MY THIRD STORY - WATER
“The Universe dreamt it was a chair - and thus chairs were invented.”
Baba Haggerston
8 - IN THE GARDEN
It was there.
In the garden.
That I saw her.
I was ready to run off and play in the woods, but just as I walked out the door, she stood there.
Leaning against the wall.
She wore a red dress, with swirly black patterns printed on.
Her long, dark hair was braided.
She smiled at me, and then quickly ran away.
And I died.
Instantly following the few seconds that our eyes met, a swirling sensation welled out from the earth beneath me.
It entered the soles of my shoes and rushed up through my legs.
When it hit my belly, it exploded into a million pieces of swarming invisible insects, trying to get out.
The wave hit my heart, and ripped it open.
All I could see, was a cloud of vibrating particles that flickered in all the colours I knew.
And some new ones that I didn’t.
What seemed like a far too short eternity passed.
Then I could hear the voice of my mother calling my name.
It sounded as if she was standing at the bottom of a deep well.
I slowly returned to my normal senses.
Changed.
I have been looking for the girl ever since.
14 - MY THIRD STORY (WATER)
And this is where I snap out of it, and realise that none of the previous introductions to myself have in any way been correct.
Or, there may have been parts of them that are true, but to be honest, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly which ones anymore.
It’s all a bit blurry at this point.
But the real story is that it’s now three o’clock.
Wednesday.
Early in the summer.
And I’m at home, here in East London.
Upper Clapton, to be more specific.
43 Gunton Road, to be exact.
I’ve lived in this house since I first arrived in this city.
Back in 1987.
When I moved in, the house was a squat.
As were most houses in the area.
This was mainly due to London’s housing-legislation at the time, stating that as long as you weren’t caught red-handed breaking into an empty house, it was the landlord’s duty to prove that they had concrete plans for using the house before any squatters could be evicted.
Because of this, Hackney was filled to the brim with the most amazing people.
Every kind of freak you could imagine gravitated here from all over the world.
Even the odd broker from the City squatted, saving money by not paying rent.
They would slip into their suits in the morning and disappear for most of the day, only to return in the evening with a cheap takeaway in hand.
It worked for those who didn’t rattle their jewellery too loudly.
Or park a fancy ride in the street.
Some had to get burned to understand the rules, of course.
But they were the exception.
In our specific house, a bunch of young, searching souls had huddled up together in order to escape their more or less difficult pasts.
Ranging from broken families to apartheid regimes.
Or just the bland boredom of their home towns.
Those lucky enough to hold a British or Commonwealth passport could sign on and get dole-money.
That is, if you considered being paid £30 a week lucky.
The few who had a job would evaporate through the city’s web of buses in the morning, only to come home at night to find the rest of us hanging out in their living-room, smoking dope and listening to music.
Or gathered around bonfires in the back yard, brewing magic mushroom tea.
It was all about trying to capture every single bit of excitement we could find.
Which usually included having a party at some point.
But there were more to it than that.
My definition of a successful day was all about finding enough cash for a ten-pack of cigarettes and a half-pint of milk.
And the cheapest teabags available.
Supplemented by a handful of bags of sugar nicked from the local greasy spoon, it was all that was needed to get through the day.
Along with my most essential asset.
The music-making setup.
An Atari 1040 computer running C-Lab Creator and an E-Mu Systems Emax keyboard sampler.
Expensive tools that were an unlikely find in a squat in Hackney at the time, but something that had to do with my rather privileged background.
I wasn’t born here, you see.
I was born and raised in a small Arctic town in the kingdom of Norway, where a monthly unemployment cheque amounted almost tenfold to that of a UK one.
In addition, I sold everything I owned before leaving home, including all the music gear I had been buying since I started working as a cleaner when I was 14.
My savings first and foremost went into buying the home-studio setup, and a couple of years later, buying this house, when the frustrated landlord realised that it was better to get rid of a property in an area where most people who could afford it would never set their foot.
The house cost £3000.
The same as the music gear.
After that, I was broke.
But on a day to day basis, a basic diet of cigs and tea was all I needed to be happy.
As happy as can be.
It hadn’t always been like this, though.
After all I had left a lot behind.
Not that I had anything to run away from.
My childhood wasn’t difficult in any way, or lacked the magic every childhood should have, if the world had been a fair place.
Mine was mostly about wild rides of the imagination and untamed emotion.
Immersing myself in little big things.
I can still recall almost every emotion from when I was little.
