Loki's Child Page 5

  There’s a local musician named Willard Wank, who plays a style of music that I call “spazz-jazz.” His group is called the Xenophonic Cabal. Every instrument uses a different tuning system: guitar in 19-tone equal-tempered, synthesizer in mean-tone, washtub bass in quarter-tone, ophicleide in diatonic, vocals in Ling Lun, and electronic feedback in God-knows-what.

  These tuning systems are not compatible with each other.

  It sounds like the vile drums and accursed flutes of the mindless attendants who circle the throne of the blind idiot god Azathoth, the amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity. But less soothing.

  Being a devotee of purist analog recording, Willard records everything on 4-track cassette and releases it on vinyl. His music has been known to burn out computer-controlled helium-cooled cutting heads. I suppose even machines can be driven to suicide.

  Willard accosted me one day and asked me to produce his debut album. “Maybe in the next world, kid,” I replied. “You mean Mars?” said Willard. “Sure, whatever,” I said. “If you record your album on Mars, I’ll produce it for you.”

  Me and my big mouth.

  Willard has a friend named Raymond who works for NASA. Raymond hacked the software of the Mars Rover (and almost got canned) so that he could play music through the atmosphere of Mars and re-record it. He digitized all of Willard’s guitar parts, beamed them off into space, and the Mars Rover beamed them back. It was beyond lo-fi, like the cylinder recorder I made out of rubber bands and aluminum foil when I was a Boy Scout.

  “OK, I’ll produce it,” I groused. “But if you want a hit record, you have to do exactly what I say.”

  I tortured him with farcical mix notes, inspired by an infamous producer who used to show up at the studio zonked out of his mind. “Could you record the sound of a bowl of fruit and put some echo on it, and make the echo sort of a greenish beige color?” I came up with pages of this stuff. Not to be out-weirded, Willard followed every instruction to the letter. He wasn’t about to let me off the hook.

  I stamped my name on it and sent it to a label that does that kind of thing. Now we had to get it on the charts. At my urging, Willard boosted the sales numbers by recruiting his entire fanbase to pre-order the record multiple times from multiple vendors. The stratagem worked: it squeaked onto the Billboard chart at #198.

  Unfortunately, we had a small mishap. The entire first pressing was destroyed in a fire, along with the only copy of the master tape. We didn’t even have a cassette dub. The record never shipped.

  And that’s how I made music history by producing a hit record that doesn’t exist. Record collectors are going to drive themselves up the wall trying to find it.

  The label still had to pay us. Willard received a royalty check for $17, but he spent it all on beer. I asked him how it feels to be a phantom rock star. He replied, “It feels great!”

  Never give up on your dream, kids. Just order my book, Producing Without Listening, and learn the secrets of music industry success.

  10. Hideous Noise Cacophony

  by SCOTTY

  THE BEATOFFS The Beatoffs, led by John Lenin and Paul McCarthy, were the most famous group in the “Punk Skiffle” movement of early-1960s Liverpool. They were mentored by George Merwin, an ex-British Army officer whose iron will and ready fist were barely a match for this unruly group of street toughs. Under Merwin’s tutelage, the Beatoffs became the only Punk Skiffle band to achieve the status of “art.”

  During the same period, rival producer Joe Meek was pioneering Psychedelic Skiffle, while American artists were creating Progressive Skiffle and Glam Skiffle. Skiffle was the predominant form of popular music in the latter half of the 20th century, until it was eclipsed by the popularity of Belligerent Shouting, inspired by the traditional Shouting Choirs of Finland.

  The Beatoffs were introduced to American audiences in 1963, when they invaded the set of the Ed Sullivan show on live television, wearing Redcoat outfits, shooting off antique rifles, and shouting “Bow down to the Queen, you Yankee twats!” This was the beginning of the “British Invasion.” Capitol Records mistakenly promoted them as a “pop” band, and their first concert was attended by 20,000 teenage girls. They were so frightened by the Beatoffs’ aggressive music that they began to scream in fear, and many of them wet their pants. Since that day, it has been traditional for rock fans to greet their idols by screaming as loudly as possible.

