So much time at a computer manipulating synthesized sounds acclimatises you to finely tuned rattles and rings. Synths, unrealistic horns, compressed hi-hats, deep 808s. Once I’ve finalised a track I need to listen to something real: classical galas, jazz bands at bars; when I see this one saxophonist, name of Frank, busking in town I sit and throw him some coins and watch, sometimes until he finishes. The experience is like resurfacing for me. As the night moves on a few local vagrants show up to drop their hats and jive to his rhythms, most of them are talkative, but they move on quick enough. Frank is friendly when they show up to dance and have coins tossed toward them, though I notice his face and his music are happier when they leave.
Some nights we eat together. He’s an older guy, forty three, Tongan, a darker shade of brown than me, and heavier too, though he does have twenty years on me so being wide suits him. He dresses in adidas sneakers, jeans, and a white and red track jacket. I see the jacket often enough to think it’s his favourite.
We don’t really know each other which means the things we do know don’t have much context. I don’t know where he lives; he told me he grew up in Mangere, he’s got kids he doesn’t see, I don’t ask about them except for when he brings them up to emote.
“You got kids?” he asks me.
“Nope.”
We’re in a McDonald’s on a night in May. It’s characteristically bright inside, too bright in the way fast food joints are. The tubes don’t mesh with the feature lights, the effect is artificial, which I suppose isn’t out of place.
“How old are you, again?”
“I’m twenty four, man.”
“That’s good,” Frank nods to himself, chewing slowly. “What kind of music do you play?”
“The uh … I’m a pianist. Practised classical all the way through school.”
“You in a band?”
“Nah, I … I produce beats and tracks for people.”
“Produce beats?”
“Yeah, ya know, hip hop. That type of thing.”
“So … you record these bands?”
I explain some more but I don’t think he gets it. He’s not impressed, not disappointed either. I wonder how I would’ve reacted if he’d felt passionate enough to rebuke me.
He hiccups. “You like this work?”
“I’m good at it.”
For three months I’ve been working on this mixtape with a client, Michael Stent, goes by Linkoln, not sure how the name works and I personally don’t think it does, but it’s for his friends to say something about it and I’m not his friend. He’s twenty one, Caucasian, tatted up to his neck and unmistakably upper middle class. His cap says ‘Compton’, his face says ‘Herne Bay’.
Michael likes trap. Club tracks. Rolling, blazing, fucking, drinking; the feeling I get is one of running till you pass out. This kind of subject needs to be redeemed by style and Michael doesn’t have it. But again, I’m not his friend.
“On. To the. Next. Bitch
Yo. Gonna. Get. Rich.
Schooled. Like a. Test. Bitch.
School. Like we. Is. Fish.”
He had this written down. The song is called Sharks. Scribbles plague his pages like this was the tenth iteration and it was only getting more refined.
This is from his last session. He had to stop for rewrites because he didn’t like the rhythm.
He comes into the studio vaping with four of his friends. One of them is brown. He needs that one. He’s in the booth behind the glass vibing out, rocking to the beat, holding his headphones in place. He slurs the first four takes.
“Run it again, Jack,” he says.
I swipe back four bars and tighten the snare. He seems happy with that. Another five takes of affected street swag and he feels he needs a break. He sits in the booth and meditates, vaping, making shapes with his fingers.
“G you seen the cover art?” his brown friend asks me. Name of Luis.
He produces a sketchbook from his JanSport bag and flicks through his work. He has drawings of angels, guns, women, cars, and animals. His style focuses on shadows, figures are sketched with sharp dashed lines, shaped and shaded, posed often with their heads, barrels, and bonnets facing down. He draws my focus from the scenic sunsets to a printed out image of the prospective cover. It’s a well-rendered colour image of Michael relaxing on bars of gold, Luis points them out to me.
“See those gold bars,” he says proudly.
“Yeah.”
“Link didn’t even get it when I showed him the first time.”
The title of the ‘work’ is: New ScHool. The words are spelled out above Michael’s head in white, the font is standard for the backs of schoolbooks and sheds at schools. The muscular figure of Michael is flanked by two naked bronze-skinned models. They’re curvy, of almost unrealistic proportions, but then I’ve seen people built like this hanging around gigs.
“Yo, you seen the artwork on Wildheart?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s like the palette I wanted to try and get and the feeling Link wanted for the girls.”
“That’s cool, man.”
Michael sounds off. “Yo, I’m good, man. Hit me again.”
I play the track from the start. Synth brass honks, a bass buzzes simulating a melodious buzzy lead, now the snare, the layered kick. People start zoning.