Simple triggers, like seeing a familiar view in an old photograph, or the smell of wood burning in cold, crisp air, can instantly transport me back to events from the past.
Vividly.
As if the grains of silver and the smoke particles serve as little storage devices.
The DNA of every experience.
I remember most of my childhood dreams, too.
And some nightmares.
I guess I was quite vulnerable.
Easily moved.
My early years taught me to appreciate my family.
We lived in the attic of my grandparents’ house until I was 4 years old.
The house included me, my mother, my grandmother and grandfather, and their black cat.
My dad came and went.
Working on a ship abroad, he had to be away for months at a time.
I missed him greatly when he was away.
And loved every minute he was home.
When he was absent, my mother and I got the support we needed from my grandparents.
Being part of a greater family gave us love and strength, and laid the foundation in making me a strong believer in cooperation.
Working together to accomplish even the most challenging tasks.
I’ve had my share of loneliness, though.
Especially in my teens.
The formative years.
I believe that’s where my love for music came from.
Comforting sounds.
Waves of melancholy.
“The Figurehead”.
“Pearly Dewdrops Drops”.
“A New Dawn Fades”.
Music that helped me get through the hardest times, and the motivation eventually brought me here.
To this City.
My drive to make my own music is probably rooted in a wish to be as important in the lives of others as the artists I’ve listened to have been in mine.
To say that I’ve reached that goal would be an exaggeration.
But to say that my love for music has never been stronger, is not.
Enough of the past.
Now, years down the line, I’m still here in this house, getting ready for my walk.
Like I do every day.
I look into the bathroom mirror as I put on my make-up, and decide that the foundation is pale enough, the eyeliner appropriately thick.
I walk into the bedroom and pick a black t-shirt from the wardrobe, then grab a couple of rings from the wooden bowl on top of the drawer.
The lion’s head goes on my middle finger.
The infinity loop on my pinky.
It’s too hot to wear my fake leather jacket.
But I choose it anyway.
Some things in life are essential.
15 - WALKING THE PATH
Every day, when I’m sufficiently dressed and ready to leave the house, I always start by picking a route to walk.
In my old and battered A-Z, I have carefully drawn up numerous walks with different coloured pencils.
Over the years, the pages have become so densely covered that they look more like abstract works of art than street maps.
But I have no problem reading them, and rather enjoy the added aesthetic value.
You might say that I have a special interest in both topography.
Especially the topography of a city.
I love studying the webs of streets and train tracks on a city map.
The grid whereupon all possible shapes may emerge.
All the walks I’ve drawn into my book are always ending up just where they started.
At my house.
Which makes them circles of sorts.
You could say that I start every day by walking around in circles.
The route I’ve chosen for today starts right outside my front door, then goes all the way down to the bottom of Gunton Road, turns left onto Casimir Road, right onto Southwold Road and all the way down to the Lea riverbank.
Upon reaching the water, I walk Northeast, then cross the small bridge at the end of Riverside Close, and detour slightly to walk around the Leyton Marshes for a bit.
Holy ground.
Today the weather is lovely, so I decide to sit down on the grass and close my eyes for a minute.
Feeling the warm sunshine on my pale face, I suck in the peaceful moment to the sound of busy insects and some rather enthusiastic ducks quacking away down at the river.
When I’ve had enough, and my soul is re-charged, I get up and head south along the Capital Ring towpath.
As I pass under the Lea Bridge, I do my best to not crash into the continuous stream of Digiaddicts passing me by.
They’re either walking with their gaze locked onto their screen, or they cycle or jog by with earplugs updating them on their latest topic of their highly personal interests.
Immersed in their own world.
Rulers of their own universes.
Lost in the bubble.
Either that, or they’re filling up their ears with their shit music.
Which just makes me feel sorry for them.
They’re missing out on all the good stuff.
There are many reasons why I’ve made these walks my daily ritual.
First and foremost, it makes me able connect with the outside world.
The real world.
Staying inside usually makes my mind wander, which can lead me to some pretty dark of places, if I’m not careful.
It takes effort to oppose the ruling paradigm.
I also have a strong need to be surrounded by nature on a regular basis.
Which is not to say that I don’t love big cities.
They’re as much part of nature as anything.
Man-made, but still natural structures.
I think cities are our best reminders of who we are as a species.
For better and worse.
I have warm feelings for this city, as I have for the people populating it.
That’s probably why I’ve stayed here all these years.
Coming from a small place, I still get excited by the multitude and variation this place has on offer.
One of the most important aspects of my daily wanderings, is that it is a good way of meeting some of my fellow citizens, in all their diversion and glory.