  —Omnibus Imperiosus

  I came in the next morning to find DJ Skreechy still banging away at it. No wonder he carries his own espresso machine everywhere in a flight case. He had transformed Jasmine’s spastic folk disaster into something that sounded like it was created by pissed-off robots. It was all done by processing the original tracks; no synths or samples. I helped him with a few mix issues, and Blenderman pronounced it a hit.

  Jasmine was enthralled. She forgot all about “real”; she was seduced by the novelty of hearing herself as a cyborg.

  “That was pretty wild,” Jasmine smirked. “But the next song is really gonna freak people out. I came up with this trance/tribal thing with loops and guitar effects on my computer. It’s like that Beatoffs song, ‘Insurrection #9,’ but it’s super-heavy. It’s called ‘Hideous Noise Cacophony.’”

  She handed a CD to Blenderman. He held it between two fingers like it was radioactive, and gingerly put it into the CD player.

  You know the wheel of karma, where you’re reincarnated over and over, and each time you’re a little higher on the totem pole, until you commit some mortal sin like stepping on a cricket, and BAM!, you’re reincarnated as a bacterium and you have to start all over again? That’s what it was like.

  Finally, it was over. Now I know what eternity feels like.

  Jasmine said, “Oh yeah, I wanna hire George Merwin to write an orchestral arrangement for it.”

  Blenderman said slowly, “You want to hire a legendary producer to arrange… that?”

  “Why not?” she said snottily. “It’s not any worse than what the Beatoffs made him do.”

  “And how, exactly, are you going to get George Merwin?”

  “Oh, we ran into him yesterday at the Lincoln Center. He’s going to be in town all week. He agreed to do it.”

  Blenderman walked away, shaking his head in disbelief.

  Jasmine presided over the Grand Guignol with the attention span of a five-year-old on crack, coming up with brand-new amazing ideas every five minutes. Mitzi contributed to the mayhem by banging wildly on all the orchestral percussion that was brought in; and Sandy discovered the joys of electric cello, sharing her lack of bowing technique courtesy of five gigantic bass amplifiers. I was convinced that all three of them were on drugs, so I had Alpha and Omega follow them everywhere and spy on them. He reported nothing worse than cigarettes, unless they were spiked with PCP.

  George Merwin bravely attempted to keep the production under control, working out arrangements for all the bizarre instruments and noises that Jasmine insisted on incorporating. He made sure that every note, chord, and harmony was in place. Jasmine helped by giving the players contradictory instructions and driving him nuts.

  He may have been a match for the Beatoffs 40 years ago, but Jasmine possessed the arrogance of the spectacularly untalented. Finally, Merwin went completely off his gourd, delivered a brilliantly scathing 10-minute diatribe about Jasmine’s complete lack of professionalism (which she had me record and incorporate into the mix), and walked out, leaving Jasmine, who never learned to read music, to direct the musicians by humming notes to them.

  Jasmine composed some Dada lyrics. Two lines were looped and faded in and out throughout the song: Mitzi saying “I’ll be a sunbeam for Corporate America,” and Jasmine screaming “Die fascist pig!”

  Nothing was sampled. We rented real instruments and/or players for everything. The expense was ludicrous, but Kasugi doesn’t mind a bit. Why? Because they own the studio. Manhattan has the most expensive st
udios in the U.S., and this is the most expensive studio in Manhattan. How expensive? Let’s just say that the cost of two weeks here would buy you a very nice automobile.

  Recording expenses are what the record company calls “recoupable.” Every cent will be accounted for and deducted from the band’s royalties, along with the cost of promotion, touring, music videos, mastering, duplication, packaging, breakage, returns, cartage, bribes, miscellany, and that unprecedented million-dollar advance (before taxes) that is currently being devoured by the cost of living in New York City.

