The Kimota Anthology (16 page)

GOOD VIBRATIONS

by Simon Kewin

Mark E Moon put his empty pint glass down onto the bar, looked up at the barman and said, “So, what year have we reached?”

Around him, the bar definitely seemed to be taking on the right sort of appearance. By his expert judgement they were now some time in early 1981, perhaps even late 1980. The clothes of the other people in the bar were definitely turning towards the post-punk: some chains and spiky hair visible amongst the New Romantic frippery. The music playing on the jukebox had taken on a rawer edge, more energetic and simplistic where, just earlier, it had been slower, more melodic and varied. To most people, he knew, the difference was negligible; it was all just some rhythmic-era music. The Beatles or Beethoven, something like that.

But nearly two thousand years of collecting had given him a good ear for the form, and the distinctions were clear to him. He didn’t really need to ask the barman, but this highly-muscled, long-haired, gruff, tattooed figure happened to be an avatar of the ship’s consciousness, as well as pulling the pints.

“December 1980. John Lennon has just been shot. Wanna start collecting?”

Moon wandered over to the jukebox. He had created a classic, glitzy Wurlitzer model, one of the few fixed items in the room that was otherwise rigged to shift to reflect the particular era that the
Motorcycle Emptiness
was moving through. Other collectors he knew just used a little clock displaying the year on some screen or something. Or they actually fabricated a retro “flight-deck” with all the buttons and flashing lights and manually controlled where the ship flew to. At least, they had the last time he had spoken to any of them. That was, admittedly, a long time ago.

He looked at the records now available on the jukebox - plenty of post-punk and ska classics - The Teardrop Explodes, XTC, The Specials - just the sort of thing he was currently looking for. As he watched, several familiar singles by The Clash appeared in the selection, replacing those of The Human League.

To his left, The Jam were shambling onto the tiny, corner stage, Weller’s battered electric guitar slung across his back, Butler holding his drumsticks up like a weapon. All three of them - Foxton, Weller and Butler - eyeing Wham!, who were making way for them, with an undisguised distaste.

“OK,” said Moon to the room in general, “this is far enough. Turn us around and put the needle to the record.”

Instantly, he felt the slight shifting that told him the
Motorcycle Emptiness
was manoeuvring, no longer just flying in a straight line away from Earth. No-one else in the bar appeared to notice, each carried on talking, laughing, drinking and singing. Just as they had been created to. Two leather-and-denim clad Heavy Metal fans whooped and shouted as they huddled around a game of Space Invaders near the bar.

The ship dropped out of subluminal and executed a gentle Immelmann so that it was pointing back Earthwards, allowing itself to drift away at 99.99999999999% of the speed of light. Slow enough for all of the precious space-time vibrations to ebb slowly by it. The
Motorcycle Emptiness
began to listen, to feed. Moving along a precise, delicately controlled path, spiralling slowly outwards, it danced around the circumference of this particular stratum of Earth’s electromagnetic bubble, its ghostly quantum corona. It started to sample space, to taste the faint, faint fuzz of background noise, the slightest of vibrations on the atomic and subatomic level within which, painfully slowly, patterns could be discerned. Sound, pictures, music. Like recreating a painting by spraying one brushful of dots onto canvas, then another, then another. The
Motorcycle Emptiness
did move through normal space, but only coincidentally. Really, it swam in an ocean of sound and vision - archaeological layers of musical space discernible only to its amazing powers of perception.

Slowly, painfully slowly, the music began to form. Not that he was impatient. Virtual immortality gave you a wonderful sense of patience. And this was what he loved to do. There were many, he knew, that couldn’t take the aimlessness and meaninglessness of their near-infinite lives, and turned destructive, or self-destructive. He had spent a week on Earth a little over three centuries earlier and felt absolutely no desire to return.

