Hallucinating (33 page)

Mild paranoia makes him glance over his shoulder as he tramps the concrete streets designed retro Carlo Scarpa style, makes him stare at umbrella wielding passers-by, makes him avoid the light pools of street lamps in case somebody recognises him. Down a passage he dodges, shoulders hunched, jumping when a splat of roof moss hits the ground just ahead, glancing up at the fluorescent club signs, looking for one picked out in lemon yellow that reads Gesang Der Junglinge, or would do if somebody had not made a masking washing line of optical cables out to the window opposite.

There it is. He pauses, looks behind him. Just a dog. Two, in fact, ripping apart the body of a giant rat. He darts into the club, bending down because the door is a metre and a half high.

He smells wet coats, pot smoke, mud on shoes, hair gel.

At a counter a girl sits reading a copy of Ohr Zeit. She is petite, her hair bleached, her nose a posy of silver and gold loops, and she looks up at Nulight.

"Wo ist Sie?"

"Voiceoftibet Records."

The girl glances at a stack of CDR's, picks one up, then checks out the back cover. "Hallo! Kommen Sie herein."

"Danke schön."

Nulight has permission to go inside. He can hear the music in the club, and he is attracted to it like a berserker drawn to the rumour of war.

The club is a single space excavated like a cave from the rooms, yards and passages of properties surrounding it, an accretion of volumes bought over a period of thirty years by the owner of the club, Dieter Ohr. Its roof is composed of melted polythene, its walls are white-painted brick. The music emanates from a torus of Surroundsound stacks: ambient heaven.

A blonde man walks over to him. "Hello, I think I recognise you."

Nulight grimaces. He appreciates his fame, sure, but it freaks him out, not least because of the alien situation that he is facing. "You must be Dieter," he says.

Dieter nods. Waving at one of the speaker stacks he says, "You like?"

Nulight hesitates, then frowns. "What is this music?"

"This is the melodious voice of my club, a continuous ocean of music that has become semi-autonomous, taking as its source material foreign radio broadcasts, CDs, MP3s, samples and riffs filched through coagulated computer feeds from the internet, all mixed by club DJs who sit astride their music like a diver on a whale. Twenty fours hours a day, every day of the year, on and on and on."

Nulight is a little freaked out by Dieter's teutonic intensity. "Yeah, right..."

"This music has mutated over a period of two decades. It has never stopped since it started, yet in becoming semi-autonomous it has turned into something else, something vast. Many people try to control it, but they cannot. It is too complex now. Wiser folk, like me - they just interface."

"I get you," says Nulight.

"Have you heard of auton music?"

Nulight shrugs. "Vaguely. It's new."

Dieter nods. "It is new. It will expand. Be aware of that."

Nulight for a few acid moments feels scared of this music that is never turned off, because it is alive, mutating according to the rules of binary heredity. People drown in oceans. Clubbers could drown in this music. He takes a pencil-light from the pocket of his coat and shines it across the chamber, and the beam stabs through smokes, clouds of exhaled breath and whiffs of oxygen from photosynthesis tanks, illuminating the faces of entranced listeners twenty metres away.

"This is heavy," he said. "What do you do for a laugh?"

"We play rock music."

Part Four

So the gig plan is put into action. Over the next few weeks Nulight calls in all his favours, contacts all his friends, all the organisers of free festivals, all those in co-operatives and musicians' matrices and free information nets, and after only a week has put together a tour of fifteen dates, from the first to the thirtieth of September. The band are to be called SemiAutonatic. It is a dreadful pun, but it says what is meant to be said. And it says, 'We are here'.

All the band's synths and computers are set so they respond to the key of the auton music. This is a difficult job and it costs Nulight dear. He is trying to forget that the Mystery Trend album that was meant to pay for all of the LA creative accounting is now dead. He realises they must record their gigs straight to hard-disk and release a livemix album on the 'Net, since there is no time to sit down and record stuff. The publicity will need to be steaming, however, or else the download sales won't cover the deficit.

But there is hope in that direction. Before the first gig Kappa turns up a software defector from Ukraine, a tall, thin, pale dude called Grigory, who is cool enough to have heard of Henge of Astral Stone. Grigory tells them he can design a softpack that will mutate their auton riffs and store them as isolated AIFF's, so that with just the flick of a virtual mixer they can create a master file with all their live tracks done studio quality. This is pleasing. Nulight now feels that he can go ahead with confidence.