As much as my pre-determined routes serve as maps for moving around the city structure, they also tell me something about who I’m going to meet at each walk.
People are habitual.
On this sunny day, the first face I meet who is not lost in a connection to the Infoweb, is George, and his dog Boris.
George is a Wave Survivor, one that chose to stay disconnected after the crisis.
He doesn’t define himself as a DisCon, as myself, though.
He only defines himself as human.
I greet him with a smile, and take my time to sit down on a bench to have a chat and throw a twig or two for Boris to catch.
That’s what being a DisCon is all about.
Connected through disconnection.
Detached from the Machine.
As usual, George tells me about how he survived the wave back in 2004.
He had just come down from the bridge of his ship as they were passing through the English Channel from Antwerp, bound for Teasside.
Like many times before, he describes in detail how he saw the water’s sudden rise in the distance at starboard, how he ran back up to the bridge and shouted at the helmsman to turn the vessel around to face the monster wave.
And then about the panic as he immediately understood that this would be too much for the Thames Barrier and the lower coastlines of the South-East of England to handle.
Immersed in memory, he tells me how the ship was lifted 60 feet into the air, but marginally avoided rolling over and getting smashed by the tsunami.
I listen patiently, as I’ve done more than a dozen times before.
I know he needs to tell the story again and again more than I need to listen to it.
The Tsunami that hit on Boxing Day 2004 killed thousands of people along the coast of North-Western Europe and the south of England, and created a lot of damage all the way across the North Sea, in Southern Norway.
No-one saw it coming.
There hadn’t been a tsunami off the coast of Western Europe since 1755, when on November 1st a quake hit just outside Lisbon and killed between 60-100 thousand people.
The 2004 wave changed everything.
Up until that point, natural catastrophes were something that happened in other parts of the world, to other people and economies.
These kind of things never happened on our home turf.
Until that day in December.
It basically changed the way we felt untouchable, and thus the governing policies of European countries.
Like a traumatised parent after seeing their child in a terrible accident.
Our imagined sense of sovereignty died, and from this day onwards, we were as vulnerable as the rest of the world.
George keeps interrupting himself, calling out brief orders to Boris, who is busy fetching the twigs I’ve been throwing as I’ve listened to his owner.
Every time Boris returns to the bench he is as happy as can be, only to face the same task again.
As if he knows something I don’t.
I can hear that George starts getting toward the end of his tale, and I get ready to move on.
I know where it ends.
In tears, but at the same time at some sort of hope.
The mindset of a survivor.
The moment I get up on my feet, a Digiaddict on a Segway almost knocks me over, her attention buried deep inside some world behind the black mirror of her tablet .
She doesn’t say sorry.
They never do.
George utters some old sailor curses at her, and Boris barks as if to express his support.
But all we can see by then is a hunched back on wheels disappearing up the towpath.
We both shake our heads.
Boris tilts his.
Then I bid my goodbyes, leave, and finish my walking for the day, surprised to not bump into chain smoking teenage nu-goth Cat and her bottomless well of worries on my way back up to Clapton.
Maybe the burden of the world is too heavy to carry outside today.
They might be in danger of turning to dust like trolls in this sunshine.
I’m sure she’ll be out again tomorrow, though.
Back at the house, I make a cup of tea and sit down by my desk.
My big black notebook lies open on top of it, surrounded by the usual mess of cables and music-machines.
It serves both as my writing-desk as well as my studio desk.
I try to write down something to sum up my feelings for the day.
I’ve always found this helpful, and a way to ground myself.
To still the noise and make space for more subtle emotions.
The more important ones.
16 - ∆EON
When it comes to music, I’ve always liked songs.
I grew up with songs.
Songs defined me.
Maybe because they managed to express thoughts and emotions that I was unable to express myself.
I don’t know for sure, but in some mysterious way songs had the ability to comfort me, and make me strong again whenever I felt weak and lost.
I even believe some of them saved my life.
This is not to say that I can’t enjoy instrumental music.
I love listening to details in music production, and can lose myself totally in sounds within the music that might seem insignificant to most people.
When I was a teenager, I would torture my friends by I replaying the same part of a record over and over again while enthusiastically shouting “Listen! Wait… Now! No, now! Hear that sound?”.
Often to nothing but silent, puzzled reception.
Still, it has always been the human element and lyrical content in combination with interesting sounds that has been the strongest focus of my attention when it comes to music.
Which turned me onto synthesiser pop, back in my early teens.
More than often of the melancholic sort.
