Chapter 2, Part 1: The Delicate Sound of
Thunder
It is Saturday, on the sixth day since the Silence. We open upon a cleared field just outside of the city of Darwin in the Northern Territory, as a little known music festival opened to sold-out crowds. Awareness, instructions, clues, chance, or curiosity have led several of the Aware to this place at this time. And they are definitely in for a show, whether they anticipated it or not.
And so it begins again.
It was noon. The sun was at the height of its powers, slowly starting its descent into the oblivion of night.
That had signalled the start of the festival - the sideshows began, as well as the open-air bar. It had been doing a roaring trade, a constant swarm of patrons descending upon it like vultures to a carcass. Other popular distractions included the visual arts installations - some of which were cunningly practical, by virtue of incorporating ways of avoiding the stifling heat into their displays. One such industrial artist had shipped something not unlike a butchers' cold-room to the festival, installed a state-of-the-art set of floor-to-ceiling speakers in it, covered the interior with 6 inches of foam padding and wired the whole thing to a set of VR-gloves and a sequencer. As he moved his hands, the music changed inside the cooler. The system was pumping out way too many decibels for anyone to last more than a few minutes at a time, but it was cool in there. Every so often people were dragged out of it, having stayed too long and gotten confused by the overbearing wall of noise, but it proved to be a considerable success.
There was an ample supply of fire-breathers, sword-swallowers and other exhibitionists - some bright spark had a stall with a sign that read "I Can Out-Drink You!" He lasted about three hours before the medics were called. It was later discovered he wasn't even authorized to have a stall.
All of this was, however, merely a sideshow to the music.
The first band came on stage about half an hour after the festival had officially opened. It was a local four-piece; guitars, bass and drums - every bit as predictable as its line-up sounded. They were on the bill because they knew the promoter and had a local following - there were mildly enthusiastic cheers when they took the stage. More cheers came when they left, after a meaningless, and mercifully brief, encore of a song by Queen which died of schizophrenia - the band seemingly unable to decide whether they were playing "We Will Rock You" or "Radio Gaga", and the singer doing a rather bad job of singing like Freddie Mercury.
The second band was a little more unusual - two bass-players, no lead guitar, and a standing drummer - but displayed more coherence. As a known band (in Australia, at least), their brand of funk-metal went over well with the crowd. They avoided covering other bands' songs, although on one or two occasions their fragmented compositions had a touch of familiarity. The singer, as might be expected, was lyrically fixated with sex, and this made the songs seem a bit patchy in parts, but they were on a good thing with a song apparently called "Go Down On Me". They got the crowd going in a sing-a-long, which lasted for a minute or so before the crowd got bored with it - it was still too early in the day for that kind of participation.
The organizers had gone to some trouble to have a diverse line-up of bands, mixing solid performers with fresh, new acts. There were some moments during the afternoon when the diversity threatened to lessen the show's momentum. One such moment was the antics of the thrash-metal act, Machine-gun Famine, in trashing their instruments and the stage at the end of their ragged but powerful set. During their performance, the lead singer had seemed a little jumpy, frequently glancing at someone or something backstage. They left the stage in ruins to the cheering of the crowd, but after a few seconds offstage, hurried back on and began to tidy it up, leaving the crowd somewhat bemused.
Into this equation came a young woman armed only with an acoustic guitar. She began strumming pensively, and it seemed to be some time before the crowd realized she was performing for them. Some elements of the crowd - perhaps disgruntled fans of Machine-gun Famine - began to throw cans at her. Whether it was planned or not, her strumming and her voice began to get a harsher tone, and her songs seemed to allude to themes of resistance, and freedom. It seemed she was spurred on by the crowd's indifference, as she grew in confidence, and her stage presence grew in stature by the end such that the louts who had thrown cans were the ones whistling as she calmly walked towards backstage, guitar slung across her back. She paused at the exit, then turned with a wicked smile suddenly lighting her face. She strode towards the front of the stage, un-slung the guitar with a smooth bow, and smashed the guitar on the stage, as if to lampoon the thrash band. The crowd cheered enthusiastically, and waited for the next act.