Some of the students at the Avalon Faculty in Glastonbury have been persuaded by Kappa to design viruses that will harmlessly but assertively advertise the new album. One lady, Vanquara de Musique Nouveau, a mixed up freak who only wears green, makes a Celtic Pack that can infiltrate the entire British Underground via the 'Net. It is a leap forward. Sales projections come in at eight thousand. With luck, enough revenue will be generated to keep everybody happy.

But that is all breadhead stuff. Nulight has a thousand other things to attend to.

Like Zhaman's lyrics. "This scraggy dude gave them me down the pub," Zhaman has said. "Cut up, you know, sort of in the Burroughs style." Reluctantly Nulight reads what is written.

Camping wigwam-style not far from three thousand neolithic stones,

Dressed in an olive kagoul, hillage hat, my beard whipping about in the wind,

That fish rising album freaks me out,

I shrug, glance down at the book, same as you, you new here?

It was published almost half a century ago,

You, man, are you following me?

Smoke?

No.

You think you're handsome, you put your face on the back of all your releases,

You should expect people who stroll the stones to know,

At the wigwam camp last night, people around there knew who you are,

Any lights in the sky?

Thought I saw something whizzing over the stones,

I don't believe in ufo's, but some people do,

Choice is doomed to be fragmented by the wind.

Nulight scrunches up the paper and mutters, "I thought I told you Zhaman, I don't like lyrics." Yeah... music is about tone, frequency, timbre. Words are just obstacles to the attainment of purity: words are samsara, timbre is nirvana.

Part Five

The gigs begin. The weather gets hotter. Was Lovelock right? Is this the most serious problem facing humanity? No way, Nulight responds, because we're about to be invaded.

Ten thousand psychedelic undergrounders come out and have a great time. Sunny, groovy, plastic, sonic. A kind of hyper-summer where everything is full on, everything is more colourful, more surreal, more intense.

Nulight gives away one-track mini-CD's as a taster of the album, which is to be called Auton de Musique Nouveau in honour of the virus lady. The artwork has been done by an AI Nulight met in Paris.

The music papers have all picked up on the new development. They say SemiAutonatic's gigs are impure because it is well known that only computers can compose auton, but they applaud Nulight for his audacity, and as a result sales of other Voiceoftibet albums pick up. The news that Mystery Trend have been dropped is suppressed for a week, and then some hacker kid breaks the news over the 'Net, an event that makes Nulight furious despite the fact that he expected it.

Near the end of the month, with three gigs to go, they release the album. It charts indie at number forty-one. This is fantastic. First week sales are somewhere between four and five thousand. If they can keep this up then the gamble will have paid off.

But still no aliens. Nulight - is he in fact paranoid? Where are they?

4: Istanbul

Gateway between West and East.

Nulight is wandering around the Gulhane Gardens in Istanbul. He is aiming for the heart of Europe, where the music is: Roma, Berlin, Paris. He hopes ultimately to reach Britain, where many of his fans hang out.

Glorious ethnic calm leaks out of his earphones: the works of Stephan Micus.

Nobody here seems to recognise him. He's quite pleased about that. This fame thing is too weird.

3: Damascus

Nulight is getting tired of walking everywhere, but he is penniless and unable to obtain credit on plastic cards. He does not want to cross Turkey on foot because the east of the country is a swamp of civil war: Kurds to the south, Caucasus refugees further north. Nasty and dirty-nuclear.

In an internet café he sits before the fuzz-o-screen of an Apple Mac BioNano. Some blackbeard dude is playing an eleven string 'ud behind him, riffing on the lines of a Culture Club track, and for a few moments Nulight - who scorns melody - is pissed off at the inanities of the bubblegum music. But then his mind makes a connection. Chameleon... karma... Calmer! Djo, Sperm, Rich and Calmer, otherwise known as Hanging Gardens of Fungus, one of the bands on his label. Now, Calmer's parents are loaded... maybe he can freeboot a cheap flight to Britain.