  If the record is a hit, instead of being in the 90 percent of new releases that lose money, nearly all of the money will go to the record company, with additional cuts going to the producer, the engineer, the mixer, the band’s manager, agents, lawyers, music publishers, and anyone else who managed to grab a piece of the record in return for their services. Whatever is left goes to the band. The record could go multi-platinum; but if the expenses exceed the band’s royalties, the band will actually lose money on it, and the record company will threaten to drop them unless they agree to even worse terms for the second record. The band will end up in permanent debt to the record company and spend the rest of their career working it off, renting their lifestyle while they make everyone else rich.

  As soon as they’re judged too old to appeal to the youth demographic, which is about four years away at this point, their leased limos and leased mansions will be taken away, and they’ll go back to whatever jerkwater town they came from. If the record company really wants to screw them, their wages can be garnished to pay back the money they still owe. And just in case they try to get out of it, the Record Industry Association of America has been lobbying to make it harder for musicians to declare bankruptcy.

  There’s a wildly popular “talent search” show on television, and the grand prize is a record contract with a major label. A deluxe vacation in a Turkish prison would be less cruel.

  Blenderman was AWOL for the entire session. I caught George Merwin in the parking lot before he left, and tried to apologize. He said, “I was around when the Beatoffs started a make-believe record label as a tax shelter, and threw money at every lunatic and charlatan who walked in the door. I thought I had seen everything. I was wrong. Those girls don’t belong in a studio. They belong in a zoo!”

  Unexpectedly, he broke into a grin. “You know, I haven’t had a good rant like that in ages. It’s really rather cathartic.”

  The song clocks in at 15:36. If I use surround panning, frequency shelving, selective muting, gain riding, dynamic differentiation, side-chaining, reverb distance, cross-modulation, and temporal fugue, I just might be able to fit everything into the mix and keep it from degenerating into indistinguishable noise.

  But why should I torture my ears for the sake of this 15-minute wankfest that no one will ever listen to all the way through without chemical assistance?

  I’ll do it the Blenderman way. Alpha and Omega are always angling for board time. They can mix and I’ll supervise. In fact, I can supervise from at least fifty miles away with my phone turned off.

  11. Sleaze Queen

  by SCOTTY

  “Hideous Noise Cacophony” is being cut down to a five-minute stereo mix at the tail end of the album. The ladies didn’t object, since they got bored with it halfway through the recording process. Ask me if I care. I get paid by the hour.

  Those ladies know how to waste money.

  But I was completely unprepared for what happened today.

  I came in at noon, after taking a few days off to recover my sanity. I walked down the hall toward Studio B. The door was ajar, and I could hear guitar playing. It was an evil-sounding chromatic riff with a funk rhythm and a lot of string bending, like if Jimi Hendrix joined a thrash metal band. The playing was fluid and effortless. Not many people bother to play that way anymore. Who was in there?

  I opened the door. It was Jasmine.

  Heaven help us.

  She was playing a Strat plugged into a Marshall Plexi. Sandy and Mitzi were sitting at her feet, listening intently.

  Jasmine turned around and saw me. Her face filled with horror. Then the horror turned into an unholy sort of amusement.

  She put the guitar down. “What are you lookin’ at?”

  I was speechless. “Uh– what–”

  “If you tell anyone, you’re dead. I’ll rip off your nuts and shove ’em down your throat. You got that?” There was no sign of the bored, sarcastic, darker-than-thou Gothspeak she had affected up to this point. Her real dialect was Chicago blue-collar, which sounds like a tall-corn Jersey. I thought Da Mare was the only person who actually talked like that.

  “Too late,” I heard Blenderman say. He was standing right behind me. “I heard it too.”

  “Yeah? What are you gonna do about it?”

  Blenderman eyed her. “I don’t get it. Why put us through this elaborate charade?”

  Jasmine put her hands on her hips. “It’s called method acting. Do you know how hard it is to play that bad?”

  “Yeah, but why?” Blenderman insisted.

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Yeah. I really do.”

  “Fine. We’ll show you.” She conferred with her bandmates. She picked up her guitar and cranked the amp, Sandy picked up her bass, and Mitzi sat down at her drum kit.

  Jasmine spoke into the vocal mic. “This song is dedicated to Miss B. It’s called ‘Sleaze Queen.’”

