Dystopic Jam Session - 23 April 2007

I had forgotten writing this. I must have just finished something cyberpunk (likely the Mirrorshades anthology) and wanted to earnestly emulate it. This has some of the really satisfying momentum that good (post-)cyberpunk SF has. I had expected it to age poorly, to lose that energy that I was going after to begin with. Surprisingly, having reread it just now after a few glasses of wine and quieting the music (Silver Apples Radio on last.fm), it maintains itself very well. It has a few unintentional errors and gross confusions, but I can still pick out many of the references I had first aimed for. (Robes, for example, is named after Roberspierre.) This still has a surprising "fresh-ness" to it that I don't think my writing generally retains.

Why do I post this now? Well, I have all my past writing ready at hand on my current computer and it came to mind. Why did it come to mind? In Lorenzo Vincenzi's search for understanding his macabre case, he stumbles dreamily into a music shop. I needed some inspiration and "Dystopic Jam Session" came to mind almost immediately. I did not expect much from rereading it and was pleasantly surprised. Afterward, I felt that posting it might be satisfying for any fellow SF readers. If you are entirely unfamiliar with cyberpunk, then it may be a bizarre mixing of run-on sentences and onomatopoeia. If that is the case, then check out William Gibson's Neuromancer or Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (which is technically post-cyberpunk) and everyone should watch Ridley Scott's Bladerunner, as long as its not the theatrical version.

If it happens to be your flavor, enjoy "Dystopic Jam Session."

~~~

Dystopic Jam Session
23 April 2007

Jakki started out on the drums, blasting away with her toothbrush in her left hand and the two sticks in her right. She’s a leftie so it made more sense that way. Intoxed on her retro-hardcore bands, she pounded and grilled and ran holes, or nearly did, thru those second time round thrifted drums. She scared the bejeezus out of me starting up out of nowhere like plastique under a desk. I thought I knew her as a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend, and so we were like pseudo-fammed together. Her faded-jaded tie-dyed dreads flew in all spherical head-bobbing directions and damn if she didn’t know hot to play a toothbrush on a drum set.
Robes hopped up next, hitting strings on a half-stolen half-homemade bass hybrid, roughing up tables and breaking chairs on his way in, while he was in it, and out again one-oh-five mins later. Robes’ hair is the color of a lightning bolt, and I don’t mean white-yellow, but fucking luminous. He got some cosmo-headjob with fiberoptics that he programs with from an integrated wristpad and can set to moody-lights, fluxing up-down based on his neural activity, a basic straight-uplink. Robes beats shit up; people, cars, walls, screens, himself, but not animals. He played like an animal, like some fuckin’ lycanthrope jaguar beastie boy. He swears genies are bad shit and bat shit stupid and he ain’t one; he doesn’t fuck with building blocks, just rearranges them into things like electrical hair on which you could see a Bowl game.
Jakki spat at Robes when he began playing drums with elbows, ankles, toes, knees, and more spit. Robes kicked up tiles and jammed his metal shoe parts into the ground. People started watching, regulars and aimless amateurs, who wanted to condescend but were busy shitting with being-blown-away-ness. Some kid tore away from his handholding matron and began breakdancing in the midst of it. She screamed which led to four others screaming out majestic zealous notes like fundamentalist fools. The kid moved fast, encouraged by the screaming and the respectful space Robes gave him.
Inward I leapt, first getting kicked in the left cheek by Robes and then playing an amped trumpet into Jakki’s face so that I could see the color of her eyes in the off-chance I might want to screw her later. She whipped her long orange-red-green-blue-magenta-yellow-pink dreads at me. Yeah, she was a fox featuring tightstrapped goggles like wartime Brit comix, screaming and hitting me. Lips smiled around the mouthpiece and teeth clanked against the brass and silicon, fingers warping and winding the notes this and that-a way.
The kid had started trying to freestyle, using pop-lines and nostalgia rhymes from his ma’s tunes who had given up and was window-shopping for scandalous electro-items in alley-facing windows. Robes set down his bass atop the drums—Jakki didn’t miss a beat; that made me hard—before walloping me under my ribs to my right. I swung the trumpet at his nose, hitting him before he tore it from my hands and began playing like a pre-king jazz maestro. Jeeee-zus! I began swinging and shouting bullshit nonsense political manifesto gobbledygook before taking a retrofitted keytar when Lianna pushed in with her post-hippie double peaces and moons with Band-aid™ charms.
Lianna Mother Earth-hip checked me into the crowd and she rammed herself towards the pile of toys, from which she triumphantly pulled a kid-friendly electric harp she slammed against her body. Playing with mashed, clay-laden fingers that must not be feeling anything at all, and tore the shit out of it. The breakdancing-freestylin’ youngster ran off with her swinging round and round and round with that oversized-string-menace hanging onto her like a vicious unloved formula-fed alien baby. Jakki spat on the harp and Lianna began pounding out waves below hearing we felt in our ribs and marrows—one less not harming Robes or me any. Spinning got her post-revolution peasant skirt all fangled in necks of other instruments and they trailed around her thrashing. Robes skipped over the trailing electro-zither, not missing a chord in the discord of his mutualist solo. Something like bagpipes plomped exasperatedly against my back and I tried to get out of Lianna’s radius as best I could. Peddies ran back in waves like rad warnings came off the earth tone hued and patchouli—which mingled with her B.O.—smelling girl. Lianna played something fierce, though it lacked rhyme, beat, and harmony, and logic had fled at the sight of her tawny, flowered-over skin.