He grins. He is not used to this style of thinking. But he is Nulight, the man behind Voiceoftibet Records. Surely he is entitled.

He whacks off an email to Calmer, telling her he is desperate. He wanders around the city. His dusty Himalaya-style clothes, holed boots and long greasy hair attract some attention, even in this chaotic place, so he steals a pair of shades and a hat from a stall-holder. It makes a small amount of difference.

Back at the café he checks his email account. There's a message!

Yo man! Feck, you're coming over? DJ Ginge is in Jerusalem checking out databases, I'll get him on his moby then email you right back. Excellent! Feck, this place will be bouncing when I tell people the news. C.

Nulight's heart is pounding. He has walked all the way from Lhasa. This is his first ever scrounge, and he isn't sure if it's going to work.

A few scary moments pass. Then a second message.

Yo! Ginge reckons he can get to you in a couple of hours. He says don't move. Damascus is really dangerous. Since the big war it's been an outpost of the EU, so it's CCTV city. He's hardly got any cash but he reckons he can get you to Istanbul, where it's safe. For Buddha's sake stay right there! Ginge has got the old style GPS on his moby, he knows where you are, okay? C.

Worry settles upon Nulight. Has he been recognised already? That wander around the city might have been a mistake. Paranoia creeps up on him.

The 'ud player has turned his attention to the Beatles. Annoyed, Nulight says, "Don't you know anything recent?"

The 'ud player stares at him, then glances at the café manager, a fat bruiser with white hair and a thick moustache. Nulight notices a pistol in the manager's belt. Seconds later, he is thrown out into the street. He pulls his hat down, adjusts his shades and tries to shrink back into a doorway. Now he has an agonising wait through the heat of the afternoon...

Long wait. People look at him all the time; he thrusts his hands into his pockets and sighs. Most of the men here carry a gun. Orange sun goes down over rooves encrusted with satellite dishes, muezzins call, people leave work and go home. Some stare at him. Hours pass, and no sign of Ginge.

Then a dude runs up to him. Tall, freckled skin very pale, copper dreadlocks bundled up and hanging down his back, wearing a blue shirt and festival slacks. "Nulight!"

It is DJ Ginge. "Hey, man..."

"We need to get off the street quick. Why aren't you inside the caff?"

"Got thrown out." Nulight glances at a couple of girls standing a few yards away. "Are they with you?"

Ginge looks, then shakes his head. He glances again at the girls, who have been joined by their boyfriends. "Hey ladies, nothing to see."

One of the men says, "Are you Nulight?"

Ginge grabs Nulight's arm and hustles him into the alley beside the café. "See what I mean? This is an EU place now. Your profile is pretty high, what with the Mystery Trend single charting at number thirty nine. You gotta realise you're a good-looking lad, new on the block - there's been 'Net zines sniffing around, looking for dirt."

"Thirty nine? You're kidding."

Ginge ignores his surprise. "I'm going to take you to the airfield just outside the city. There's a microjet on the tarmac going to Istanbul. I raided my account and got you a ticket."

"Thanks."

"No problem. But if people recognise you it could get nasty. Kidnap is a way of life over here. You should have come to Jerusalem, it's much safer there."

Nulight shivers. People... looking for him... trying to get him...

They walk at speed into the sunset. Nulight glances over his shoulder. A group of youths are following.

"Don't panic," says Ginge. "Hopefully it's just kids."

"Shall we run?"

"No. Nothing stands out on CCTV more than two scruffy blokes running."

Nulight decides he does not like fame. His mind is abuzz with paranoid thoughts. They speed through the streets, then, thank Buddha, they approach the floodlit airfield. Nulight is shaking, sweating, confused. Night is falling and he is sure he is going to be caught. But suddenly Ginge is sprinting. Nulight follows. They dodge through a chainmail fence and run up to a portacabin. Twenty people follow.

Ginge shows the clerk his ID, grabs a cellophane ticket, then pushes Nulight towards the minijet. "Quick! I'll hold them off. You should be able to hitch west from Istanbul. Lorries for preference. Head for the music, right?"

Nulight runs as fast as he has ever run.

Part Six

The penultimate gig is at The Other Eisteddfod, just outside Llangollen in Wales. Nulight expects it to be a stormer. It is an apt metaphor.