Hard, Soft and Wet. Melanie McGrath
than the rest of us. Or maybe it’s just that they haven’t learnt how to be full-on hypocrites yet.
No, it’s not the perfect communication, but it’s damned near. An imperfect kind of telepathy.
I leave the screen for a moment and fetch myself a can of root beer. Cat follows at a hopeful trot. Mac’s answer is scrolling up on my return.
>I’d go along with that. Younger people are less hypocritical, definitely. Oh wow, it’s just started to rain.:-)
I glance towards the window, notice twists of rainwater spiralling down the panes and whitened in the light of the desk lamp. Cat yells.
>Here too.
How weird.
>What else?
>Well, issues. When I was a teenager… I think back and do my best to stifle the memory … it was nuclear war and trades unions. These days it’s animal rights, anti-racism, ecology and homelessness. We didn’t really think about that stuff. Oh I don’t know. Things change so *fast* is all.
Animal rights. Cat’s begging has become so insistent I’m driven to leaving the screen and pouring him some Go-Cat biscuits. On my return I tap ‘A’ to send the mail, remember all the points I’ve forgotten to mention and open another e-mail file.
>The decline in trust - another generational cliché. Can’t rely on your education to equip you for a job, there aren’t any jobs, can’t rely on your parents to stay together because half of them won’t, can’t rely on care when care means weirdos and sex abuse, can’t rely on god and the church ditto, can’t even turn to that old teenage staple, sex, on account of AIDS. Or how about this? A generation used to the idea that the only power they’ve really got is consumer power. Disenchanted with politics, enamoured of product.
I tap in ‘A’ again and take myself off for a pee. No word from Mac on my return.
>Mac, hello, I’m talking to you!
Electronic silence prevails. I wait a little while, humming over my screen like a wasp circling a honey trap but no word arrives. Mac has taken on such a sudden and unexpected importance in my life and yet I’ve never met him.
TUESDAY
This is Mac’s eventual offering, paraphrased:
Even though the culture is ridden with premillennial tension the great thing about living at the end of the century is that there’s at least the theoretical possibility of being able to start out fresh. New beginnings, redemption, the Second Chance. So typically American.
WEDNESDAY
A disconcerting lunchtime revelation. Mac is not American. I suppose I should have noticed that he doesn’t spell like an American, but I was too busy making assumptions.
>Why didn’t you tell me before? I typed.
>The Internet makes national borders irrelevant. He typed back.
Somehow all this matters terribly. The beautiful edifice of projections tumbles. Macadamia the California nut is actually Mac a British human being … which makes me what? Some lovesick clown dreaming of California on a computer.
Dawn arrives, but I don’t sleep. I drift about in the pale half-life between unconsciousness and dreams.
FRIDAY
A ticket to Daniel’s DJ event arrives, along with his World Wide Web address. I spend ten minutes leafing through its two main sections, Boredom and Bedroom. Bedroom is the life story of his ambient techno album, Boredom is everything else that has ever happened to Daniel and is capable of being distilled down into two-sentence sound bytes and graffiti graphics. A lot, in other words.
SATURDAY
The moon is made of gorgonzola
Determined not to be entirely ignorant in the face of ‘the scene’ event tomorrow, I pass much of the day in Ambient Soho, Unity, Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus and with a pile of NMEs, Melody Makers, iDs and Mixmags catching up on being young. Nonetheless, I feel like someone trying to swing. My one comfort is that at least I now know what ambient techno is. It’s aural wallpaper, slews of electronic sounds devoid of narrative. Future noyz. Geek pop. Which makes Daniel a geek pop king.
Four hours with the music press has taught me something else too: Geek pop kings make it big on the quiet. They don’t appear on the covers of NME and Melody Maker. Aphex Twin, the Orb, MLO, Muziq, Wagon Christ, Cosmic Baby – a bunch of egghead boys with tiny marble eyes and thin white features bounded by fuzzy hair and street style. Mostly they work alone, up in the teen-boy heaven of circuitry and kit control, remixing, remodelling, switching names as fast as record labels, in constant drift and flux; sampling, distorting, sequencing, dipping, cruising around the musical ether. Occasionally they collaborate – two tides of repressed testosterone converging in a sound wave.
Geek pop albums – Lunar 7, Electron Pod, Weimar Supernova – are named after bits of Germano-Japanese technology and scifi tropes, presented with sleeve notes quoting from French deconstructionist theory and The Brady Bunch. The albums are divided into quadrants and sectors, their tracks given numinously impenetrable titles. ‘Phragmal Synthesis Part 3’. ‘Nexus Techtronics’. ‘Tokyono’. ‘Space Warp Exodus’. Albums more like pieces of machinery, heavy with devices, levers, buttons, musical gadgetry, technical gewgaws, bytes and showy displays of novelty. Sometimes a secret track lurks beyond the album’s seeming end, causing entire Internet newsgroups to spring up in order to explore more fully the profundities of geek pop secret tracks, the digital generation’s equivalent of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ played backwards.
From ‘A Thousand Plateaux’, a geek pop manifesto, written by two French theoreticians, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari:
A musical consistence-machine, a SOUNDMACHINE (not for the reproduction of tones) one, that, molecularises the sound material, atomises and ionises and captures the COSMIC energy. If this machine should have another structure than the synthesiser, in that it unites the modules, original elements and working elements, the oscillators, generators and transformers and brings together the micro intervals it makes the sound process and the production of this process itself, audible. In this way it brings us together with more elements that go further than the sound material. It unites the contradicting elements in the material and transfers the parameters from a formula to another. The synthesiser, with its consistence-operation, has, a priori, taken the position of establishing in the synthetic decision: this is a synthesis of molecular and cosmic, of material and energy and no more of form and material, ground and territory. Philosophy no more as a synthetic judgement but as synthesiser of thought, to allow thought to travel, to make it mobile, and make it to an energy of the cosmos as one sends sound off to travel…
A reminder, incidentally, of a course in formal logic I took at college:
It is raining
It is not raining
Therefore Paris is in France.
And the moon is made of Gorgonzola.
SUNDAY FOLLOWING
The Big Chill. Daniel’s hair is plaited into embryonic dreads and stuffed into a multi-coloured woollen hat with woollen tube extensions running from its centre, giving him the appearance of a sprouted octopus at carnival.
Neo-hippies crash on sweaty mattresses caressed by the velvet pall of ganja smoke and Daniel’s ambient techno seepage. Chillin’. Overhead a video jock projects computer-generated images across the walls as Daniel mixes the Radio One Top 40 live into his set. The room so dark that,