattling of gnu on a wooden track thrills my heart in a way that newfangled steel-track gnu/coasters can never do.
I’ve been leaving Ryoji Ikeda’s MySpace up and running while I work.
I first started listening to Ikeda when the Microscopic Sound compilation came out in 1999. The rhythmic elements are built out of little squares of white noise, like turning a faucet on and off, or Suicide’s first album, or the old Ice Fever pinball machine. The arhythmic elements (I hesitate to call them melodic) are built out of high-frequency sine waves, basically like sonar pulses, or tinnitus, or icicles falling off your roof.
I enjoy keeping his MySpace up partly because it’s suited to my dime-sized laptop speakers—ideal for reproducing dog-whistle music—and partly because it sounds so neural, like what you’d get if you ran Flanagan’s high-tension tinfoil induction headphones in reverse. When your Swiss Army knife accidentally slices into the 220 volt line, these are the first sounds you hear.
To stop listening to Ryoji Ikeda, please see my Instructable on converting your halo device into a Faraday cage.