The wiry dyke onstage was hunched over the mic so intensely that her veins were visible, livid. Olive combats and a grungy, washed out Muthaland t-shirt … museum-grade, thought Leftova. Fuckoff big brown biker boots and an electric blue electric guitar slung at her side. Rockstar – pretty much an anomaly then, when it all happened online, where distances didn’t matter and they could even recreate the smell of a singer’s sweat. Further back, the band – three more dykes in jeans and retro cool sweaty t-shirts, using instruments like weapons of mass destruction. Leftova found the harmony in the discord and surfed it, moving almost imperceptibly, head thrown right back and drinking it all in through her jugular.
Songs, screams and encores later, the crowd raised their wristfeeds towards the stage, fists clenched and teeth bared in that moment when individuals go mob. Then a deep, dark hush as the singer walked right to the edge of the platform, leaned towards the audience, the mic loose in her hand suddenly. Hands stretched towards her, majorly gendermixed groupies, enthralled. Skin, vocalist, lead axe and mostly lyricist for The Indefinite Article made eye contact with the abyss and spoke. “You. Are responsible. For yourself.” she stated flatly, her right hand with the mic in it fell limp to her side, she nodded once, bounced offstage and headed to the bar.
Leftova looked round; what had felt like a serious stadium was, of course, just Charmageddon on a Friday night. There was maybe a couple of hundred people there, probably mostly queers, but these days it took an interrogation to find out and you likely only bothered if you wanted to get laid and were fussy about it. She checked her feed; looked like she’d recorded the gig OK, but if she hadn’t it wasn’t a train smash – there’d be at least a hundred copies online by the morning, studio quality. Skin looked up as she approached the bar and grinned, “New song went down good, hey?” Leftova grinned back, “Lo-5 will be viral by now yeah.” They logged on to ::beatsn0w:: and watched the hits rack up. “Oh man, imagine if singers still got paid!” said Skin, “Not that I’m desperate for bucks right now, but shit, a few more never hurts.” “Ah, the plight of the tortured artist …” said Leftova and they both rolled their eyes. “You ever pay for music?” asked Leftova and Skin shook her head, “Don’t know anyone who ever has either.”
Skin rubbed a hand through very sweaty, very short hair and scanned the room. Looked like the rest of the band was well on its separately collective way to oblivion; dancing, kissing, drinking. Spiky, blue haired Ashtray, pulling into somebody androgynous looking, one hand clutching a green bottle of lager, the other clutching a hip not her own. Skinhead Dragon kissing her lover, Star, in the corner and little, pixie-ish Boi Soldier just grooving on her own on the dancefloor, still rushing, spaced out from the gig.
::beatsn0w:: signals constantly pulsed on Skin’s wristfeed – hits, comments and questions about the gig and Lo-5. “Ha!” said Skin, “Top gotta-know is whooooo is Skin in lurve with, whoooo is Lo-5 for?” and Leftova said, “Well?” “Me?” said Skin, “A dream? A ghost? The world? Death? Nobody? I don’t fucking now at all.” “You put a shitload of emotion in there for someone without a target,” Leftova commented and Skin narrowed her eyes a bit, thoughtfully. “Actually I just seriously don’t know … it’s like … jacking in, tapping in, tuning in … ag, it just happens hey.” They touched their beer bottles together in one of those comradely salutes and set about the business of drinking and talking shit and accumulating decent hangovers.
“I,” said Skin to a doorway, as she wobbled home on foot later, “am in love with night air on my skin.” The empty doorway seemed unimpressed, so Skin tried to wave her cigarette at it a little more pointedly, “I am in love,” she repeated, “with the way my feet just bounce on this tarmac.” The doorway, which really was well and truly empty, continued being impassive. “I am in luuuurve,” she said, swaying just a little, “with everydamnfuckingthing in the world.” At that point, Skin managed to get her keypass to connect with the ID pad, the door opened and she fell into the lobby of her apartment block and proceeded to navigate erratically up to her little hamster-cage in the city.
Daybreak thwarted by blackout shades, Skin woke to a faint and insistent bleeping – she’d left her wristfeed on and ::beatsn0w:: was still signalling a stream of reactions. She deactivated it, snapped its coil wristband off and stood under a shower for about three million centuries. It took ages to scrub the sharpie scrawl off and the handwriting was so lousy she couldn’t work out whether she had written, “apophenia is the new quadrophenia” or somebody else had. And if somebody else had done it, she had less than no idea who. At least she’d woken up alone and there were no visible bruises.
Dressed in faded hipster denim and a t-shirt that had seen better days, Skin armed herself with orange juice and risked opening a blackout shade. Rain streamed past the small window over a small square below – no sky visible. Feet up on the windowsill, Skin shot one photograph from the same angle she did every day whenever she woke up. Architecture texture distorted by glass and rain; yet another lo-res digital image showing nothing and expressing nothing – not even time. A thousand or so images by now, all tagged and filed as “sighs matter.”
She flicked on her audiostream and it cranked to life with Audible Punctuation; tripsonic stuff from India, pure instrumental maniacs that the Indefinite Article had been trading mashups with for the past few months. Audible Punctuation had taken Khoi San language, translated it into computer code, then translated that into music – then added Qawwali and Bhangra.
The result was insane and even more insane once Skin and the Indefinite Article had layered on raw guitar and laconic lyrics. ::beatsn0w:: ate it up and when Ginger Berlin added visuals to some tracks, the whole multimedia snarlup became nightclub fodder for weeks at a time. With Audible Punk’s latest, “Rambo Juice” as a backtrack, Skin grabbed her mic and slammed along.
I am in love
with the air on my skin
I am in love
with the tarmc bounce
I am in love
with everything
Another layer and a delay and two Skins muttered hoarsely over the music. She added a third and it sounded like a meditation. She fired it off to the band and within the hour, Dragon’s update came back. Bass guitar and Dragon screaming, “I am hurting / I am her thing!” Skin presumed Dragon had pissed Star off again. Later on, Ashtray sent back her track – a complex and very sparse guitar thing that bounced beautifully off the rest of it. And then Boi Soldier sent a low hum – Skin couldn’t even begin to guess at its origins. Boi was known for her offbeat approach and often added sounds made by crazy stuff like toasters and vibrators.
Funny how toasters had survived techonology and revolutions. Comforting though.
They released the beast out into cyberspace for the fans to add visuals to, mash up, react to. Instant gratification, instant response and a short shelf-life. Art as disposable as anything else the consumers out there wanted. If they were lucky, hardcore collectors would keep it alive and maybe a few bars and clubs too, where retro was anything that happened last Wednesday, usually.
Boi Soldier had got hooked by some twittering microblogger out there for an interview.
Excerpt:
Q: Why do you do it?
A: Same reason anybody does – because I want to and more importantly, I need to.
Q: Why?
A: Question and expression.
Q: That’d make a good track title.
A: Somebody’ll probably do it 5 mins after you publish, if we haven’t already.
And of course, they did.
No comments:
Post a Comment