Michael is out of town for the next few days so I’ve been changing things from his recordings and sending them to him for feedback. His comments are useless but his money isn’t. He’s not my only client. There are local acts that I have asking for tracks. Pop projects, indie rock bands, though I personally think that rock has been dead for a while.
After a long session on Ableton I catch a bus into town to sit in on the university’s graduation gala concert at the Town Hall. The crowd here is different from what I’m used to. There’re older people sitting in the audience, on the ground and in the balcony. The philharmonic orchestra, dressed in black and of various ages, are there to support the younger performers: people in their twenties. Two pianists and a violinist in competition for some prize. Every song takes me back to the songs I used to play and watch and practise when I was younger. Bach, Rachmaninoff, Chopin.
There’s a visible passion in the main performers. They’ve dressed the part: the females are in long sparkly dresses; one of them, the violinist, wears a blue dress and bares a shoulder; the other, a pianist, older, is strapless, and has her dark hair straight and short. I don’t know why their dresses make such an impression on me, I don’t even know what to make of them. All I know is I’ve noticed them and I’m thinking about them and I don’t know why. The other pianist, a young man with his hair gelled into a pompadour, is clean and smooth in a suit and waistcoat. But I’m not all that interested in how he looks.
The hall is large, not amphitheatre sized, or even IMAX theatre sized, but there’re two levels for seating and a dedicated staff. No glass between the artist and the sound man, hardly a hint that a sound man exists. There are microphones and speakers about, I spot some beside the frieze of vines that lines the balconies. The sound is gorgeous. I don’t have all of the songs memorised so I can’t tell if they’re making mistakes, but I feel the speed of the playing and the pressure of the notes being bowed and pressed. This sound, so familiar, is undamped and so full.
I judge that most of the audience are present for the concert not the music. For the spectacle and the banter of the two hosts. Two women in front of me are giggling and taking pictures on their phones. They’re shushed by an usher. At school I had teachers tell me that art was the voice of the soul and that music was the most precious. I was supposed to be proud of my work because it healed me. School seems so far away now.
Applause rings out, the winner is announced. The male pianist. People stand to leave, me included, for the soft drizzle outside.
At some point crossing the tiled ground outside the hall, in glossy tessellated civilisation, uniform and decaying, I resolve to dust off my old sheet music and find what it is that exists in the keys.
I like the feeling. Muscle memory. Nostalgia. Remembering how Chopin’s études feel on my fingers. I wonder what’s in the playing that captures me. What’s in the stave that makes it all worth it? There’s so much promise here. Can it counter what I see in Michael’s tripe?
This feels like the beginning of something good. My teachers taught me about the promise and the marvel of an overture. This is mine.
One of the new acts to hire me is in the studio this Saturday. Gen and the Shells. They’re a three piece set. The drummer and bassist are the quiet type that don’t have much to say about my production, but their leader, a young woman handy with a guitar and her neat set of pipes, is much more demanding. On the whole I find it more satisfying to work with her than I do with Michael. She’d rather re-record than have me touch her guitar with my software. I appreciate the integrity.
“Tell me you’re gone
Now stay away
Tell me you’re wrong
About today
And every other time you saw the sun shine when you were sober
Dragging me under now I can tell you that it’s over”
The lyrics are cute and a bit dark juxtaposed with their folk sound. The band dress like hippies but I’m not too knowledgeable about how dressing works now. I’m always in a leather jacket or a hoodie, I probably look like an extra in their movie.
“Whaddya think?” Gen, the vocalist, asks.
“Sounds good.” I mention something about mixing down the percussion to see what it sounds like. She’s on board with that.
The rest of the band leaves and the only people left in the studio are Gen and me. I’m wearing headphones, figuring out how prominent the percussion should be in the second chorus. Every so often I see Gen out of the corner of my eye; she’s leaning on a wall, lying on a sofa, she’s peering over my shoulder to watch me fiddle with digital filters. She smells faintly of lemons, her fingernails are fuchsia coloured, bangles pile up at the base of her wrist.
I take off my headphones. “You okay?”
She swipes at her orange fringe. “Fine. You?”
“Fine.”
“How long have you been at this, man? This job, I mean.”
I pivot to face her, she hasn’t left me much room to move. “I think I’ve been producing about three years now. If you start from when I’ve actually been getting paid.”
“That’s cool, man. I’ve worked with a few other producers, most of ‘em suck. They’re hardly in the studio, they think they know everything, they charge a lot. You’re all right, Jack.”
“Uh … cheers.”
“You’ve got a gift for the music, man. It’s nice to see.” She sits on the edge of the soundboard. “You must make your own stuff. So what’s your tune?”