Poor, shattered, scattered Earth. Perhaps it would have been better if alien life of some sort had been encountered after all, if humanity hadn’t found itself to be so alone, if it hadn’t become so crushed by introspection. Only about half the people lived down on the surface now - here and there, where it was habitable. The rest lived on a rag-tag assortment of satellites and moons, both natural and human-made, or out on Ganymede, Titan or Charon. Or even wandering nomadically and alone in one sort of ship or another. Back home, they listened mainly to chaotic music now. As was ever the case, it was music that suited, reflected, sprang from, the times. Most people didn’t bother much with music from the rhythmic age, the classical golden age, except perhaps for the occasional retro concert, an occasional foray for them into high culture. Most of the music broadcast to the universe now was arhythmic, deliberately confused. He listened to it himself sometimes. He could see the attraction.

But there were plenty, like him, that really cared about the golden age - enough to want to archive and capture it all, to make sure that all, or as close to all as possible, was recovered. It was reckoned that the archive now approached 96% completion for music produced during the electromagnetic age, when broadcasts were being made and thus cast out into the aether. For his particular period, say 1955-2015, the figure was reckoned to be 97%. This was a guess, of course - no-one really knew how much music was made at that time, and occasionally, previously unknown - obscure or transient - artists still turned up, to the great excitement of everyone working in the field. Perhaps a raw but enthusiastic punk band who only ever jammed together for a few sessions in someone’s garage. Or someone producing some stuff in a home studio or using an early computer. Or maybe even, treasure of treasures, played a previously uncaptured live concert.

It still happened. 200 years earlier, over a period of just 12 years, on the opposite side of Earth’s expanding radio-wave bubble, he, Mark E Moon, had hit a golden seam of previously lost Public Enemy, crisp and unfuzzed once enough of the signal had been collected and merged, a beautiful, perfect seam of raw 1980s music encoded into the ghostly particle vibrations of deep space. The recording had turned out to be 99.99% pure - a previously lost golden age transmission from an unknown New York night club, broadcast on a small, local radio station. It had made his name. In the academic discourse, it was still referred to as the
Mark E Moon
session. It was generally considered, he believed, to be
embryonic
.

But as 100% capture was approached, the chances of finding a gap inevitably went down. Maybe they would never get there. But perhaps it didn’t matter, perhaps the search, this thing that filled his infinite life, was what mattered. Or perhaps they would eventually move onto the music made prior to the electromagnetic age, from before the time when the slight vibrations in spacetime were produced. Maverick research philosophers postulated that it would be possible to do just that - to capture music even though it had never been electromagnetically broadcast in any way. Mozart playing his own opera scores. Mozart
writing
those scores. The music was all there, they said, encoded into the deterministic structure of the universe, the eternal, inevitable by-product of the way creation, the universe, was, is, will be - discernible if you simply knew enough about it. Humanity simply didn’t, that was all.

Maybe. Who knew? For now, he would settle for another strike like the Public Enemy one. He wasn’t impatient, truly, but still, it seemed about time.

Thirty-four years later, the barman said suddenly, “Moon ... there’s something out there.” He was sitting at the bar, drinking beer and looking on appreciatively at Kraftwerk, who were playing a mesmeric performance on the small stage, the subsonics making the room and his ribcage boom in synchronicity. The barman’s eyes seemed to be focused on infinity, even though the room was the same size as usual. “It ... moving, moving, moving on up,” he continued, “I can ... swimming in the water ... there is water at the bottom of the ocean.”

“What is it?” asked Moon, a little surprised at the barman’s incomprehensibility. It was unheard of for ship personalities - ships - to go wrong. “What is happening?”

A new band were on the cramped, poorly-lit stage now, a physical representation of whatever musical energies the
Motorcycle Emptiness
was experiencing. He knew them all, knew every genre, style, form and type of rhythmic-age music. Unlike 99% of humanity, he could identify and differentiate between Motown, baroque, thrash, blues, bhangra, soul, northern soul, plainsong, surfpunk - whatever. But this new band wasn’t any of those, didn’t fit into any of the known categories. It wasn’t even close.

It was like ...

