Square Wave (11 page)

He bent his head around to Moto. The drummer’s hair seemed to glow under the white lights crossing the loft’s ceiling along a concrete beam. He was expressionless, or perhaps he wore the thinnest-lipped smile, and it seemed as if he had finished adjusting his setup, though the differences looked meaningless to Larent. Now, the splash cymbal was just to the right of the hi-hat, and the crash hovered over the left tom, overlapping it slightly. The ride was still on the right, and for whatever reason the china had been pushed away from the set.

Moto dropped Larent’s gaze and stared through the transparent heads of the toms. A deep, compact note answered his taps of the bass pedal as an eighth-note pulse took shape. The snare flams came next, interlaced with a roll so slow you could pick out every strike.

Larent returned to his silent fingerings, though, to the inner music that seemed to be leading somewhere. But Moto persisted, and eventually he relented. He set aside the baffling chords he’d been toying with and returned to the scales of earlier, bowing every third note, sounding ascending fourths and sevenths, flattening and sharpening notes as he crossed through several modes. Having won Larent’s interest, or at least his commitment, Moto distilled the thick rhythms down to a quiet line on the toms, a tapping of the ride, and a sharp snare.

Larent switched on the amplifier and the delay pedal. The notes collected in layers, mode on mode, his route through one superimposed on the others. A kind of aural fog emerged, with only Moto’s snare-work, increasingly central to the sound, making it through.

It was painfully indistinct. He threw the bass onto the bed in the corner and dropped to the floor, his back against the nightstand, facing Moto, and his arms wrapped around his knees. The bass notes continued to flow from the speaker, though slowly the haze thinned as the layers fell away, one at a time, the delay being less than infinite. Moto carried on unperturbed, his stare deep into the drums unbroken. It wasn’t clear if he’d noticed Larent had stopped playing or whether he assumed this was the bassist’s intention, a piece that, once set in motion, faded away in its own time, a release of potential energy.

The bass notes finally disappeared. Moto carried on a few more bars and let the loft go silent.

“Well?”

“Nothing, really,” Larent said. “That’s the problem, I guess.”

Moto paused a beat, raked his hand through his long black hair. Four cracks of the snare and then his sticks were on the floor. They rattled and spun, settling into circular sweeps that barely began their motion before being interrupted, one by the wall in a too-bright yellow, the other by the olive couch pushed up against it, across the room from the bed. Moto smiled and sat down on the couch.

“What were you expecting?” Moto said. “We barely know each other.” He laughed into the empty space between them.

“It’s been half a day and we’ve found nothing at all, not even the beginnings of something.”

“We could go back to something unamplified, really clean, simple, start from there.”

“A single instrument—a melodic instrument—and it’s a bass. It’s too little.” Larent put his hands on the bed behind him, pushed up, and sat on its edge.

“And these?” Moto asked as he tapped the tuned toms with his fingertips.

“We need more, however you want to put it,” Larent said, the curtness growing in his voice.

“Well, if you want a fuller sound—”

“Every group you’ve played with had horns, guitars, keys. Usually all of those, and other things too. There’s not enough friction here, even for harmony.”

Moto stood up, pulled his black long-sleeve taut along the bottom. “I don’t mind the change really. My drone groups, these ensembles with lots of friction, however you want to put it, started to outnumber the audiences. They just kept shrinking. Scaling back, even way back, to something just a little bigger than nothing, that doesn’t seem so weird to me now. But it takes a while till you’re okay performing to yourself.”

“The composers, the poets. I’m aware.”

“But even a form of rock. All of it’s arcana now.”

“Drone was always, though.”

“Oh that’s not true. Maybe here. But in Tokyo you could actually have a show with a sea for an audience. You didn’t have to play to a hundred ABDs in a gallery or a factory loft. But that was a while ago, in another country. Now we’re just like you, the conservatory crowd. I don’t have a problem with small, even very small now. But then I’m not against some expansion either. We’ve got to play around more, I think. The ideas will come.”

They’d left for the bar after that, the amplifier still on, humming in the empty room, its power light shining red in the dark as Moto shut the door.

And maybe the ideas
would
come, Larent thought. But there were still no drinks.

