A Thing For

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Studer jumped into the interval between the A and E chords of a song picked just for this occasion. He was propelled by the measured grace of partially muted strings of a guitar feeding a slightly overdriven tube amp. He flew through what felt like air into the brief space between huge sounds. He was back in the virtual game that seemed so real, while in full relaxation on his quiet sunny back deck in the real world.

Events swirled about Studer as his Probabilities app dialed in the correct time and space coordinates for a virtual representation of Saint Paul, Minnesota on October 14, 1986. The realism was partially born of his actually having been at this show.

He landed in a wide parkway, looking down a lane that was stitched by ghostly trails accreting into cirrus clouds in the evening sky. They showed the effect of the delay pedal that Blunie had slung over the guitar when recording.

He wrapped the harmony around him like a cloak and followed the violin melody, which shot out a trail towards his main destination. The notes glowed as fairies of old as they flew eagerly to the main doors of a large auditorium in the otherwise quiet city. The minor tone of the cellos added a slight fretful feel to the breeze stirring the bushes next to the sidewalk.

Studer walked towards the pounding, thumping, and rattle of an excited crowd. The doors of the Roy Wilkins Auditorium swung open as if pulled by ancient invisible guardians that knew him by sight as one who belonged where few may go.

Nodding at old friends as he strode the labyrinth towards backstage, he thought about his proteges, those that knew, and those yet to meet knowing. The forces gathering them together were like winds gently teasing pieces of paper on the street.

The ley lines of this music scene crossed his screen and flashed bright shadows in the laugh lines of his face. He traced a path that might take the right amount of seeming daring and danger for his students immersed in the game.

A space in time opened to let in his lesson, and he felt the familiar warmth as something new came into the past. A half-hour opening slot should be enough, he thought.

What treasure lay hidden in the warp and weft of the twin towns in their heyday? It was time to set Blunie up with a tableau, a new slice, using his song to make back in the day bigger.

Studer had a thing for music and all that went with it. He thought with affection of his friends down the speaker wire, transmitting tunes into times and vice versa.

He had treaded many a board in the supposed real world. His mind was a vast trove of concerts, stages, people and songs, strummed into being and into Dual City. His experience made his scenarios for those on the lower rungs into real lessons. His reputation for those stuck in screens was to be able to replace second hand living with the feel and rush of really playing.

A friend from Camper Van Beethoven raised his hand, on his way to the tiny room that opening bands were allowed. It was Jonathan Segal, their multi-instrumentalist. Studer wanted to ask him how the violin was going over on the big stage of this tour of pageantry. The string samples recorded in a church in Berlin that Blunie had used in his recording were cool, but Studer looked forward to the “real” thing, if only virtually.

He would be in the wings as Blunie arrived, aglow with possibility. He wanted to see him sail the high seas of sound waves that could be harbored in Dual City.

The crowd started to fill the front rows like ocean to sand. With them Studer felt excited, alive and free for a few hours created from infinity. This is what we live for, he thought, as the door opened into the crossroads of music and time. (to be continued)

Fiction by Marc Coleman, 2021

Photo: Manuela Thames

Dual City

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Dual City illustration by Claire Coleman

Blunie drove into Dual City as the setting sun glinted off the Gated Snare towers.
Monolithic blue and black expanses rushed into view, defining the edges of a pink gold reverb sky. He motored across the see-through bridge towards the Bauhaus District, with its edges of Burtonesque goth and glitter. Briefly he marveled that he could finally access this immersive game of sound that felt realer than real, while his actual body sat cross-legged on his yoga mat in Northeast Minneapolis doing paradoxical breathing, his mind having flown.

Blunie had learned well from his teachers. He focused his skills like a laser beam at a
BÖC show to focus on the guitar solo with which he had adorned the ending of his new song Dual City. The guitar wound serpentine through the gleaming facades of synths that he had coaxed from Ableton. The notes became sparks like fireworks in the darklit streets of a city built of sound.

He had done it! His song was his glowing ticket found in his chocolate bar, his opening
of the velvet rope of reality. This backstage pass of the spirit was a laminate that may
well open doors to a thousand stages and dimly lit recording studios of time immemorial. The game was on and he was in it.

He opened up Choogle Maps with its randomized Creedence riff and punched in a
section in the gray and black post-punk of the Bauhaus, and his virtual device switched
to a Daniel Ash guitar line from a Tones on Tail track that he barely remembered.