He turned from the bar and slowly picked his way between scattered, beer-stained tables towards the corner of the room where the stage was. Behind him, the barman was muttering to himself, over and over,
like endless rain, like endless rain
...

The new band were at once familiar and strange. Much about them he could recognise - the black clothes, the sunglasses, the long hair - but at the same time he had absolutely no idea who they were. He recognised none of them. A new band? But there was more to it than that. It was immediately clear that the four figures standing on the cramped stage were not human. At least, not completely, not only human. They moved in new ways; the way their eyes were concealed suggests something insectoid; the drummer had six arms, a drumstick in each hand; the guitarists’ hands each had 10 fingers, each digit long and delicate, with a definite claw, a talon even, at its end, like a natural plectrum. Their instruments seemed somehow to be connected to them, even a part of them, as if instrument and performer were merely parts of an old-style cyborganic entity.

They set up, not looking at each other, saying nothing.

Moon walked up to the foot of the stage. He had to know. “Who are you? What are you doing here? What ... what are you called?”

The lead singer smiled back, a reptilian kind of smile, saying simply, “Dig the new breed!” before launching the band into their first number.

Like the band, the music was at once familiar and alien. Chord progressions and keys, riffs and vocal inflections he had heard a million times before. But the structure was fundamentally different, there was an extra dimension as if many tracks were being played simultaneously, although distinct melodies weren’t discernible. They played with an inhuman intensity, Shiva on the drums maintaining a beat more complicated and intricate than any a human had ever produced. The guitarists’ fingers were a blur. The total sound was bewildering, hard to grasp somehow, as if some significant part of it was inaudible to the human ear.

Then it clicked, like moving from black-and-white to colour, mono to stereo. He could suddenly hear the music. And it was wonderful - rapturous, intense, frightening, beautiful, captivating. It filled him, transported him. It was at once familiar and like nothing he had ever heard before. Everything else, the room, the
Motorcycle Emptiness
, the universe, his thoughts, his identity, all started to slip away, seeming less important.
This is it
he thought to himself.
This is the root, the essence of it all. The golden age music. This is great … this is … this …

And for Mark E Moon, then, there was only the music.

The band played a short set - eight songs and no encore. Throughout, the barman, and all the other non-existent people in the room looked on as mesmerised as Moon -captivated, staring rapt and vacant at the stage. No-one moved. The
Motorcycle Emptiness
itself began to drift directionless in space. Eventually the singer, with a final, sly “Thank you!” strode off stage, followed by the other band members walking in close formation as if they, too, were intrinsically interconnected. Everyone else in the room remained where they were - transfixed, lost. For each of them - human, ship or mannequin - there was the music, gliding and thrilling through them, and nothing else.

One hundred and twenty-three years passed by. During this time, the new musical pattern passed like a life-form, a virus, from the
Motorcycle Emptiness
, to the other nomadic ships, to Charon, to Luna, to Earth, reproducing itself electromagnetically each time it was replayed, mutating and evolving to suit each new host. And each became just as enraptured. Each forgot about everything else, became lost in music, gave their conscious and subconscious minds over to the music, the glorious, new music. Soon, humanity in its entirety stood enthralled, invaded, defeated. Civilisation stood still, apart from the occasional, indistinct tapping of a foot.

A life-form feeding on musical vibrations, evolving in an infinite environment of organised, coherent electromagnetic waves, its DNA-analogue structures mutating in time to the harmonies it absorbed. It
was
what it
ate
; it became the music, and the music, evolving, changing, became
it
. Raw music, the product of human minds, transformed, sublimated, transcended like the basic chemical elements becoming complex molecules, becoming the amino-acids of life.

Like a virus, but not a virus. After another seventy-seven years, Moon emerged suddenly from his introspective fugue. The music was still there, in his mind, but so was
he
, his own self. Moving, he found his arms, his legs, his body flowed with the rhythm of it. The melodies twined around his thought-patterns. Its beauty was in his eyes. He could see patterns in the air, in the universe, that had never been there before.