“My tune?”
“Your band. Solo projects. What do you make, dude?”
I tap a rhythm on my headphones. “Ah—don’t really have one.”
She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, right. C’mon, what’s your other Bandcamp like?”
“Just have the one.”
She squints. “Dude. That’s messed up. A guy like you …”
“What about a guy like me?”
“There’re a lot of people making music. Why does a guy like you have to be so … quiet?”
I chuckle. “Um … that’s nice of you to say. I think.”
She peels a stick of gum. “Well, I think we should start a project together. You keen?”
Making my own music. Something I want to make. Something that isn’t just a demo of some sounds I know people will like. The idea seems sensible, and yet, strange.
I say: “I don’t know.”
She laughs.
As is often the case when drilling music I’m getting headaches that seem to thump in rhythm to the songs I’m learning. It’s late one night and I’ve no urgent work so I’m drilling Chopin’s Scherzo on an upright piano. The chords thump in my head. One boom and then a climbing phrase follows. I’d written an essay on Chopin in school, his music was a standard for every pianist to learn. Playing that music now, it rings in an old part of my head, and I feel like that part of my head is empty. That part where I’d once kept something that I couldn’t name anymore, and now the music echoes, bouncing around, ringing, feeling so full while I feel as if I have nothing. I decide that I’ll compose, put to use this apparent talent I have for production. I wonder if Gen and I can work. I won’t ask her just yet.
Michael is back from the States yakking about all the emcees he met that appreciated his demo. He had a listening party in New Jersey with some big shots giving him props about the tracks on his upcoming mixtape. We’re in the polishing phase now, but he’s re-recording vocals with a more confident voice knowing that there’s an audience out there for it.
His friend Luis claps me on the shoulder. “Yo, you’re a solid dude.”
“Thanks.”
“Man, when we was out in the Palisades, they was givin’ props to the production. Guarantee you get more business when New ScHool drops.”
I make a noise. Vaguely affirmative. It’s filler. I wouldn’t have conversations without it.
“When we was out at the beach with these models, bro, I got inspired.” He flicks through his sketchbook.
The page he shows me has a sketch of a buxom mermaid, very detailed, well shaded like the rest of his work, she’s smiling cynically. He slips out a printed colour image from a pocket in his book. Her skin is bronze, her scales are gold, her lips are thick watermelon innards, her hair is long and black and shiny.
I say: “That’s cool, man.”
“Link’s pretty into it. I think this is the final one, bro.”
Michael shouts for me to run the beat again. He recites his lyrics with new passion. At the end of his verse he hollers: “Shouts out to Jack. You a genius.”
I’m a genius.
An almost serene Friday night in town. I sit at the base of a pillar beside him while he jams under the glass canopy across the road from Britomart Station. The night is humid and dull but Frank rescues it. He transforms the people into detectives from the forties. I imagine an audiobook, one of those radio shows of a Chandler story. Never mind that this is Auckland city and the gangs aren’t central and the jazz culture isn’t too prominent, no one’s carrying iron, no desert wind blows to put murder in your blood. The brass is enough to carry the illusion.
Frank plays freestyle for most of his session but at some points I can make out phrases from St. Thomas, My Jelly Roll Soul, and Hotel California.
A man with a fedora tosses a ten dollar note into Frank’s sax case.
We’re eating at McDonald’s again, a different one than last time but it’s still oversaturated with light. Frank takes off his white and red track jacket when we sit and he, for the first time I notice, says grace. We run through the usual nothings to start talking. Then out of the blue he tells me he’s getting annoyed with his new boss at work.
“What job is this?” I hadn’t asked him about work before. I’ve seen him busk and he’d told me he tutored sax. For some reason I thought that was liveable.
“Warehousing. A lot of glass around. Chipped one today and the boss pulled me up.”
I make that filler noise.
“Said he wouldn’t skin my pay. Told me he was doing me a favour.” His cheeks go hard. I hadn’t seen his look of contempt before. It’s rough.
“I didn’t think you did anything besides your music, man. You teach don’t you?”
He nods and slurps Coke. “For free.”
“You could make a safe dollar doing that.”
“Nah,” he croaks. “Music don’t support you that way. Need a real job when you’re my age.”
“You’re not that old, man.”
He chomps politely with his mouth closed. “You’re twenty five or something, right?”
“Twenty four.”
“No kids, eh?”
“No kids.”
He’s pleased and nods about it. “That’s good. And you produce music?”
“Yeah.” I’m not sure he fully gets it. “It’s a living.”