Powderfinger were quite a well-known band to the Australian audience, and had some international exposure, due to a couple of reasons. Firstly, they had supported the legendary band Crowded House at their Farewell performance on the Sydney Opera House steps, and secondly, they were really talented musicians, whose songs displayed a lot of spiritual and intellectual depth. They were currently between albums, and so their set consisted of a mixture of their well-known songs and new material. The performance won the crowd over effortlessly; even when they got slightly rattled by the bass-player breaking a string, they brushed it off with a quip from the vocalist along the lines of "He hasn't been the same since he lost his lucky bass!"
As one of the headlining acts, they also got to relax the structure of their set. Rather than be like an average band's play-list in saving the hits for the end of the gig, they just slotted them in when it seemed appropriate. "Pick You Up" was one of the first songs played, almost as if they were trying to follow on smoothly from the acoustic set of the previous act. They finished on a high note with the song DAF - almost ubiquitously titled for the basic chords it followed.
Holding
out
for a signal to come
Solution found
should appease everyone
Religion hides
from developing proof
Believers try
to encourage the truth
Cascading
down
Golden rays above
Cascading down
Life from far beyond
may reveal the silence they deny
Sound
and sight
and suspicion and fear
Distant light
took so long to appear
Fey black eyes
mystified everyone
Cascading
down
Golden rays above
Cascading down
Life from far beyond
may reveal the silence they deny
But
they keep filling up,
keep filling up my eyes
But they keep filling up,
keep filling up my eyes.
The aftermath of Powderfinger's performance left the crowd expectant. The sun now hung low in the sky, unhindered by such insubstantial things as clouds. After a few minutes of roadies scurrying around on stage tapping microphones and plugging in assorted little black boxes, the crowd's interest was piqued at the sight of a large green Buddha being carried on to the stage by several burly roadies, as well as a large gong. The Buddha was placed (with a certain degree of ceremony) next to the drum-riser, and then one of the roadies hit the gong three times, allowing it to resonate long and loud.
At the third tone of the gong, thick incense billowed out from smoke machines in the corners of the stage, and for a few seconds the stage was obscured. In that moment, the band appeared on stage - or rather, it became evident they had been there all along. The man who had sounded the gong took his place behind the electric drum-kit, and began a subtle but insistent rhythm on the cymbals. The rhythm grew in complexity, occasionally interspersed with light, staccato flicks on the snare drum. Gradually the bass drum came into the mix. After a few bars of this, and a quick look at the rest of the band, the drummer seemed to swivel on his stool in one fluid motion, his hands suddenly a blur as he went into overdrive, and the rest of the band joined in, in an exceedingly loud, crunching moment, jarring the crowd from anticipation of the oncoming to the realization that it had passed them by. The heavy guitar had effectively kick- started the song, and then sunk quickly into the background as bass and keyboards began an interplay of grooves. The guitarist moved to the microphone and began murmuring over the music. His voice was being digitally processed with strange, almost alien effects, and the music began to develop regular, off-beat rests which gave accent to various snatches of lyrics, which, when viewed as a whole, made sense in a poetic fashion. This was "Oblivious":
Out...in...dreams
Everything...seams(!)
Oblivious...to the truth.
In...your...last...moments
Defend...your...opponents
Oblivious...to the proof.
Truth...amongst...the
lies
Search...beyond...your eyes
We are...Ethereal...Skies!
After this, the groove built upon itself, the guitar kicked in again and the band cranked up into a higher gear, combining power, momentum, light and shade and some fundamentally quirky sound effects into a pulsing wall of sound. The music hit top gear, at which point the entire band were playing like maniacs. They kept it going long enough for even the most drug-crazed moshers to peter out and begin to stare in awe at the stage, and then ever so gradually began to wind down. This was where the individual band members had their fun. The five or so minutes it took to evolve the song into the next piece saw the band explore a myriad of variations within the piece, yet they kept things tight, and stayed away from anything that could be considered a solo. The piece ended on a thin, wailing synth-chord, and then the guitarist moved to the microphone, shaking his head at the bass player as if to stop him for a moment, and spoke into the microphone while gently strumming his guitar in a faintly discordant manner. "This is something for some people we met - or maybe we haven't met them yet...heh, I don't know. This is something new. This is Ash's song."
Maybe
Lucifer was lying.
Beautiful lies.
You
remember?
In the same way as burning flame,
In the same way as nuclear blast,
A flower unfolding,
With petals of fire.
