Unnatural Artifice: Those sensitive to the unholy marriage of mechanism and the uncanny, the stirring of dead metal with unearthly sentience, may find elements herein profoundly disturbing.
“A Wiggle in the Signal: A Dispatch from Shatagee Woods”
Wal now, I s’pose I oughta begin at the beginnin’, but the beginnin’ done run off with the middle when the voltage spiked last Thursday. That’s when the forest started hummin’, not in no birdsong kinda way, but like a field recorder what’s got religion—buzzin’ low like a preacher’s throat when he’s ‘bout to say somethin’ he ain’t quite sure he believes.
Now, don’t you go thinkin’ I’m one o’ them types who stares at a wire and calls it God—though I did once teach a toaster to whistle “Sweet Georgia Brown”—but even a feller like me, who codes with one hand and tunes with the other, knows when a waveform’s got teeth. And this one, brother, had molars.
See, I’d been fiddlin’ with the Echo Magnetizer I built outta an old butter churn, three piano hammers, and a stolen bit o’ military-grade delay logic—don’t ask, or do, but I’ll lie—and I was tryin’ to loop the sound of a fox yippin’ through a probability ladder made of patch cables and regret. Nothin’ fancy. Just a little somethin’ for the pirate hootenanny up ’round South Inlet come Sunday.
But that signal, that wiggle, it weren’t comin’ from me—oh no. It was driftin’ in through the ether like music what forgot where it was goin’. Somethin’ other was playin’ the lake like a mouth harp strung with silver hair and ghost breath. And you know what they say: “You made that bed, now try sleepin’ in a waveform what’s shaped like yer mama’s warnin’ voice.”
I got up, pulled on my ragged coat stitched with MIDI ports and memories, and stepped out ‘fore the stars changed their pitch. Y’ever hear stars? Not just look at ‘em—hear ‘em. They got this high, glassy sound like rain on a brass skillet; all shiverin’, no wet.
So I’m trudgin’ down toward the beaver dam—I call it Studio B, on account o’ the acoustics—and wouldn’t ye know it, there’s ol’ Saple-Tooth Jack, sittin’ cross-legged on a stump like he’s waitin’ for his soul to download. He’s been dead since ’93, but that don’t stop him from playin’ a mean jaw harp in the spectral band what haunts the western shore.
“Ye ain’t usin’ enough intentional error,” he says, puffin’ out smoke shaped like treble clefs and bad decisions. “All yer notes line up too pretty. Ain’t no truth in symmetry.”
Now, I know Jack’s right, in the way only wrong people are. So I start detunin’ the oscillators on my pocket synthesizer, real gentle-like, till they’re staggerin’ ‘long like drunks at a barn dance in six-four time. And lo—lo, mind ye!—a door opens in the sound itself, a kind o’ shimmer ‘twixt frequencies, like the forest is breathin’ in reverse.
Behind it? A room.
But not a room room. This one’s made o’ long-forgotten chords, and the walls are held up by guilt and ashwood. There’s a table with a teacup what whispers your own name in a voice two octaves below thunder, and a metronome made of squirrel bones tickin’ out the last seconds of somebody else’s childhood.
I stepped in ‘cause I’m an idiot.
Inside, I seen myself as an old codger—or someone mighty nigh to it—bendin’ over an array of copper plates what shimmered like lakewater under pressure. He (I?) looked up and grinned. “You’re early,” he said. “We ain’t crashed the system yet.”
Ain’t crashed the system. That’s composer-talk for “we’re still bein’ polite.”
So I asked him what all this meant, what the signal was, what reality was doin’ spinnin’ like a fiddle string round a broken peg, and he just laughed—kinda like a banjo fallin’ down a staircase. “Paradox,” he said, “is just improvisation dressed for a funeral.”
And then it all faded. Just like that. Room gone. Jack gone. Stars tuned back to A=432 like nothin’ ever happened.
But I woke up with new code in my pocket. Scrawled on a dry leaf in chicken scratch I know weren’t mine:
{“To break the loop, ye gotta play outside the chart. To love a place, let it haunt ye. To write music that floats in the air, ye first gotta forget the ground.”}
Ain’t that just the damndest thing?
So now I’m back in my shack with wires hangin’ like Spanish moss, tryin’ to recreate a moment what probably never was, recordin’ the unrecordable, buildin’ little sound-traps for truth like a child makin’ forts outta mittens and lies.
If ye get up here by Sunday, I’ll show ye how the fox sings in reverse, and we’ll toast to paradox with saple brandy and the laughter of dead raccoons.
I got one mic open and one ear bent toward the storm.
Come quick.
We’re ’bout to crash the system.
What mysteries of Chateaugay Lake haunt you?