Tyrone ingests beats from the other side of the chicken wire, pushed along the spiraling cable that snakes through diamond spaces to the headphones that sit heavily on his head. Vinyl spins in front of him, just inches away from his hands but forever out of his touch behind the protective mesh, bass flowing from vibrations on rare wax that he can’t afford. He watches the stylus head rise and fall, tracing the contours of hypnotic spin as the tune ends; stolen, rearranged syllables and reverb-drenched snare hits dying away in decades-old waves of echo and distortion.
He takes the headphones off, hangs them on the nail that protrudes from the wood that frames the chicken wire, turns, and looks around the record shop. It’s an odd sensation, when you first step in here—the feeling that you’ve stepped into a prison, a cage. The shop floor itself is tiny and compressed yet empty, unfilled. Step through the front door and you’re in the empty chicken-wire cage, just you and any other punters that have wandered in, with nothing to do but stare out of your prison at the treats that line the walls behind: the dead, neglected devices propped up on shelves, the ancient music machines adorned with knobs and sliders, their once-pristine faceplates potted with scratches and finger smears, and of course the records—walls of vinyl, carefully cataloged and filed. Once, when Tyrone was still a little kid, they used to be out on display, arranged in racks facing you, so you could flip through them with your fingertips, so you could scan through each section quickly to see if anything new had arrived, or to be horrified that something you wanted had gone, something you’d craved for months and had saved for, selling off your ration coupons and any shit you could find to get your hands on a few pennies you’d hide away until you had enough to maybe, possibly, one day walk in there with your head held high and your pocket full of shrapnel you could swap for music.
Mike sees him hang the phones up, works his way around to him on the other side of the wire, stepping over boxes of unsorted compact discs and squeezing past protruding shelves laden with dusty cassettes.
“Any good?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll take the lot. Stick ’em on my tab.”
Mike smiles, gently and sympathetically. “Sorry, Ty.”
In long, painful silence Tyrone watches him take the record from the turntable, fingers gently touching only the razor sharpness of its edge before balancing it, with an archivist’s care, on one hand—the tip of his middle finger in the center hole, his thumb still only touching the edge, as he gently drops it into the waxy white paper of the inner sleeve, which, after rotating it 90 degrees so the disc won’t roll out, he in turn slides into the plain black card outer. Slowly he turns, scanning the walls of record spines, navigating the complex patterns with some secret geographer’s knowledge, before nodding and slipping it into its rightful place, and Tyrone feels his heart drop as he watches it disappear, lost among the obscurity, and he realizes it’ll probably be the last time he’ll ever see it until inevitably that next man drops it at that next party.
“You shouldn’t be listening to this shit anyway, Ty. Y’know? It’s depressing.”
Tyrone sucks teeth, his standard annoyed/defensive reaction. “Here we go. This again. Always this.”
“Yeah, well. I’m fucking right. This ain’t your music. Jesus, a lot of the stuff you reach for is so old it ain’t even my music.”
“Bet you don’t say that to the Loco crew when they come in here and drop money on those jukebox sevens.”
Mike shakes his head. “C’mon. Loco are all a lot older than you. Jesus, Shaka must be nearly seventy. Old wizard will never die. The rum has pickled his soul, he says.” They both laugh.
Tyrone studies Mike. The old head ain’t that young himself, easily pushing forty. That’s getting on, around these codes. And he’s got a point. A lot of the stuff Tyrone plays, that he obsesses over, was released before even Mike was old enough to go out raving.
“Well, I don’t exactly know what my alternative is.”
“Make your own. Like we did.”
Tyrone screwfaces him. “On what, exactly?”
Mike shrugs. “I dunno. Improvise.”
“Improvise? Improvise. Okay.” Tyrone points at ancient matte-black Japanese electronics gathering dust on a shelf behind Mike’s head. “That’s easy for you to say when you’re charging six months’ rent for a poxy TR-8.”
“It doesn’t have to be, y’know, electronic stuff.”
“Oh, what? You want me to learn the ukulele now?”
“It doesn’t have to—”
Mike is interrupted by a disembodied voice from under the shop’s counter. He recognizes it instantly. “You still got that old Akai 950, Ty?”
“Yeah. I still got it. Piece of shit.”
College’s head ascends into view, a mess of dreadlocks and unkempt beard. He hauls up a box of old glasses—all colors and shapes and states of repair, more than a few with cracked or even missing lenses—and dumps it on the counter in front of him, continuing to rummage through it as he speaks. “Ain’t it working? That a nice bit of kit, man. Classic machine.”
“Nah. Well, sort of. Half the memory is fried, I think. And I ran out of discs, so I can’t save shit anyway.”
“Bring it down mine next week. I might have memory sticks that might fit it. Might.” He pauses, investigating a pair of glasses in his hands, turning and moving them about in 3D space as if accessing the integrity of their physical structure. For a second Ty thinks he’s going to sniff, maybe taste them. Instead he just drops them back into the box, continues to rummage. “And anyway, you shouldn’t worry about discs. That’s healthy.”
“What you sayin’?”
“Make your tunes, record ’em, wipe over the discs, reuse ’em. Wipe the samples. Makes you have to find new sounds for each new tune, means you can’t go back after it’s been put down on tape and constantly re-edit everything. Keeps everything fresh.”
Tyrone thinks about this, thinks about the half-broken Akai sampler back in his bedroom. Thinks about the days he spent combing through his vinyl collection, searching for sounds he could take and use, building a library that spans the dozen or so ancient 3.5-inch floppies he spent years tracking down. He thinks about the hours he spends trawling through that library when working on something, trying to find that elusive sound that would make the tune complete, and how often he’d fail. Thinks about how he’d do whatever he could to try to warp and meld those samples into something else; running them through his small collection of effects pedals, recording and rerecording them onto ancient cassettes to make them compressed and distorted, transmitting them over the station’s FM transmitter and resampling them off his auntie’s tiny radio to wrap them in distant hiss and static. And he thinks about his attempts to make his own sounds: drumming on kitchen pots and pans, jacking an old busted set of headphones into the 950’s mic input and dangling them out his bedroom window to catch the staccato rain patterns, the filter sweeps of tenth-story breezes, the shouts and cries of people down in the streets.