May 13, 2011: My flight to London jetlagged me into a stupor, and now after four concerts already this evening, I walk dazed to the Roundhouse Studio Theatre. The room is hot and full of people in black, mostly German, here to see Carter-Tutti play. I go to the back of the room, where a pearl-haired girl is sitting in the only chair in sight. She indicates no intention to give up her seat, so I slouch against an eight-foot stack of disused folded tables at the back of the room. My feet hurt; I am still breaking these boots in. Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti are already on the darkened stage, along with the wiry Nik Void, whose huge drape of bangs covers her face. The three casually tool with their instruments while the mixing engineer speaks to them through his talkback mic, helping them to sound-check over the noise of the DJ’s downtempo beat. Leaning back, I close my eyes, and my breathing slows. Sleep, almost.
After a minute or two, I hear the bass-heavy pre-show music recede, and the chattering around me sails into excited cheering. The band is ready to play. I open my eyes for a moment, but the shock of suddenly finding myself in physical space is repulsive—knowing the closeness of the crowd around me, the mean look the blonde’s boyfriend gives me, the sheer not-infinity of this blackbox theater. The stage is now red as the band acknowledges the audience, and I close my eyes again, returning to the void, a quenching, zero gravity seduction of my fatigue’s slow hunger.
A sharp, tight bass drum begins pounding in clockwork. Through the room’s giant speakers, the sound blooms cavernous with every beat’s attack, twice per second, hitting me in the chest first, then rumbling in decay down my hips and legs. A moment later Cosey and Nik begin scraping their guitars, filtered through Chris’s harmonizers, ring modulators, and effects boxes. It is the sound of metal gouging metal, a scream that suggests the resonating of both source and filter, sawblades mutilating themselves against one another. And it is loud; recordings are mastered to ensure that no sound leaps out so aggressively, but the band is playing these noises live, impossibly painting the bass drum’s already oppressive pulse as background to a clatter of extreme malfunction. The grinding is filtered so it locks to the beat’s grid, echoes right to left, and excites an orgy of aching mechanical groans in antiphon. This is dub music’s language, spoken with a mouthful of broken glass, I think to myself.
But thinking is hard when music plays so loud and pervades my body so deeply, when I am already in a black, internal space, sleepy chemicals filling my brain and limbs. At this volume, when a bass frequency hits, its widening sine wave is amplified into squareness by the limits of mixing boards, subwoofers, and the human ear. It silences everything else, not just at the purely acoustic level, but in my head too. The sound drowns me over and over, and in the instant between the beats, I gasp for clarity, my head just above water, defenselessly receptive. Storm gods loom. High frequencies at this volume do something else. Either in some instinctive attempt to mimic the music’s steely squealing and its sonic preconditions with my own body, or through an ancestral cochlear fight-or-flight response to danger, I cringe, tightening my face, clenching my teeth. Automatically I jerk my head away from the song’s fiery birthing. I respond this way again and again, always a split second after each fricative machine growl. Half dreaming now and forced into pure response, I regress. The animal brain writhes sensuously in its own mere selfness.
I am at the edge of a pleasure rarely visited. The possibility of ecstasy—being out of myself—is nearly always either novel enough to marvel at (a strictly front-of-brain act) or strange enough to scare me back into my body. Dimly aware of this in my sleep-deprived trance, I raise my arms above my head and hang onto the edge of the top table in the stack behind me, my knees now about to buckle, my eyes still closed.
I will let go. Submit. Abject.
This choice is my last conscious act before I slip under.
My legs stomp, collapse, and wriggle to the pounding beat. My head and face twist at the high noise, now slamming in repetitive white-hot overexposure. When the screeching and the throbbing drums line up just right, I twitch harder, my head banging the tables behind me. It feels good so I do it more. Harder. I don’t know if I’m awake. I don’t know how many songs the band has played. I am an electrified thing, gnashing in spasm but not self-destructive, because there is in this moment no self to destroy. I am making noise now, resonating with the music, its collateral damage. Sex noises and fuck words. At some point my legs give way again and I am slumped, hanging from my hands, my wrists together. Not more than a dreaming body, I shake my head back and forth fast. I am drooling. There is no time.
Until the music stops, and amid the clapping I hear from everywhere, something touches me. I awake, a terrible reminder of where I am. It’s only the blonde girl’s boyfriend accidentally nudging me as he applauds, but that’s all it takes to rip me back. Surfacing, I adjust my stance, fix my hair, and remind myself to clap for the band, whose set is finished. It’s what one does in the social world of ugly buildings and plastic beer cups and other people.