“You know,” Moto said now, expertly accommodating the silence Larent clung to, “the best show I’ve seen here, or no, the one I remember most clearly, here or anywhere, maybe, I actually saw with Renna. It was Dianogah. Almost a reunion show. Definitely a band on its last legs. Maybe that made it even better.

“We had these fake IDs. This was a decade ago. Even more than that. I didn’t know the band that well—I still don’t, it was really a band other musicians turned me on to—but the first thing I heard as I came in were these two basses, one clean, with very light gauge strings, I’m assuming, because it seemed to be tuned in a higher register than a regular bass. The other was fuzzed, rumbling beneath, maybe in a dropped tuning. Behind both was this frenetic beat that was still precise somehow. Made me think of the Minutemen, D. Boon. Slint just as much, though. Classic, before-our-time stuff. And for those first songs there wasn’t a guitar on stage.

“The place was slammed, nauseatingly full. We watched most of the show wedged in the corridor. No one much moved, no one could, I guess. So we all just took it in. There was a constant stream of speech from both bassists. I couldn’t make any of it out, not sure that it mattered, but after a few minutes they turned to singing this simple melody—which they could barely hold, of course. Part of the charm.

“The clean bass started sounding overtones. This entrancing line. He held it for a long time while the rest of the music dropped away. Just this little five-note figure. And as the rest of the band sat around, paced, smoked, whatever, out of the audience steps this man: short black hair, long-sleeved polo, red canvas shoes.

“He lifted the strap of a black bass over his head, holding the cable in his free hand. The other Dianogah bassist set his beer down and started picking a steady stream of As. All the while, the overtones kept sounding.

“Now this third bassist—Bundy K. Brown—plugs in and strums across the strings. Nobody’d seen him in years, post-Tortoise, but there he was, the anti-legend, and the crowd playing it off like it was nothing. So he keeps strumming, head down, twisting the tuning pegs in big turns, all in the same direction, bouncing between them, loosening the strings haphazardly, sending the notes, already low, plunging. The amp can’t even resolve these notes, they’re so low, and what comes out is this sort of unpitched roar. Bundy catches the strings in his hand—they were wobbling, visibly—and pulls his head back up, as if satisfied with the tuning he’d arrived at, if you could call it that.

“The drummer had returned to his stool by this point. He taps out this delicate beat on the tom and snare, no bass, pumping the hi-hat. A final overtone rings out, and Bundy starts picking this really intricate riff that’s right on the lower border of what you can hear.

“He
had
been tuning, or detuning, and even though those notes were mostly gravel, texture, they were still pitched—barely, but still. And what I assumed we were in for, a blaring noise piece, this cacophony, never came. It turned out to be this carefully shaded tune, with Bundy supplying the deepest layer of the harmony, through a sort of percussive melodic line. And the drums matched this with the opposite, a melodic percussive line.

“So these three post-rock bassists gave us ten minutes plus of something not far from counterpoint, in the lowest registers, at immense volumes, and in rumbling, near-inharmonic tones you took in through your chest, your skull, more than your ears. This place just shook, everything and everyone. It made me a little sick. But I guess there are good sorts of sickness. Renna didn’t feel quite the same about it, I think. But there was nowhere to go, we were packed in too tight for that. So she waited through it.”

Moto brought his eyes in line with Larent’s. “Or I guess I don’t really know how Renna felt. Just that she hardly talked, when we were getting drinks afterward with some of her friends, or with me, on the train back to Massachusetts, to school. It’s hard to believe it didn’t make an impression. She was probably preoccupied. With you, I’m thinking now.
Like
you, right now—this entire time, really.”

Larent smiled. “Just listening.” Moto was right, of course. But he was dwelling on more than musical failures. Renna had been on the fence about him then, in school, and he was already in love with her. After that, they’d had their few years. Then not. Now, she might be back on that fence. Or else, he thought, what they had was all they ever would. It looked like a lot. It was a lot. But if nothing changed, it would shrink to a blip in the years to come.

“No, it’s fine,” Moto said. “Maybe she was listening too. Not to me, but just playing it all back in her head. I don’t think we actually talked about the show later. Anyway, Bundy did play another couple of songs, the opener off the first Tortoise record, and then ‘Dreams of Being King,’ which was, I’m remembering, the perfect summation of Dianogah. But none of that sticks in the mind like that first piece with Bundy.”