“Keep going with that, eh.”
“It’s all I know, really.”
“Listen.” He looks into a burger dolefully. “You go with that for as long as you can.”
I eye him with a new-found sense of wonder. Most people I meet involved in music have a hunger in them that borders on avarice. He doesn’t have that.
“Why?” I ask. “I could put you in the studio too, man. Get some recordings going.”
He chuckles. “You study music in school?”
“Yep.”
“They teach you the history and all that?”
I nod.
“They tell you … the work heals you?”
“Mhmm.”
He needs a gulp of Coke to swallow. Then he says: “It does. That is true. The work heals you. But it can’t save you.”
I don’t know how to digest that. I don’t even understand it. This man, dressed plainly, obviously well-travelled, erudite in some sense, seemed reticent and hurt in the way he spoke of something he cared about.
“But never mind that,” he says. It’s a normal conversation now.
Michael has all the final versions of his mixtape with him now and it’s down to him and his label to talk about release. He’s out of my hair as far as I’m concerned so I graciously decline to party with him and his crew so I can go home and see about this talent I apparently have. His project is over, so the way I figure it I now have a break from making his kind of music. I’ll need to make some beats again soon to put out and fish for buyers but for the moment I’m thinking that now is my time to write.
Scanning the manila folders and flash drives full of my old compositions I find that the latest work was from three years ago. Some sheets were from high school and were stapled to marking papers where my teachers explained why my piece was only coherent enough for a passing grade. Four years of classes and every comment mentioned vision with poor execution. Aiming further than I could shoot.
I sit down at my upright piano and pray to the Muse as I’ve been taught to do. It’s been a little while. I take it to dinner and sit in awkward silence and apologise for not picking up the phone and calling sooner, I don’t look for excuses, the sour glares I get are justified. Then I pay for the dinner and adjust the seat on my piano bench.
Back to basics. Ritornello. Then some variations. I record a lot and play it all back. The tunes are familiar, I start to think about what I’d been taught about the music healing me and I know it is. My recordings are in ternary form. Feels like I’m massaging a twinge in my head. Aural convalescence. A starting piano phrase that I elaborate on with an accompanying acoustic guitar arpeggio. Old school stuff. After several listens I wonder what Gen’s contralto can add.
Gen and I meet up at the studio on a Saturday morning, without her band. Their EP is all put together and they have all the masters of their tracks. I play some of my emptier pieces for her and she smiles. She starts humming, taking this as an invitation to work together. We spend the whole day together messing around with music. It’s a lovely feeling. Loose, warm, carefree, like when I was at school with my friends and we would waste a whole period banging on drums and throwing sticks into the soundproof foam in a music practice room.
By eight in the evening we’re both lying on the floor vaping with my SoundCloud playing. We’re supine with our heads side by side, my feet face the soundboard, she has hers facing the opposite wall, her orange waves brush up against my neck. There’s the scent of lemon. Some of my older tracks start playing. The kicks aren’t layered, the snare is loose, it feels naked, and the main melody is an electric piano. I like it.
I see Gen’s arms come up and start moving to the beat, she starts snapping her fingers, her shiny bangles fall toward her elbow, jingling on her freckled forearm.
She hums: “This is nice, Jack.”
It’s a beautiful moment.
I feel my phone buzz in my pocket. The message is from Luis:
“Yo that video for Sharks got 300,000 views now cuz.”
Gen is surprised when I cut off my music.
“What’s up?”
Luis wasn’t lying. When did they shoot this? It’s a black and white music video, set underwater, rays of light ripple across Michael’s Compton cap, women swirl around him in a bacchanalian parade on the ocean floor. He’s mouthing the words that I recorded:
“Die. For the. Game. Martyr.
Three. Hundred. Slain. Sparta.
Bitch. Talkin’. Foul. Card her.
Dunk my. Arm. In it. Carter.”
Gen is laughing, smiling, entertained by what she sees.
“Who is that?” she asks.
“Uhh … client.”
“You’ve got some scope to your work.”
When the video finishes I search up Michael’s name. Then I look up Linkoln. The mixtape dropped last week, the night after we finalised everything. There was a lot of praise out there for the project. He had an interview at an American radio show, Gen and I watch it. I don’t actually believe what I’m hearing.
He’s friendly with the radio host. A black man with a full beanie drooping behind him. There’s Michael in a hoodie explaining his creative process.
At the end of the interview he says:
“On the real, shout out to the man Jack from Otahu. Hear that production, yo, that’s all him.” There’s a camera in the radio station booth and he looks into it, right at me. “Much love to you and yours, homie.”