Something synced between Lianna and Robes like French Revolutionary groupthinking zeal in all the right places, not that a precedent comes to mind, and the sharp metallic squeals and clangs of the trumpet isolated and enriched the infrasound twanging of the electroharp. Lianna’s turn focused the sound on me and the grease in my hair jangled loose and my keytarring got out of hand in the alt-funkiest of ways, sneaking in and out and about their platonic-planetoid-Plutonian intermixed mastery. The motions of Charon entered my mind, the semi-orbital paths and the intermediary center of gravity, and my spinning and tap-tap-tapping like neighborhood machinegun warnings stealthily stole the show, but only for the fourteen or fifteen seconds before Jakki started pounding out again. She didn’t compete, didn’t jingle and jangle and dangle and dingle the drums and tophat and cymbals to overcome the racket of the three of us jamming. Out of the ash-gray clouds showing in via the skylight, her accents caught up like she was ahead of us the whole time and we were jamming no holds barred like real revolutionary underdogs, like forgotten zinester and locavore scenester beating proletarian elitists. We knew what was up and what was down and we were both.
The peddies and plasticized mothers with elastic cheeks and brows were mesmerized like dreamers unknowing, or the dreamers’ lucidities become overrated in the mystical visionary dreams brought on by damn good peyote. They hadn’t a clue. Robes was digging holes out of the ground with his feet, the clackity-clacking of the synthetic porcelain providing sharp, chaotic undertones. The breakdancing kid circled back and pounded his fist in the air threw his body into everyone else like a mosh pit-bound youngster asking for a fist or heel in the face. As Jakki doubled up on drums with toothbrush and sticks, the bristles flew into my eyes and I megalomaniac screamed, el presidente-style which spun tunes out of Lianna with long fingers tracing the strings up and down their lengths. Robes hair was crazy-on-fire, reds and yellows intermingling with his bleached blonde and the quasi-wrong of the image meant that I spat at him liberally and he screamed in my face and I spat in his face more and Lianna swung her fuckin’ harp and knocked the two of us over and tearing the strings out of the frame.
Robes and Jakki rebuilt the tunes, losing and regaining and pounding away at the mesmerized audience, sucking up the soundwaves like Vonnegutt’s harmonia, nearly glowing in powerful reproductive lights. They almost burst in succulent passion—the eyes a-glow and skin vibrating loosely, it was obvious—when Lianna shattered their inter-sensual minds with the zither that still hung loosely from her skirt. From the strewn out armaments of Lianna’s assault I hefted a heavily patched didgeridoo, making long low tribal sounds which were complemented immediately by high twin twittery sounds from Lianna who, all smiles and chasing laughter, sucked up my rooted tribal spirit, thinking me more of something I’m not that what I am. I blew and sucked and blew making the deepdown madnesses well up in the crowd, rumbling away at the windows in their frames and the old-style glasses of the crotchety vinegar-aged undermasculine protectorate in the kiddie playground. Robes didn’t laugh but picked up my long breaths and shifted, pulling out the high astral sounds from the electric machine at his lips. Jakki tapped away at quick insect monster sounds, making skin on my legs and back and neck wriggle feverishly, ensuring her bestial nature and vicious teeth.
York, all two-hundred-some kilos of him, pounded into the tile debris behind Robes and he whipped out his lengthy harmonica linked to ultrathin speakers in the sides of his head and sang thru notes unheard outside of York’s padded basement dwelling. I avoided York up to this point, buffed up on soups he liberally borrowed from the pharmaceutical companies until they paid him for weekly testing. At one point he had C-cup tits, but by the next week they were gone without any surgery scars. The pharms paid for the amp-implants and he used them whatever he played, which was next to everything, and the double-harmonica made a point of that. York had apparently crafted it himself based on old school possibilities. He played under and over us, as if bird-lungs breathed and rebreathed constantly. Layered and intermingled notes shattered like storm windows and car crashes.
Lianna was the first to duel him out from under her strings. She pulled a hairclip from her endless masses and twittered away at different strings in slippery-sliding ways, making noise to a rhythm, summoning infernal chords that soared like fiery wings and soured wild-grape-like with near immediacy. Trying to reach under their interplay, my long bellows poked out opposite, rancorous rich spring water while Robes space-danced mindlessly to Jakki’s tit-tit-tittering which had nothing going on with his timorous shatter-sounds clashing like lightning on my long waving outward gushing streaming.
