Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
In the Troll Market
Monday, May 17th, 2010
The job was just annoying. In spite of all the things Miranda remembered about the year she’d spent here as a kid, somehow she’d forgotten the cold.
Now Riggs, the lead singer, wanted a certain sound from a David Bowie song. Couldn’t remember which one. So Miranda raided every used record store the guys from the studio could name, collected LPs, singles, Japanese-only picture disks… Somehow, this was part of the recording engineer’s job. She played them over the mixing room speakers, while Riggs drank and did crossword puzzles, badly, in pen.
Space Oddity.
“Yeah, that’s right,” said Riggs, “Thought it had spacemen or astronauts.”
He could have saved her days of effort if he’d just said that. All she said was, “It’s a Moog.”
Could she find one? asked the producer.
It took a week of asking, begging, and, at one point, recording and mixing a boys’ school choir for free to get information, but she found one. Turned out the owner both knew Miranda’s father and loved Rigg’s records.
Took another week to move, set up, tune, tweak, and generally fix it.
“No, not that sound,” said Riggs, “that little needly-needly-zuzz bit right there.”
“Stylophone,” said Miranda. “Little gadget you play by touching a pen on a wire to a metal plate keyboard to complete the circuit.” Hadn’t been made since the 60’s. In a city on an island in the arctic, it was sure to be even harder to find than the Moog.
She went to the markets, literally underground, in the now-roofed-over valleys between the mountains upon which the city was built. The troll markets, where you could find anything.
But there was too much, so she went to Arduhl, who’d been her father’s assistant twenty years before, and, she remembered, his engineer. He sent her to a man who never left his basement flat, but knew every detail of what came and went through the markets with a trainspotter’s mania for detail.
“There’s a couple of them,” said the basement guy. “I know where. But in return, you have to tell me something I don’t know. About the markets.”
She set up her Nagra under a seller’s booth, recorded 24 hours of market sounds, brought a stack of reel-to-reel tapes to the basement.
His eyes were moist as he shoved a crumpled paper into her hand and shooed her out.
The stylus wire was loose, but she fixed that. And if it gave Riggs a little shock with every note, well, she couldn’t fix everything.
For the curious, a Stylophone demo video .
The Day Without a Story
Friday, May 7th, 2010
It was the day without a story. At least, if we were reading the dials and blinking lights correctly.
The fictiometer sat in the middle of Professor Woodfern’s desk, whirring and clanking.
“According to this,” he said, nose grazing the pages of the operation’s manual as he read, “we’re in a state of storylessness. It has no beginning and no end.” He looked up, and got that voice he had when he dictated articles on critical theory, “An atemporal state of irremediable middleness. A paramodern and yet curiously prelapsarian condition attended by the utter suspension of causality.”
“Meaning?” I said. The machine was beginning to overheat, so I hoisted the nearest window open a couple inches.
“Events happen, and other events follow, but nothing causes anything else. It’s all isolated, as if the laws of profluence had been suspended.” There was a quiver in his voice as he looked out the window, where the shadow of the clock tower didn’t fall on the roses.
An airplane droned overhead.
My scalp tingled.
In the next office, someone sang a tune without words, only to be interrupted by their own laughter.
I picked up the operation’s manual, and clonked the side of the fictiometer with it the way you’d bang the side of a malfunctioning TV.
The readings didn’t change.
“So it’s true,” I said.
And then, other things happened.