The floor was small, the walls enormous. Four hundred people made arm’s length unachievable, yet the warehouse, a silo for carbon black before it burned down in an unprovable arson, remained nearly empty. It felt it, too, even with them crowding the floor. All that space hovering above, a sealed sky.
Some of the damage from the fire remained. Most of the windows lining the top were missing or shattered, and thick soot covered a ceiling that had yet to be scrubbed or blasted. Streaks of bleach stained the walls, as did grand blazes of rust formed by the rainwater that would have rushed in through the broken windows in the weeks since. The smell of coal-fire was everywhere. There was a hint of soil in it too, and a polymer that lent a saccharine note.
In the gray space between laws the owners, chemical suppliers mostly to experimental labs in the region, had rented the silo to the bands for the night. The last group had just taken down their gear, and Larent, Moto, and Ravan, the closers, were setting up their own. The monitors blared Reich’s 18 Musicians. They weren’t quite eighteen in number themselves, but they’d brought enough other musicians along with them to fill out the sound and play everything that needed playing.
Dozens of small speakers sat convexly behind the audience, along the curve of the silo wall. Directly across, they set up Larent’s collection of oscillators, two MPCs rigged to laptops, a frequency modulation synthesizer, several rack-mounted amplifiers, and a Marshall stack for Ravan’s fretless guitar.
Moto’s drums were out in front rather than behind all of this, and had been whittled down to a bass, a snare, a floor tom, and a series of splashes with no true crash. Between the drums and the electronics were the strings and brass: the cellos, a violin, Larent’s double bass, and a quartet of trumpets.
Three hundred rungs up, perched on an iron grating at the top of the tower, Renna and Stagg watched and listened. They hadn’t talked about that night yet, the one that ended in broken glass. The music meant they didn’t have to right now, which pleased them both. Language was hurting more than helping lately. It was better simply to sit together, alone.
But the ladder rattled and faces started to appear. A half-dozen of the crowd below had found their way up. They’d come with Percocet and marijuana at least. Recompense for the intrusion, that was the way Stagg thought of it. He waved off the marijuana but accepted a clutch of the familiar off-white pills, the ones Jen had softened her tragedy with. Instead of popping one, though, or handing one to Renna, he pocketed them all and went for the ladder in search of an emptier grating. Renna gave them a sheepish smile and followed him down. She was getting sick of that smile, the one she seemed to need more and more around him.
The two had hardly made it down ten rungs when a rising wave met them from below, 440 hertz shooting up at them from the lens of speakers on the factory floor, like the ocular beams once thought to leave the eye. At the same time that this filtered sawtooth traveled the length of the tower, bouncing off the ceiling, its pitch spiraled upward through the series of overtones, a second per.
The sheer height of the silo gave it reverberative powers greater than most cathedrals. But the acoustics were flawed. There was especially the coldness of the sound, which must have been augmented by the concrete and further distorted by the tunnel-like shape of the building.
Stagg lost the rhythms of his descent in the wake of the sawtooth, the coordination between hands and feet. He paused and Renna’s foot came down on his hand. He pulled it away from the ladder and twisted around before finding his grip. As the wave disappeared above the 46th partial, into the inaudible range, the two of them continued their descent in a countermotion to a music they could no longer trace.
The strident buzz of a naked square wave replaced the sawtooth. This time it was Renna who paused. Stagg looked down, his hand still hurting, and saw Larent working the oscillators, peeling away partials, paring down the brute wholeness of the wave with the same slip-stick motion he would use to hold a note on the double bass, his rosined bow alternately catching and sliding across the strings.
Around this synthesized core the musicians they’d hired arranged an organic, pure body: doublings, pure fifths and thirds, and a pure major sixth above it, all played in measureless notes, the instrumentalists ducking in and out of the chords at will. Having dialed in the oscillators, Larent triggered the MPC samples and joined them on the bass, bowing the lowest A.
Harmonically the piece was simple, the motion generated through synthesis, additive and subtractive. Ravan ran a kind of interference with his guitar, injecting tempered notes just micro-tones off from the rest, shading the music away from purity. Quickly these beating tones, these wolves with intent, went from peculiar accents to percussion more vicious than anything provided by Moto, who pounded out a beat on bass and snare made up of the fewest strokes necessary to imply the time signatures revolving every sixteen bars: 3/4, 4/4, 5/4, 3/2.
Renna and Stagg dropped onto a vacant grating about half way up the silo and took half the Percocet. Over the next minutes, or however long it was, by infinitesimal increments that evaded the ear the music grew extraordinarily loud. Stagg hadn’t noticed any discrete bump in volume, but now that he’d sensed the scale of the sound, it was unignorable and still expanding.
As the music grew, the audience shrunk in proportion. Since the silo doors couldn’t be seen from where they were, the contraction too occurred by imperceptible intervals. Every few minutes, though, they could see, with a detachment the opiate permitted, that the crowd was that much smaller and the music that much larger.
Sick from sound, they took the rest of the pills. Everything dimmed, the sound transforming from an exogenous crush to a simple flush of space. They leaned against each other and stared down at the band. At Larent. Neon green peeked out of his ears. Plugs. Prepared.
They passed out on the grating, or fell between sleep and wakefulness, whether from shock or the drug or both. An abrupt silence woke them. They looked down to the floor and it was empty. Only the band members remained. Larent stared up at them inscrutably. Ravan was smoking something.