Ghost Radio (6 page)

Listeners
,
I know we're new to each other. But I'm going to end this broadcast with a story. A very personal story. I hope it draws us closer together. I hope it makes you understand that you won't be mocked here on
Ghost Radio
no matter how wild your tale. Because I have wild stories as well.

When I was a kid
,
my friend Gabriel and I had a group called Los Deathmuertoz
,
a Latin rock
,
punk
,
experimental
,
progressive band. Maybe some of you still remember us. We had a following back then in the Houston area. Our music was strange, but I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that it was also intoxicating. We used “found” noises that we had recorded. Sampled
sounds from the most varied sources. Initially we only wanted to jam
,
to explore every possibility offered by our crude instruments and equipment. But beyond these experiments
,
our musical world was colored by tragedy. That was perfectly understandable. My parents
,
and Gabriel's as well
,
died in an automobile accident
,
the same accident. The car I was in crashed head-on into the car carrying Gabriel's family. Only he and I survived. After the accident and the time we spent in the hospital
,
our lives became increasingly intertwined. I went to live with my grandmother in Houston a few blocks away from Gabriel's aunt
,
who took him in for a while. We shared our time together in a strange limbo
,
a quasiabsence of authority.

We were both pretty wild
,
but Gabriel was always more daring. Nothing intimidated him. He was always eager to experiment with a new drug, make danger where there was none
;
get into all kinds of trouble. In short
,
he was a hellion. Every time we got toasted
,
he would disappear. Usually he didn't remember where he had been or what he had done
,
so he started documenting these sprees with Polaroids. The photos he would find in his pockets the following morning were placed in what he called his “Diary of Lost Days.” I always wanted to keep up with him, but his escapades were so personal
,
at times I didn't feel welcome. Besides
,
Gabriel didn't care where he spent the night
:
in jail
,
in the bed of an elderly prostitute
,
in a wealthy person's swimming pool, or in the monkeys' cage at the zoo
,
it was all the same to him. I always went home to sleep.

Gabriel's aunt couldn't cope
,
so he took on a nomadic existence. He slept anywhere
,
my house
,
his other friends'
,
a girlfriend's
,
a stranger's
,
even the occasional park bench. In time he became a squatter
,
living in abandoned buildings. I soon followed him
;
we shared the most bizarre dwellings.

We devoted ourselves to our ambitions
,
two musicians on a mission. We thought of ourselves as a kind of fusion of Stravinsky and Dr. Frankenstein
,
making hybrid creations combining melodies and organic noise
,
like the amplified sound of a spider devouring an ant or a praying mantis as it ripped off its mate's head. We recorded everything we could imagine and took it further
,
mixing those sounds with the static from our homemade “radio telescope,” an antenna we had built with old circuits that received and distorted radio signals. With a modest sequencer
,
we mixed these tracks into patterns and added guitars
,
percussion
,
synthesizers, and other instruments
,
not to mention a lot of other noisy junk. It was all part of our experiments. Later
,
we added computer programs
,
MIDI samplers, and vocoders to our sound repertoire.

We did a lot of crazy things, but we were genuine. At school, when we actually attended, people treated us as freaks. But when we made music, everybody's perception of us changed. It was encouraging to see surprise, fascination, or bewilderment on the faces of those who usually ignored or slighted us. We lost our virginity easily; we had plenty of opportunities with our growing crowd of groupies.

Grand Guignol; onstage we presented our fantasies as well as our nightmares. This was before the concept of flash mobs, those instant crowds that gather using text messages to relay the time and place, but we used low-tech methods like flyers, the loudspeakers of a run-down ice-cream truck, or spectacular street signs inviting people to semispontaneous concerts and performances held in unique locations.

At every concert or performance, we tried to outdo ourselves. We still listened with passion to the great noise groups and bands of the industrial era but thought, ingenuously, that our music was a step beyond what those legends had accomplished. We compulsively read William Blake, Aleister Crowley, and Eliphas Lévi. We were obsessed with all types of death rituals. During one period we wrote songs in honor of the deceased, chosen randomly from obituaries in foreign newspapers, our lyrics inspired by their stories. We often found profoundly poetic passages in those obituaries.

Once, we connected our guitars and equipment to the school's loudspeaker, sparking a revolt of legendary proportions that ended in a fire and dozens of arrests. We played in public places, abandoned buildings, old churches, pretty much anywhere we could cause chaos and confusion. We were constantly in trouble and spent a lot of time running away, hiding, or under arrest, which only increased the number of our followers. We made CDs that we sold ourselves, and with the money, we bought more equipment and expanded our sound system. It felt like being on a train going at full speed. I guess anybody could have predicted that we were hurtling toward an abyss.

One night we went to an abandoned radio station at a Mexican university, close to the border. We set up an improvised—and undoubtedly historically inaccurate—altar for Teoyaomqui, the Aztec god of dead warriors. We connected our equipment to the transmitter and managed to get our music on the air. Afterward, I learned that many, maybe even all, of our fans were listening with euphoria. Eleven minutes in, at exactly two in the morning, there was a sudden power surge. I'm not sure how it happened since there was never an investigation, but it's clear that our equipment caused a short circuit. It was raining that night and water was everywhere. We were more careless than usual and it appeared to outsiders that we had intentionally caused the disaster. Sometimes I wonder if Gabriel had wanted it to happen, consciously or unconsciously. I am sure of the time, because the digital clock at the studio, perhaps the most modern piece of equipment in the entire station, was blinking, flashing 2:00. The last thing I saw, before I flew eight yards in the air, was Gabriel.