On the corner of a crowded intersection on the edge of Eco park a teenager assembled a wall of modular synths, a few lights, and four enormous amps. He jacked everything into a spliced streetlamp crowded by leering homeless men, then flicked each component on, one switch at a time. Lights blew up the front of the synths, a hum boomed, and the teen began fiddling with wires, footpedals, keyboards. An errant note, a screech. Then a pause. Everything was set.
The teen brushed long black hair out of his face, walked up to a keyboard with a mic over it and moaned a note barely audible before a single pure tone pierced the intersection causing people to look up briefly before continuing on. A dyad faded in and out, then a wall of arpeggiation washed over everything. Deep undertones danced with the twist of a knob. A wash of static, a heavy boom, then… melody.
People were looking now. Multicolored lights flashed in front of the wall of synths to the strange harmonies pulsing the intersection. Their feet moved in time to the rhythms. The teenager walked between keyboards and his wall of synths, switching wires around, twisting knobs, observing screens and nodding, then setting new sounds alive with the touch of a button. Most people kept walking past, but enough stopped every hour that a crowd formed around the corner of the intersection. Some took to dancing briefly. Some took out their cellphones and recorded the event.
As day pushed into night, the multicolored lights became more prominent, and the crowd faded but the teen retained a few watchers. The homeless individuals that move into the park at night sat around him and watched, conducting their activities, but never quite migrating into the bright sphere encapsulating the musician. Policemen drove up wondering about disassembling the set, but after watching a few minutes they continued on their way. One or two took up station around him to have company through the night. A mass of shadows played just on the edge of the teen’s multicolored wall of light, dancing, watching, going about their lives, bleeding again into black.
Night crept back for day and the teen was still working at his synths, having never looked up or noticed a thing around him. The crowd swelled and faded with the pulse of the workday, but by the second evening food carts had set up around him and people were almost spilling into the road trying to get a glimpse of the teenage performer. He had neither slept nor eaten since setting up. One of the crowd approached him with a hot dog which he accepted without making eye contact and ate while continuing his actions. Folks danced and swayed around him well past midnight. Again the police thought to stop this performance but could not bring themselves to do so. It felt comforting, like a reason to stay awake, to work and breathe. So on the edge of the crowd stood the policemen who had approached but stopped, the unhoused using and watching, the shy, the night workers taking a break. Closer was a broadcaster who had set up a camera to stream the performance at all hours. Closer were people watching and enjoying. At the core was the sleepless teen, moving endlessly, twisting, touching, rearranging, flicking, tapping, nodding, rocking.
On sunrise of the third day news trucks showed up to get in on the sensation. Reporters live at the scene of this mysterious teen. Who was he? Microphones and cameras filtered through the crowd trying to scrape information on the happening. No one knew his name or identity, but the rumor passed that the boy had not slept for 3 nights, had not stopped moving in all that time, and only ate what was passed to him by the crowd. Was he on drugs? It didn’t seem like it. Had he spoken to anyone? No, but he sings occasionally. What are his lyrics like? I don’t know, they’re hard to understand, but I really feel whatever he’s saying.
Confused, contradictory information swam around, but people kept appearing to watch the teen at work. Days and nights bled together. The teen never slept, never abandoned his post. Music pulsed constantly. The intersection grew clogged, and after 11 or so pedestrians were hit in a single day, the park was cleared behind the performer to offer more space for observation.
No parents ever showed up for the teen. No friends or lovers, though propositions were made, all completely ignored or unheard. No questions were ever answered. The teen played and played, continued to be fed, and never looked up.
After the thirteenth month of this activity the city government acquiesced to what was already happening: the intersection closed, the park around the 20ish musician was demolished and a large clear space established, surrounded by tables, food trucks, and a constant audience that flowed with the day. People treated the musician as a landmark. He became a place to meet, to hang out. Livestreams of the musician grew increasingly popular. The streamers all donated a portion of the profits of their streams to purchasing the musician food, clothes. The musician kept playing. Amazement grew.
How could he not sleep? Nothing had changed on his face. He seldom blinked, his eyes beatific, skin unblemished. His hair had grown, as had a beard, but he hadn’t touched the clippers or scissors left out for him.
What he had touched, however, were instruments left out for him. First a child placed a recorder against one of his synths, which he eventually found, considered, and played into a modulator.
After that moment individuals and companies sent offerings to the Musician, who considered each object, plugged it into some amp or modulator or other device. It became a marketing device, and a point of pride to have one’s creation incorporated into the ongoing performance. Electric guitars, pedals, microphones, horns, more synths. Pyrotechnics, colored lights, fog machines. Walls of amps and modular synths rose, penetrating deep into the park. Every lamp was busted open, used to power the growing structure of noisemakers and lights. Cameras were set up around the different areas, watching each instrument, each inch of synth. A labyrinth spread under the pristine foliage as the sprawl of instruments rose underneath. The occasional rain that swept through seldom ruined an instrument, and what was ruined was promptly unplugged and tossed outside of the sphere of light and sound, taken away by city services or private individuals.