  She played a riff. An actual riff, not the aimless noise I was used to hearing from her. Then the drums and bass came in. They more than competent, they were solid. Was this the same band?

  It was thrash metal, with some fast double-picking. The riffs were more melodic, less atonal, than typical thrash. It had a ’70s metal-meets-Baroque feel. Sandy’s bass and Mitzi’s double kick locked in perfectly with the guitar. I have never heard girls play like that. Come to think of it, less than a dozen metal bands in the entire world are that tight.

  Blenderman kicked me. I ran to the SonoViz and hit the record button.

  The vocals came in. But the singer wasn’t Jasmine—it was Sandy. She wasn’t caterwauling, whining, or screeching—she was actually singing. She had a powerful, operatic tone with an uncouth edge.

  My court is attended

  By ladies and lords

  So dainty and pretty

  You’re nothing but whores

  I bought you with gold

  You sold me for lead

  Fall on your knees

  Before the queen of the dead

  Harlot of infamy

  The priest has it in for me

  Cynosure of lusting eyes

  Depravity never dies

  Sell your soul for a kiss

  Give in to carnal bliss

  I’ll give you what you need

  So many sins to feed

  So many sinners to bleed

  The bass went into a new riff, and Jasmine played an arpeggiated guitar solo that went through an astonishing series of modulations that might not have impressed J.S. Bach, but would have made him raise a powdered eyebrow.

  They stopped abruptly. Jasmine stalked into the Padded Cell. “What the hell are you doing?”

  I hit stop on the SonoViz. “Uh… recording?”

  “Erase it.”

  “I’m not erasing that!”

  She gave me a vicious shove. I tripped over the chair and landed on the floor. “Erase it!” she screamed, standing over me.

  “Erase it yourself!”

  “I’ll erase it, all right.” She aimed a vicious kick at the computer, sending bits of plastic flying and causing it to reboot. “I hope you backed up the album, fuckface.” She kicked it again, and the display went plaid. “And you can bill the cost of a new computer to my ass!” A final kick, and the computer emitted a series of warning beeps and shut down.

  “We’re going home,” she said. “This never happened. When we come back tomorrow, we’re gonna be the same shitty band
and you’re gonna keep your mouth shut. Got it?”

  “You’re the boss,” I said with elaborate casualness, fighting the urge to slap her in the face.

  They marched out. Mitzi turned and stuck her tongue out at me.

  I looked at Blenderman. “What the hell was that?”

  He considered this difficult question. Finally he said, “Kasugi would never release that kind of music. It’s too ’70s. The indie labels wouldn’t touch it either. It’s too corporate.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “If you’re a guitar band, you have to fit into one of the five official categories—Alt, Pop, Nu, Retro, or Indie—otherwise the marketing department doesn’t know what to do with it.” He sighed. “But the real problem is, they’re too good. When record mooks hear virtuoso playing, it frightens them. They associate it with progressive rock or even classical, God forbid. If it doesn’t sound like what’s on the radio, they won’t touch it. It antagonizes the indies too, because they think musical ability is fascist.”

  “If the industry shut them out, they should have gone the DIY route.”

  “Not without gigs. Live music is almost dead since they raised the drinking age and got all happy with the noise ordinances. The venues that are left aren’t interested in that kind of music.”

  “They had us completely fooled.”

  “Who can play dumb better than a girl? It’s practically an evolutionary strategy with them.”

  “What are we gonna do now?”

  He grinned. “Play along and see what happens.”

  12. Her Majesty

  by BLENDERMAN

  Scotty and I waited at the studio, a little apprehensively. We didn’t know what to expect.

  Forty-three minutes past the hour (one should always arrive precisely late enough to convey one’s social position), a stretch limousine pulled up outside. It was like the opening shot of the Imperial Cruiser in Star Wars. That’s how long it was. The horn sounded. It was an old-fashioned horn that went “Aoogah!” A crowd of curious onlookers gathered on the sidewalk. A dozen studio employees came out to see what was going on.