My
god,
My fallen god,
How beautiful...
Would
that I
Could sing for you my song,
The occasional notes
Or alterations I made.
Perhaps you would understand.
Maybe
It is flawed
And worse than the first,
But it is the only alternative.
Magnificent
In its fragility
And intricacy,
And power.
My
god,
My fallen god,
How beautiful...
The piece was markedly different in style to the rest of the gig so far. It had a sparse feel to it, and also no bass up until the "chorus", where the bass player suddenly introduced a wailing bass sound, mimicking the keyboard sound that had begun the piece. The impressive part here was how he could bend the strings so far, yet still hold the tune - bass strings are thick and unforgiving. The rest of the band seemed somewhat surprised by it as well - giving rise to the possibility that it had been conceived as a song with little or no bass in it. Somehow, the discordant guitar, wailing bass, trembling synth and the restrained percussion - consisting of tabla-like effects and brushed snares with lots of after-touch - held together behind Saul's un-enhanced voice as he sang, eyes closed for all bar the chorus.
The second time the chorus came around, however, something was different. Something was definitely happening towards the front of the crowd, but from anywhere else it was difficult to pick. Something changed in the sound of the music, and it picked up rhythms and cadences that seemed far too evocative and true to be mere music. The framework of this new cadence came in part from Saul's un-enhanced voice, but colored in the power and movement in the base. It grew in tempo and power, and most interestingly, there were audible harmonies that began to form around the twin centres of this trend. No one else was near a mike, but there was another voice joining in, loud enough un-amplified to make itself heard, adding to the music itself. The harmony was perfect, Symphonic and Polyphonic as the words repeated.
"My
god,
My Fallen god,
How beautiful..."
And then a third voice joined in. This one came from a definite location in the front of the crowd. The triple harmony surpassed what the mortal ears could hear, but they caught it nonetheless, and the crowd was rendered into silent awe, merely listening.
Chapter 2, Part 1a: Dancing with Myself
The Symphony slowly unravels. It seems to lack the strength necessary to oppose this music. The notes that hold reality together cease and fail. The band's music ceases, and two voices only sing out Polyphonic and Harmonious. Echoes and resonance in the song fill the minds of those aware, Angels, Devils and Others, and they stand, open mouthed, stunned. Time stands still, and without time there is an infinite era of pure music. It reaches up and out, twin voices supplying resonance to the Symphony itself. It ebbs to an ending.
In the moment of silence that follows, beyond time and beyond the corporeal there can be heard a tired voice taking a deep breath, and uttering a single phrase. "Thank you."
Then the Symphony begins again. Time starts. The sun sets. The music that has kept That Which Is in check for a moment changes, and the notes begin to slowly re-knit the Symphony itself, altering and shaping the occasional tone or note, but returning it to completeness. The two extra voices quietly fade to nothing, and the lead singer on stage is left, wide eyed, standing with the mike, in front of a crowd utterly quiet, as the music behind him abruptly cuts back to mundane norm.
The bass player must have bent one of the strings a little too far: his instrument snaps. He seems to stare into the crowd for a few seconds, then turns and hurries off stage, walking past a surprised roadie who is holding a bass guitar ready for just such an occasion. The rest of the band plays on for a few more bars, trading worried looks before the guitarist gives the signal to end it, and with a brief "Thank you, and good night" and a (perhaps forced) cheerful wave, he walks off after the bass player, quickly followed by the keyboardist. The drummer just keeps playing. He is evidently on some sort of musically (or chemically) induced high (or both), and he keeps the beat going for a couple of minutes.
This suits the crowd just fine, because the dam has burst. They completely go off, applauding and standing, screaming out of thousands of voices for more.
Finally a man comes on stage while the drummer keeps playing, saying that Ethereal Skies will not be performing any more songs. He gets pelted off the stage by various garbage items. Finally the big drummer lets the riff die down, and looks about, realizing he is alone. He stops, and the crowd goes a bit calmer as he walks over to the mike.
"Wow, man... what a f@cken trip! This city ROCKS! You guys are great! We're comin' back here man! Count on it man! Woo HOO! Peace man!" He raises his arms in the air, and walks off stage. After applauding him some more, the crowd's mood has calmed enough that when the announcer comes back on, he does not get pelted.