The sound that grew as The Musician wandered through his labyrinth ceased to be describable. Livestreams could not quite capture the sound, one had to be there. Long ululations met with klaxon blasts morphing a lover’s murmur containing no words, layered over a 1000 chambered heart’s rhythm, lights rising with a seraphic chorus screaming in ecstasy. Each tweak of knob or rewiring or touch of string or key altered the sumphony subtly but totally. No sound ever repeated, but themes emerged. Pitched battles, long periods of mourning, elation, love, joy and triumph. All produced by a man who seldom made an expression, never spoke outside of lyrics.
In his public isolation a unique language emerged. As though the words he knew were not enough to express himself, yet he could not bring himself to read a book, consult the internet, engage in conversation, he cohered odd words in a high, clear voice, whose meaning could only be guessed at by context and tone of music. Streamers devoted many hours to inscribing this artist’s lexicon, believing each new word a gift of inspiration.
After a decade the entire park was consumed, and buildings around the park were demolished to make way for the city’s largest source of revenue. Pavilions and bridges were built over and around portions of The Musician’s space. The fountain in its center was expanded somewhat, so a stream shallow enough to walk through ran through portions of the labyrinth. A stream The Musician sometimes dipped his hands into and drank from. Water ran down his unkempt beard, his hair ran down his back. He was well-nourished but thin. Altars rose around the edges of his Labyrinth where folks left offerings of food and objects expressing thanks. People floated snacks and messages down the little streams floating through it which he never touched. Revelers would dip in and read each other’s notes, post them on forums, paper the walls and benches around Eco Park with them.
The whole city was attuned to the sounds coming from The Musician. As the sounds became louder and impacted residential districts, an effort was made to enclose the labyrinth to preserve some normalcy of life, but people continued to swarm to the park in downtown to see and hear the endless performance. Shops nearby grew prosperous. Apartments were renovated to nice condominiums and timeshares, hotels, spas and luxury shops crowded around. Speakers rose around the city to port the unending sounds of music in a controlled way. But the speakers never captured the sensation properly. As the sound restriction grew tighter, people huddled in around the nucleal labyrinth, the knot of trees, water, bridges, paths, and unending tangle of analog synths, monitors, keyboards, pedals, mics, flashing in arcane patterns, producing the soul of the city.
By the time thirty years had passed people grew concerned. As far as anyone knew The Musician was about 50 years of age, had never seen a doctor, never slept a wink, and subsisted off whatever foods were left out for him. He looked wretched. He had been naked for 20 years after his clothing rotted off him. But no one dared approach the man for fear of disrupting the tones he produced.
The sound had changed. At times it resembled a conversation between entities in an incomprehensible language, each syllable so massive and dense a mind of meat could not hold it. Titanic, as someone had described it. Enochean. Seraphic. Apocalyptic. A million conversant tones bubbled under each swell, such powerful mountains of sound when they ended one felt himself descending Sinai after gazing upon the back of God. The conversation descended into furies lambasting mortality, Cronos eating his children, Visions of Gomorrah, and ascended to perfect splendors: Krishna presented before the uncomprehending eyes of Arjuna, glimpsed supernovae. No one quite understood what was occurring but everyone who stood in the presence of the labyrinth felt changed.
And the Labyrinth itself had changed, burrowed into the earth, consumed the bridges built over it, entered into the buildings surrounding it. The city fed a circuit board pronouncing some vast message no one could understand. More streams around the globe picked up his work. University departments devoted whole semesters to processing mere hours of his work. Much of music around the world hinged on remixes or reproductions of The Musician’s work.
Years pressed forward and more humans crowded into the city, building lives around the square mile of labyrinth. Temples rose, sects grew. People believed the constant song divine, that the universe was written within its chords. A powerful build had grown over three, four years. The world could feel it. The Orphic was on a verge, a moment of revelation, an ecstatic burst. Building a cosmic orgasm on slow rise.
Then everything stopped.
A flash of perfect light, red, orange, yellow, blue, green, violet, white, white, white! The labyrinthian circuit screamed the Name of God. Nothing moved, nothing changed. A whole day passed. Then silence fell.
The labyrinth was dark. Power had surged and died in the city’s center. In the middle lay the Musician, dead, face down in the fountain.
People woke to an unfamiliar silence and filled it with argument.
What had happened? Did you feel that? Is it over? Did that get recorded?
Before the area could be secured people rushed into the labyrinth and carted away its pieces. The city descended into a din of scavenging, a babel of noisemakers. The churches argued over the meaning of the event and its legacy for years. Property values fell, and shops moved away.
No one had ever learned his name. Consequentially he’d a million names. No one had ever listened to all the sound he’d woven. Consequentially every moment bore a million interpretations.
It is assumed in 1,000 years men may live to 300, and one might listen to the Whole Work thrice over and come to understand God.
But who knows if in 1,000 years anyone will remember or care?