I don’t know exactly when, but at some point I could also see myself making this kind of music.
Maybe it was when the inner pressure of my increasingly stronger emotions felt like they were about to push their way through my skin.
They had to exit somewhere.
I also felt an attraction to these fascinating and, at the time, otherworldly machines.
I thought they looked aesthetically pleasing, and as a bonus, made interesting sounds.
Of course this was all analogue gear, way before digital.
Before the emergence of a global connectivity that made it possible for machines to run our daily lives, or even program our thoughts.
Before the Infoweb.
And its biased “news outlets” and highly personalised, political advertising.
Although, in the beginning of the digital revolution, I was as drawn towards it as anyone coming of age at the time.
I jumped at getting connected through dodgy phone-up modems and BBS forums.
And file-sharing.
Digital democracy.
The new revolution.
Total search-ability and global data harvesting came later.
When it all went dark.
In the beginning we tried to fight back from within the system.
Hacking the big machine.
That’s where I got my handle from, the one I’m still using when making music.
∆EON.
It was based on my real nickname, as given to me by my friend Cliff, an old rasta living in my neighbourhood.
LION.
It had no hacker-style ASCII characters, though.
And ∆EON sounds like Ian.
One shouldn’t have heroes, I know.
Initially we were fearless in our loosely organised attack on the powers that be.
But soon we ended up being as immersed in the digital reality that the differences between us, the underground resistance, and those who represented the governments and their growing draconic stronghold on their own citizens seemed to disappear.
We were suddenly all slaves of the Machine.
The global brain.
Treating us all like disposable neurons.
Resistance from within turned out to be useless.
And many of our own changed sides due to the cash involved.
Brilliant minds with low morals.
I guess we should have seen it all coming when the UK went into the Russian Union.
After leaving the European one.
What could a small group of amateur hackers possibly have to show against the state-financed Troll Centres out East?
Except defeat.
So we chose to drop out.
And in just a matter years the DisCon movement spread across the world.
Logging off.
Returning to pre-Infoweb technologies.
FM Radio.
Magnetic tape.
Analogue synthesizers.
And personal computers without online connectivity.
The stuff I still use to make my music.
That, and my voice.
In my band, the N∆EON TE∆RDROPS.
Which, to be honest, only consists of myself and my machines.
Still a band, though.
All bands are fiction anyway.
Artificial constructs stemming from the wish to create an alternate reality.
Or to simply escape the one you find yourself living in.
The eternal urge to become someone else.
Maybe in order to express something more real than you’d be capable of as yourself.
For me, music has always been highly personal still.
From my early experiments in my bedroom back in Norway, with my 4-track cassette porta-studio, an analogue drum machine and a monophonic synthesizer, up to the music I make today.
Maybe it’s because I use my own voice.
You don’t get much more personal than that.
In the beginning, singing felt far more embarrassing than if I should suddenly find myself naked in the middle of the town square.
Looking at myself in the sonic mirror revealed far too much of my real self, I thought at the time.
I don’t feel very comfortable exposing myself.
Believe it or not.
Especially in my more difficult situations.
I guess that’s why my music is as it is.
Melancholy.
I usually leave the joyfulness to others.
Those with effortless smiles, obliviously dancing in clubs.
Another kind of people.
Those who immerse themselves in the mainstream noise surrounding us.
Through every channel.
In the early days of Acid House, I was sceptical, but still found it interesting.
The rave revolution that followed also seemed like a welcome change.
People of all social walks suddenly dancing to electronic music in open fields.
It felt like a perfect counter-culture.
To start with.
The first reactions from the establishment were totally as expected.
Shock.
Disbelief.
Fear.
With no consumers left in the traditional entertainment business, the big muscle soon turned up to try to put an end to the new phenomenon.
Which didn’t work at all.
There was even an attempt to introduce legislation to crack down on raves in the shape of the "Criminal Justice Bill" of 1993, restricting public gatherings of more than 20 people playing "music including sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats".
It didn’t pass.
So they turned around and seized the opportunity instead, as they always do whenever economic interests are challenged sufficiently.
Backed with the old “if you can’t beat them - buy them” philosophy, the entertainment and alcohol industries pushed for radical political change to save their interests like never before, and when Ecstacy finally was legalised in UK in 1992, there was no way back.
Soma for the people.
Bread and circus.
Even if I quite liked some of the music, and even collaborated with artists and producers from the new dance music scene, I never caught on to the entire package.
I missed the more subtle emotions.
And drugs scare me.
