Maybe College has a point.
Mike certainly thinks he’s got one. “See? That was the problem. That’s what I’m always sayin’. There was no limits before, right?”
Tyrone looks at him, unsure. “Right…?”
“See… look. Before the crash, right? Nobody was using hardware setups anymore. Everyone was on software. You could get it just by fucking blinking, right? You could get any software you wanted, that’d do anything you wanted. That’d give you any sound you could think of, pretty much. Unlimited possibilities. That was what was wrong, right?”
“It was?”
“Yeah. It was. It fucking was. Think about it. People could do what they liked, anything. It’s why the music became so self-indulgent, so undisciplined, and then so weirdly formulaic. Good art is produced under strict limits. Forces you to work with what you’ve got, to focus, right? There was no focus at the end. No control or vision. Just lots of people fucking about but ultimately following each other’s leads because they were drowning in choices. Unlimited possibilities.”
Tyrone thinks about this now. Sees Mike’s point, but ain’t too sure. Mike annoys him when he talks like this, because Tyrone knows all about limits. He’s sick and tired of limits. “I dunno,” he says. “I’d like just one or two possibilities, you get me?”
College smiles at him, more polite aging sympathy from the first generation that knows they had it better, and can’t muster the gall to deny it. “Don’t worry, Ty, it’ll come together. Just keep at it.”
“Yeah.” Tyrone shrugs. “I guess.”
Beside him, holding one shell from a pair of discarded headphones to his lips as a makeshift mic, Bags lists off the crews. All the codes, whether friends, rivals, or enemies, must get a mention. They all come together here, no conflict, all locked to the same frequencies, Tyrone and Bags’s transmissions see no borders, no turf disputes. From the battlegrounds of Upper Easton and the hippie slums of St. Werburgh’s, right down to the Land Army camps in Brislington and across to the fortified palaces of Clifton, everyone who cared was locked in. Bags reels off their names, each gang and sound system, like systematic syncopated poetry, each line punctuated with a hold tight, a keep it locked, a shout-out. And then he moves on to the more important callouts, the requests, the birthdays, messages of love, the reminiscences for fallen friends and family, the helpless pleas for the eternally missing to come home. The messages that people have dropped off personally, that they’ve deemed important enough to trek not only to Barton from whichever end of the city, but then to climb up the tower to post directly through their door. When they first started the station nobody came, but then, as they gave shout-outs and people realized they were serious about reading them, it started to grow. Now there are almost too many to fit into the show every night, almost so many notes that he can’t open the door when he gets home. It fills him with some pride, like he’s doing something for the city that few can, but it also fills him with sadness. There’s too much melancholy on those scribbled notes, too much desperation, too much need to be seen, to be recognized, to be heard and a part of something. Too much that now Tyrone can’t look at them anymore, leaves them all to Bags to sort through, and even when he’s reading them out he tries not to listen, focuses on his mixing.
He allows his finger to brush against the vinyl, that gentle balance between being able to feel the record spin and affecting it just enough to slow it, to nudge renegade snares back into alignment. Press too hard and it slows too much, everything stumbles, the pitch bending too much, bass and strings detuning. Too light and those snares will get away from you again, and before you know it the kicks start to sound like a pair of trainers in a spin dryer.
Tyrone cuts the bass on the left channel, lets both tracks roll out together for four bars on just their mids and highs, snares in unison, filtered percussion spiraling with anticipation, before bringing back the bass on the new track, a low, slow four-note rumble that shakes the shelves and makes the windowpanes sing. Modulated distortion. Takes the bass out again, just for one bar this time, and brings it back in as he drops the first track out of the mix completely.
It’s that time of night when it’s all about jungle, from now until the end of the show—it’s all about that Bristol sound, staccato vocal chop-ups, reggae pulses, ancient drums dug up from the depths of lost musical history made to sound like the future they’d already lost. A collage of past sounds, most from before he was even born, that together become atemporal, timeless.
He remembers the first times he heard that sound as a small child, before the crash, reverberating out of passing cars like a secret black technology, or cranked from his mum’s cheap hi-fi speakers as she and her friends laughed and drank and smoked in their best dresses before heading out to the club. She’d kiss him and tell him to take care, and then they’d all be out the front door of her flat, still laughing and screeching, and he’d go back into the lounge and turn the hi-fi back on and the beats would be back, rolling and crashing, and he’d push the volume until the neighbors knocked on the walls and ceiling. Nobody knocked now.
Then after the crash, after she’d gone, that sound again. Playing from street sound systems, filling deserted shopping centers and office blocks with partygoers, soundtracking food riots and street battles. It was then he started to really pay attention, to pick out tones and sounds, to understand form and structure. Dark afro futures were made real, musical stories with life breathed into them. Before the crash it had seemed impossible to separate Bristol from drum and bass; afterward the connection was pure logic. A soundtrack for celebrating the urban decay of the twenty-first century, for dancing in the new ruins of industrial civilization, translated now as a soundtrack for everyday life.
It was also the default option now, in many ways, Tyrone understood. He never denied the reality of that, never tried to kid himself. In many ways this was the last music on record, the last throw of urban energy and expression before the shift came. He had everything and anything he could find in his collection of CDs and vinyl records, from New Orleans jazz and New York hip-hop through to Detroit techno and Chicago house, city names he knew only from atlases and record labels. But the jungle, the grime, the dubstep—that was the last new music that his city made that was committed to wax and plastic, Bristol’s final urban hymns given a physical form before the great shift to digital, and hence the last new music to survive the crash, to be unscathed in the great erasing. They might be relics, these scratched and battered discs, but like the crumbling towers and hollowed-out office blocks where he partied they were still standing when everything else had been washed away.
The beat rolling out now—the one he’s mixing the next tune into—is one of his, a collage of samples from the failing Akai, dubbed down onto ancient cassette. He used to get a thrill when he dropped one of his own tunes, a jolt of excited pride, but now he feels little more than disappointment. It’s cut-and-paste jungle, a break lifted from here, a bass line from there. Clichéd vocal samples reverberating through his tired echo pedal. Jungle by numbers, assembled from pieces of itself. Pure formula, nothing original. Mike’s words echo as Tyrone shakes his head in self-disgust. This isn’t his music, none of it, not even the pieces he’s crafted himself. It’s archaeological echoes of a lost era.
He hits the STOP button on the stereo wired into the DJ mixer, a fifty-year-old cube flecked with dull LEDs. With his usual concerned reluctance he reaches out his hand, his finger hovering on the molded texture of the EJECT button, and draws breath, closes eyes, tries to block out nightmare visions of disgorged black guts, coiled flat ribbons of magnetic entrails spilling out over his hands.