Robes took it away from us, bellowing with extraterrestrial-quasi-binary musical measurements, alien and earthen and I couldn’t keep with it. My long rhythms fell into asymmetries and they stayed there, riveting and welding and razing it all to the ground like napalm blasters on grass hut villages. My breaths thundered throughout but unmet and uninitiated in the rites that Robes was dishing out. My head was out, displayed under the suspended guillotine blade just like his namesake would have wanted. So I brought it down, nearly breaking the damn thing, and started haphazardly shouting, playing with the meter he was playing, mixing and remixing my own voice back with internalized equipment, like pounding peddles built into your feet. It wove into his brassy-ballsy-mindboggling-madness and I loved it. Lianna and Jakki faltered at my playfulness, at the unforeseen and unlikely blasting of molecular mechanics.
York halved his timing, interweaving it more clearly into the back-and-forth rhapsodies Robes and I were managing like tech’d up-lard ass CEOs. York—that big limey bastard—managed to match my wavelengths and make words appear that were not words and sayings that were unsaid. I wanted to punch the fucker for messing with my specs from the outside. Then I heard it, the bridging between Robes and me with the harmonized harmonica hermeneutics: York was playing in between Robes and me, linking us like one voice or one instrument, like one entity, the three of us gathering up nonsense into pseudo-intellectual-down-to-earth-lunar-wheat-synth-synced melodies. York was with Robes and with me, synchronicity or synergy, and with just the gaps left open for Lianna and Jakki to freeplay into it, the holes waiting for wholeness. York had found some major ‘grades somewhere that could link us or our wavelengths or some shit like that.
Jakki held her sticks tightly, knowing the opening before it exploded in a whisper, and she filled it, bursting out boogeyman/closet monster-like. No more tapping or tittering or cajoling the sounds gently, she filled the hard vacancies with majestic magnitudes of lengthy, shimmering brass echoes and the ash-flow-stampede-tectonic-thunders from her linked and interlinked with York’s bio-psi-neuro upheavals. Lianna took her zither and the stringy tunes leapt egomaniacally out, crashing heinously into York’s attempted harmonifications—whatever the hell you might call his playing—just to challenge the Anglo-Russian bastard. He swept back mighty reverberations and she filled the space guided Jujitsu-majestic-like into where he made it go, sound-bending or mending or grinding. Lianna only laughed in crazed hippie-dazed ways with both sets of vocal chords, transforming her chortles into magnificent possession orchestrations.
So Robes was jamming away blues master style with wailing pale-skin banshee types laying ruin to his southern roots. Jakki was ferociously purring extinct wild cat like as her toothbrush shattered on the cymbals, before tossing her stick apart and playing all sharp tooth and claw vicious, zombie-fighting insanity chucking a piece of broken brass at Lianna, nearly hitting York instead, before it shattered a scent boîte in some no-name’s shopping bag. Lianna fluidly jammed, flipping her feet madstyle bewitchin’ and coaxin’ out the steps from York’s goliath heels. York, the pharm-mutie-Übermensch-fuck, harmonized and mixed anything with which I voice-blasted him while tapping his toes to Lianna’s asymmetric offbeats. His notes did more interweaving and mixing than self-expression; he synergized and awoke the intercontextualities of our disparations. My doubletiming voice and re-voiced mixing exhausted my lungs and blood spat out when the static started bursting from the subsampled phonemes. Words-to-noise, noise-to-words, words-with-noise-to-nonsense-lyricism. Somewhere in the game I felt the tickle in my head like the semi-conductor buzz of a new ‘grade as it nestled down my spine and into my throat. I coughed, hacked, overloaded and blacked out. I thought:
You fuckin’ newb.

York laid a solid kick against my diaphragm while I was out, forcing a cough in backhanded Heimlich maneuvers, and when I woke the rough point of a rib somewhere dislodged jabbed at my insides. After the cough, Lianna had kindly prodded me with her foot, still strumming away, to double check my breathing. How sweet. No one missed a beat since my pallor didn’t change at all. Who needs enemies, aye?
The four of them sat above me, laying fetal on the supersmoothed tiles, drinking madly from stickered-up boîtes, smelling of sweat and compost and homebrew, but mostly of sweat. York spat on me, Jakki grinned and splashed some of her drink on me. Robes and Lianna chattered furiously over guerrilla tactics and mastermind tacticians; I could catch only every third or fourth word. York and Jakki weren’t saying much, mostly watching each other and the crowds, flummoxed by the debris from the show and frightened by my ill-composed posture. If this is what friends looked like, what does an enemy come out with (or without)?
Sitting up, half-lotus and breathing shallowly, I noticed the freestylin’ kiddo was circling us.
“Hey, come,” I shouted, hiding the expected rasp behind a croaking voice. The kid wandered up playing certain and sharp and not-too-giddy. “Take t’is,” I handed him a small jumper, “check out when t’e folks are away. Nothing naughty, just some smarts. Hide’t.” And he slipped in a slim pocket by his collar; well-done boy. He laid down a simple pound and I laughed low before he dashed off.
“What was’t?” Robes.
“Tunes, lit, ideas in concentrate.”
“T’ink’t’ll g’in?” Jakki, wondering at my foolishness.
“He needs t’em. We’ll see nex’time.”
“Nex’?” Lianna. From off the table I filched a smokeless stick, lit it with York’s chained lighter, and dragged long and rough.
“If y’up t’it.”
They laughed at my hoarse lines. I smiled vaguely and coughed.