I had my experimental phase, and with it some rather traumatic experiences.
Like I was feeding my brain synthetic fertilizers.
Minds, like plants, need to grow at their natural pace.
Otherwise the soul can’t catch up.
And our emotional selves become confused.
At least it’s what I’ve grown to believe.
Some of the new music was good, though.
But the development from early House and Techno, through the multitudes of styles such as Breaks and Trance, to the EDM that we eventually ended up with, left out more and more of the human element.
And when AI took over all production of melodic music, and mainstream genres such as Noise, Gabber and Dark Ambient catered for the rest of chart-topping music, I knew we had lost something valuable along the way.
That’s why our music started growing out of the underground.
Along with a renewed interest in printed books.
Conversations.
Written letters.
Which, in contradiction to popular conception, isn’t going backwards into the future as much as sideways into the preservation of our own humanity.
I believe it’s the only thing that can save us.
25 - BETHNAL GREEN
It’s 2 PM.
Thursday.
I’m on a different route today.
I’ve taken a train down from Clapton to Bethnal Green, in order to have a more far-reaching starting point for my walk.
On my yellow Sony Sports Walkman I’ve got a tape with Depeche Mode’s “Black Celebration” album on.
I’ve had it in my collection ever since I first came here.
“Stripped”, is the track playing now.
I love trains.
Buses are fine, too, but it’s something about the soothing movement and the sound of trains that tips my scale whenever I have the possibility to choose.
Even for such a short journey as this.
After the small handful of stops, I get out at Bethnal Green station and head north on Wilmot Street.
I turn right on Bethnal Green Road, and keep walking onto Roman Road until I reach number 50, the rather humble high rise that the locals like to to call “Canary Dwarf”, due to its shrunken similarity to the rather more impressive 1 Canada Square out in the Docklands.
1 Canada Square is only mistakenly referred to as Canary Wharf due to its placement on the docks by the same name.
I stop to gaze at the sky outside Costcutter, and then turn left up Globe Road by the Buddhist Centre, walk past The Florist, and then hit Sugar Loaf Walk.
As I usually do on this route.
I know every little road here due to my love of walking, and due to my my rather intense love for studying maps.
A skill I surely must have inherited from my father.
I cross the Museum Gardens onto Cambridge Heath Road, where I head north until I get to the Regent’s Canal.
Upon reaching the canal, I cross the bridge, before heading east on the northern towpath.
I decide to stop for a moment to admire the view of the old gasworks on the other side.
And to breathe a little.
I love the gasworks.
A truly beautiful construction.
One of London’s finest.
And a reminder of withered, golden days.
When I feel ready again, I start walking along the canal towards Victoria Park.
The narrowboats are moored in line as far as I can see.
I enjoy the recurring patterns of plants, bicycles, buckets full of paint, and people lounging lazily on the aft deck in the sun.
There are quite a few DisCons living on the barges.
You can tell by the way they greet you as you walk past.
The very fact that they do, reveal their position.
I walk around the bend where the park opens to the left, where cyclists and runners are flowing in and out from the entrance, like bees to and fro a hive.
A hive I don’t want to be a part of.
In any way.
It’s too busy.
Too disconnected.
And far too detached from the human experience.
I’d rather have my senses turned on.
Emotions freely flowing.
In slow time.
It wasn’t always like this, though.
There was a time when I couldn’t even stand the thought of facing the emotional side of myself.
Everything was blocked up.
Out of sight.
And reach.
The way I dealt with my demons back then, was to use all my energy on developing the other aspects of my personality.
The clever side.
With its salty sense of humour and razor-sharp ability to shred anything and anyone around me into pieces at will.
For a long time this approach to life worked quite well.
Until it didn’t work at all.
And I was swallowed.
By The Void.
That was the fist time I realised I had emotional issues
And then it dawned on me that I probably had more issues than the entire run of Time Magazine.
It was during my time inside The Void that I learned that there was no way I could escape myself.
That wherever I went in the world, I would still have to bring myself with me.
As if I had believed that turning away from a mirror would make you look any different.
I found safety and comfort in the darkness.
To the point where I would dress up in it when I finally came out.
Black is the best protection.
A shield.
Absorbing light.
Collecting it.
As I walk further along the Pound Path, I do my best not to get knocked over by the ones whose sensory systems are focused on parallel digital realities.
I get a sinking sensation in my stomach when I think about all the things they’re missing.
The magic of the real world.
But that’s probably just my maternal care for strangers talking.