In the far corner, behind the gear, a young man with hair poking out beneath a logo-less baseball cap got up from a table and in one motion hopped over a couple of drums inverted on the floor. Their silver snares rattled from the Fahey. He flipped the power switch on the Korg; the speakers popped and the Fahey cut out. With the palm of his left hand he rocked the modulating wheel back and fingered a minor seventh with his right. The wheel drew the chord smoothly down a step to D minor. “Like that?” he yelled over the Korg’s pipe-organ tones. He let go of the wheel and the chord snapped back to E. The three at his table nodded vaguely as they swigged from dark bottles of beer.

While holding the chord he put his cap on the keyboard and leaned over the keys, brought his face close to them. His hair, three shades of brown distinguishable under the stage lights, fell over his face. He brought his head back up and rested the cap lightly on it, with the bill angled down over his forehead, obscuring his eyes.

Several long rows of buttons ran above the Korg’s keys. Above them was a narrow screen, as wide as the keyboard, flashing parametric data: pitch, amplitude, attack, decay, and such. He riffled through the presets and the chord showed itself protean, incarnated by turns in violins, in guitars, in trumpets, in piccolos, in vibes, in oboes, and finally, in tinny synth tones. The screen showed a timbral profile for each in green, broken down into a few dozen categories. The last preset displayed most simply. The graphs were smooth, the mathematics of the sound free of natural complications like the overtone series.

He blinked heavily and brought his left hand back to the keys, away from the buttons. In those planar tones, with his cap covering his eyes and his shoulders raised, he sounded the opening bars of Satie’s third Gymnopédie. The rendition was airless, free of heat or cold. But the score wouldn’t submit, not wholly, to the slightness of its dress. Gravity remained.

Larent studied the player’s hands, perhaps for a meaning of some sort. He ran his thumb across a broad knot in the wood of the table, pressing his finger into a divot.

“Ridiculous,” he said.

Moto laughed. “I don’t know,” he said. “Yes.”

“And still no drinks?” Larent asked.

They turned toward the doorway. There was no one.

The music ran its course.

9

Albert coten, anders jaikies, frank relleau, and Harold Kames—the four sat in a row. On one end was Coten, his cuffed flannels, tailored in gray-purple Super 150s, falling finely over his crossed legs. He sat up in his chair and pulled it imperceptibly forward before settling back. An old Monte-grappa cut across the blank legal pad in his lap. The ruby celluloid of the pen held the light, glowing as if lit from within.

Kames, at the other end, reset the sleeve of his blazer to a half-inch of his shirtsleeve. He fingered a cufflink as his watery gaze met the broad doors at the back of the auditorium. Relleau and Jaikies, sitting between the other two, only looked into the stage lights.

Men and women, middle aged and primly dressed, had filled most of the seats, except for the rows in front, which were occupied by younger men, mostly students wearing the off-duty uniform of the well bred: loafers, shaggy-dog sweaters, and button-downs with rumpled collars. Two generations of Halsley wealth.

The hundred odd seats, arranged in several tiers, were three-quarters full now, and the flow through the doors had slowed to a trickle. Kames stood and took the podium.

“Let’s begin, I think,” he said. “To start, then, a brief statement of tonight’s theme. My colleagues and I—some of you will know this—have been thinking through, over the last months, a few of the contrasts that give shape to political orders, social orders. Tonight we want to see if we can throw a bit of light on that between the mercantile and the martial. By mercantile we mean not the economic theory of that name so much as the broader orientation of the merchant toward life, and of societies that take the merchant’s outlook, if only implicitly, as the primary mode by which to apprehend the world. Societies that treat the merchant as offering a template for citizenship, you could say. In the same way, by martial we mean the outlook of the warrior—not only the brutish or rapacious conqueror, but equally, the defender, the guardian.

“Except for our revolutionary period, and not even then, really, this country has never known anything resembling a martial order, or its common descendant, the royal order, the earliest monarchs often being triumphant warlords themselves, if they are not backed by them. The martial and the noble, the royal, these are really one category.