His environs grew serrated and hard as he inched his car through a crowd of
Gothabees waiting for tickets at some venerable theater front. The gargoyles
were looking a bit worse for wear, he thought, like old ladies grasping at faded glory.
The black wrought iron of the gate beckoned to those just off the Double Dare tour bus.

Blunie’s virtual reality pulsed along with the guitared shards of postpunk funk that emanated from the redlit door. The world of the real felt far away, an echo remnant of a distant dream, and yet was not lost. Back home, his bodymind and its brain stayed fully in alpha for him like a dutiful and loyal servant.

As he drove, smoky skylights whirred past in the cadence of his song’s beats.
His Singularities synths and bass formed the blur of buildings into a vision that was his version of Dual City, a town of notes, rests, and the eldritch space between.

Blunie saw his destination and pulled to a stop near the corner of Electric
and Fascination. He looked for the entrance, scanning the none-more-black wall. A faint green line traced itself into the outline of a door as he focused his gaze. An emerald dollar sign with a little red asterisk pulsed into being on the door as he approached. He knew that symbol from his studies. The Door of The Contract had appeared.

He immediately knocked firmly, having learned from his mentor Studer that to hesitate or show haste would make it start to fade. The door slowly opened of its own accord. Inside was a giant warehouse space with lofted ceilings and wall-sized windows that took in the dual sunsets.

As he walked slowly in, the room appeared to get larger, reminding him of something from a Crowley book: “The further in you go, the bigger it gets.” He had learned about how The Lobby worked, so he wasn’t surprised. A saying proclaimed itself importantly on the wall in meter-high letters: “This Is Not A Waiting Room”, perhaps because Blunie happened to be wearing a Fugazi t-shirt. He already knew the room was more like a platform.

The look was completed by giant music posters on walls taller than a tale. Blown up album covers competed with huge photos, making Kate Bush and her Hounds appear to stare across the room at a stunning depiction of the classic Power Corruption and Lies album by New Order, possibly the best Saville design. A life-size poster of Ian Curtis sitting dejectedly adorned the far end of the cavernous space and Sonic Youth embodied art punk dystopia on the facing wall. A giant MTV logo with bundled astronaut loomed over, so as to depict the bringing of new wave to the basements of America. “Take that!”, Blunie remembered his father saying about that music revolution and its infiltration into the suburbs.

Blunie stepped past the pool table that seemed to replicate the one that travels with the Stones on tour, and chose a realistically ratty couch from the many that divided the cavernous space. He scanned the virtual coffee table piled with magazine replicas. Studer had told him that the the room “will be an open tuning set to your own inner chord”, whatever that meant.

Blunie’s thoughts turned to what was accepted as reality, back home, where the pandemic had rendered all the world’s stages fallow. He needed a break from that bad news wagon, and his skill had actually got him here, to the game of a lifetime. “We’re all in a waiting room now, Ians”, he said as the dust motes slam danced in the slanting sunlights that framed a Gibson SG near a wall. “This game is a virtual way to get out of the real lobby of our lives, where we sit watching our own entrances to an outer world denied”, he said to himself, musing.

At the far end of the room an archway flashed visible, showing a further labyrinth beyond. A woman in a tattered black leather jacket carrying a clipboard stepped from nowhere, and beckoned to him, smiling. He recognized her from last night’s dream of a biz meeting in a garish neon-laden tower. She was his virtual tour manager, at least from what he recalled of a receding dream memory.

He followed through the arch into a hallway crowded with amps and other miscellanea, one side door open to a dressing room filled with roadies, parasites, and those that meant no specific harm. The other players had already left. Smiling well-wishers gave him high fives as he traversed the tunnel-like terrain.

At the end of the hall was another door that was pulsing off its sockets with the sound of music and a cheering crowd. He had found a venue! What would Blunie get with this roll of the dice, this foray into a virtual multi-verse? He figured he should just follow where it leads. Like one Speaker said, if you see a door in a dream, go through it. He reached for the handle, hoping for the best show of his life. (to be continued)

Music fiction by Marc Coleman, 2020; Illustration by Claire Coleman, 2019

Dual City is the first chapter of “Traveler in Sound“, to be continued soon; watch for the next story!

The soundtrack to this story is Dual City, by Marcsonic, and is available on most all services.

Dual City – Single by Marcsonic | Spotify

Dual City | Marcsonic (bandcamp.com)

‎Dual City by Marcsonic on Apple Music