“Maroon Steel Daffodil” :: the check is in the mail :: Part 2
It’s hot.
Machines and bodies struggle.
The air conditioner and the air purifier hiss while Mother snores. It’s a three part harmony in noise, engineered for comfort.
I’m looking at the results of a session on the piano on the monitor. My handwritten notes of the chord progression are planted in the keyboard as a totemic analog of what I’m trying to do.
It’s not bad, but the timing of the performance will need to be tightened up in places. I wonder how that will affect groove…
A significant part of it is improvised, with 12 variations recorded. I’ll scavenge the best parts of all of them to fabricate the final “performance”.
I can hear the TV turn on downstairs through the headphones. “Highway to Heaven” again. The machines continue to color the backdrop of sound in the house. Somewhere, my dog is digging against the hardwood floor, asleep. His scratches a cadence of possibility that will never materialize.
I push in a patch cord to complete the setup for a fourth voice on the piece. It’s meant for the upper register; a compliment to the piano I just recorded.
It drones on and then echos to a quarter beat, slowly smearing its way into digital silence.
Its chordal compliment sits in a register below the piano, yowling its waveforms through a simulated guitar amplifier on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Occasionally its feedback provides a counterpoint melody a fifth of an octave higher up, rough and ready; organic, even.
I like the sound but not sure how it fits yet. It’s not integrated well. Clumsy, even. But it’s early and I’m still finding my way through the piece. It will slowly reveal itself to me on its own terms in its own time.
I am Dr. Frankenstein — “Frankenshteen” — in pursuit of a vision.
I have all of the important parts. The theme and the story. A through line of intentionality. The characters are forming up, and a plot is slowly congealing out of possibility and opportunity like a freshly peeled Polaroid.
The piece requires a holistic approach that fuses the natural (such as it is) with the synthetic. The organic with the machine. The improvised with the manufactured. A piano in harmony with industrialized waveforms. An attempt at the sublime through counterpoint and juxtaposition. God, it sounds so pretentious.
The droning sound of a nebulizer announces itself, cutting through the noise floor of the air conditioner, the purifier and my own incessant internal monologue. Michael Landon is admitting he is an angel to a disbelieving audience. I can hear Mother struggle to inhale, slowly suffocating under the weight of her condition, of all the choices she made — and didn’t — over the years. Her struggle a sum total of those decisions and boiled down into a moment that echos, slowly smearing its way into silence.
Mother, is there medication in that?
She slowly shakes her head while she continues to struggle like a beached whale out of its depth.
The room carries a faint acidic odor. And it’s dark with shades drawn and heavy blue shadow cast over the furniture.
I snap off the head of a plastic tube containing the meds and add it to the device she is clutching to her face.
The nebulizer continues to drone dispassionately, and yet comfortingly. Water vapor emerges from the tube and her breathing becomes more regular.
Eventually, I walk back upstairs.
I push a fader up on the bass line I’ve been working on. It adds a bed of fuzzy foreboding that drones dispassionately, and yet comfortingly. It creates a sense of terrain that defines the landscape of sound for the piece. It’s woozy and delirious from the tape-like processing. Geologic time expressed as waves, become tectonic.
The concordance of biology and machine thins out. Mother’s device has stopped. I can hear her shambling across the room now, dropping into her chair. Her computer wheezes into action, barely capable. Sharp clicks of the mouse add a subtle Samba rhythm. She stifles a cough; convulsing through the rise and fall of it.
What is this fascination we have with technology? Is it parasitical? When did this relationship start? Is Fire considered technology? What do you think? Maybe the first real tech back in the day when we lived in caves and worried about predators both within and without…
…A caveman engulfed in flames reflected in the wild eyes of a cheetah quietly witnessing a crime. A woman looks defiant and feral. The animal backs away slowly…
…A mother struggling to breathe in the presence of the ineffable. On TV, Michael Landon’s voice comforts a character wrestling with its recognition…
…A lone piano. Surrounded by the unnatural.
A lone piano. The danger within and without expressed as noise, harmonized and whispering, engineered for conspiracy.
A lone piano. The droning sound aches with ridiculousness.
I make some adjustments to the alto voice currently expressing deep regret: a synthesizer articulating its glassy remorse as shining crystals, echoing and smeared. It’s beautiful. I modify its signal path to make a trip through some vacuum tubes. The high-end frequencies break apart exquisitely as the electrons jump across the filament wire in a leap of faith.
It’s a cacophony of defiance clamoring for understanding in the face of chaos.
A transmutation of the natural into the ethereal.
But this is only an arrangement of tumult. Not an orchestration of sound. Not a choreography of tone. For now, I’m only interested in the babel of audio waves in the service of constructing a picture. A scene that suggests.
The machines continue to hum; continue to provide comfort on this hot day. Mother’s raspy cough demonstrates the ineffable, the inevitable, as she is slowly suffocates while sliding headlong into dementia.
A lone piano. Encircled by entropy.
The check is in the mail.