I look up. He’d been behind that glass in front of me. Now he’s overseas, his creativity being appreciated, exhorted, and he was acknowledging me. It felt like the Muse had just slapped me in the face. The work didn’t seem real and was getting less and less real.
A million views in a week. The way I hear it through his messages he’s organising a European tour. I declined to participate, said I had some work to do, which wasn’t a lie with all the new offers I was getting. People were after beats like Link’s.
I’m working with Gen without her band now. The music is nice. Her writing is nice. She’s nice. It’s all nice. Link has commissioned me to remix Sharks for him with a verse from one of the emcees he met on tour. I’m doing it. It’s what I’m good at.
Another night in town looking for solace in Frank’s brass emoting. One thing I’ve found in all the time I’ve spent listening to Frank jam is that the only people that really stop to hear him are the homeless. Everyone else has somewhere else to be, which is fair enough.
I close my eyes lying down on a bench behind him. I’m nodding to that classic phrase from Spain when the air stops turning into notes. It startles me. I sit up and see Frank staring across the road where, among the crowd, a portly woman is walking with her two children. The kids look old enough to be in intermediate school. Frank is transfixed. The young girl walking with the woman looks toward him and waves. A thin lady in a cardigan drops a few coins in Frank’s sax case for his beautiful rendition of slack-jawed, heartbroken silence. The woman and children across the road turn a corner and Frank starts up his lungs again.
This time we go to a Burger King to close off the night, not that the room feels any less artificial than our usual spots. Frank is wearing a dusty brown leather jacket tonight. He’s old enough to make it look good, like he’s meant to be wearing it and it’s not for show. He doesn’t wear a cap to represent a place he isn’t from, or creased hippie shirts advertising individuality, or a taffeta dress to emphasise class.
We start on the usual nothings, but I’m frightened to talk about anything else with him now.
“How’s your music going?” he wonders.
“Not bad.”
“Do you do any rap stuff?”
“I make music for rappers, yeah.”
“What’s that like?”
I shrug. “What do you think it’s like?”
“I don’t know. It’s like anything else, I’m wondering what it feels like to you.”
I pause. He speaks so calmly. It dawns on me that the passion I see in people has been overacting on their part. I’ve grown used to their histrionics.
“It’s um … it’s what the world is now. Loud, synthetic, dizzying.”
He nods. He’s accepted that.
“I’m uh … I’m working on a project now with a friend. A chance to do my own stuff.”
“You weren’t doing your own stuff before?”
“Well, that was for other people, they hired me.”
“So … you played the keyboard in the songs they wrote.”
“No. I made the instrumentation.”
He squints. He tries to discern what I’m telling him by looking into the layers of his burger.
“So …” he looks at me. “It is your own stuff.”
“No.” I can’t explain but he isn’t bothered by it. He’s fine with not understanding my untenable world.
I’m listening to the whole of Link’s mixtape now. I feel a shadow come over me, come into me. That empty part of my head that echoed with the sound I’d adored in the past felt so false and disquietingly pernicious. A hostile emptiness. This separation in my mind is a lie. Tomorrow I’ll get stuck into that remix for Link. Everybody loves a remix.
I save my work for Link and resume drilling songs from my old music class clear files. I realise that playing these songs makes me feel good for one reason: it satisfies my hunger for musicality. Making New ScHool felt like a chore but that had to satisfy my need for feeling used and misunderstood and talented at the same time. All of those tracks that I produced for Link are overproduced in the culture of that kind of music. He doesn’t need a flow or a guiding light, he feels his way through the music with both hands on his nuts like most rappers do. Musically, there is more of me, of my style, of myself in those tracks than there is of Linkoln.
And making all of that was like therapy. What I’m doing with Gen is helping me in a way that’s different to how making this remix is helping me.
I imagine Frank’s saxophone choking and his longing look toward the family in town.
In the end Gen has no more to say than Michael does except in regard to the kind of healing I need. But the work can’t save you from needing things. I used to think the distorted light coming to me from the surface was truth, but art isn’t truth. It might look like it at the start of a project; the empty staves following a beautifully put together question phrase are hopeful, and inchoate visions of the future are always helplessly optimistic.
This is the world. This is building on superstition. Mysticism came before logic. God came before gravity. Dreams came before reality and reality isn’t ideal. I still use the music to get to Sanctuary. To feel better. Just like Link, like Gen, like Frank; because you do need healing. You need to wear bangles, caps, tattoos, taffeta dresses, loud clothes so that you can hear something this deep under the sea. You need to not think that we’re all shoals of nobodies with nothing to say.
You can’t help needing it.