26 - THE POWER OF LOVE
Approaching the Bonner Gate, I spot Baba Haggerston standing on the grass next to the towpath.
More often than not I can hear him before I can see him, busy as he may be shouting at some innocent ducks for not understanding the basics of hyperstring theory, or telling off bypassing Digiaddicts for failing to focus their sensory systems on the physical realm.
The absolute world.
According to his own peculiar perspective.
I don’t know his real name, although we tend to meet every time I go for a walk around these parts.
Which I’ve done for years.
And we always make conversation when we meet.
In spite of his preferred honorific “Baba”, followed by what I guess is not his real surname but a reference to the locale up the road, there’s nothing about his appearance that places his origins anywhere near India, or indicates any link to Asia at all.
That is if you choose to look away from the turban, the robe, the long, white beard, and the fact that he insists on walking barefoot all year around.
And the fact that he constantly refers to the Regent’s Canal as “Ganges”.
But apart from this, he just looks like a skinny, white middle-aged man with a highly personalised dress-code.
Not too unusual for these parts.
It is when you start chatting with him that that he gradually appears in a different light.
He seems to carry a lot of information on a lot of topics both on his mind and on his shoulders.
Even though it’s not always that obvious to others what it is he actually wants to shed light on.
His knowledge about the world of science, and especially physics, seems pretty abundant, something that makes me think he has some kind of academic background.
In another outfit, he could easily be imagined as the archetype of a professor of some variety.
Possibly of the “mad” variety.
Today, he seems to be preoccupied with making chalk drawings on the walkway.
To bypassers’ frustration.
He’s only now pausing to shout at them for being ignorant fools.
As I get closer, I can see that he has written “ELECTRICITY IS LOVE” on the tarmac next to where he is standing.
He greets me as I approach.
“Fools!”, he says.
“Threading Holy Ground, not knowing.”
I can see the contempt in the faces of some of the random people he addresses.
To the untrained eye, Baba Haggerston might come across as some sort of tramp.
As if that would justify the kind of looks they throw at him.
But neither I nor him seem to bother about such trivialities.
“Why electricity?”, I ask him, hoping to move the focus to something more interesting.
Then he goes on about how electricity is the physical manifestation of the force of love, because the entire universe has one single task, which is to create equilibrium out of imbalance, and that positive or negative electrical charges always have to be equalised through discharge, and that this process of attraction between opposites that are seeking balance through mutual annihilation, is the true power of love.
I think about it for a second, and conclude that he might be right.
As he usually is on these topics.
He then rants on about how digital technology is the true manifestation of evil, with its binary, polarity-enhancing celebration of opposites, contained forever in a war between zeroes and ones, and whereas electricity represents human emotions, digital is the work of the logical mind, seeking to divide and rule through its binary, emotion-suppressing dictatorship.
And I’m thinking his words resonate one hundred percent with my reasons for choosing a life off the grid.
To escape the fascism of logic, analogue is the only way.
After this, he returns to drawing schematics on the ground with his piece of chalk.
I leave him to it, and let my mind wander as I look out at the peaceful water slowly passing in the canal.
Water is my element.
I bid my goodbyes and leave Baba Haggerston, but only after he has warned me that “any code is a spell”, whereupon I thank him for the warning.
I finish my walk by returning back to Cambridge Heath, and then walk north onto Mare Street and all the way home.
Back in the house, I make myself a hot cup of tea and eat a sandwich.
Then I sit down at the desk and write down my notes for the day.
Feeling pretty inspired, I switch on the Atari and Emax.
I wonder to myself if the sound of the floppy disk booting up is the sound of evil, but conclude that I have to live with the computer as a tool for the time being.
After all, it’s not connected to anything but electricity.
34 - SOUTHBOUND
Today, I’m on my way across the city on an overground train.
I stare absently out the window as “Day of the lords” by Joy Division is playing on my yellow Sony walkman.
“Where will it end?”
My shoulder-bag is placed on the seat next to me, and inside it lies my camera, my notebook and enough food and water for a day trip to the coast.
Also in the bag there’s a bundle of brand new tapes.
Copied on my Sony duplicator, with photocopied black and white covers.
The covers are cut-up collages mostly made from photographs I’ve taken with my Nikon F3 camera and developed in the darkroom in my basement.
DIY.
Analogue style.
I’ve always liked taking pictures.
I guess it’s my way of freezing precious moments, whenever life is moving too fast.
Which is far too often for my liking.
Especially in the time before I disconnected.
Back then I didn’t really take notice of the world around me.
Now I do.
Maybe even more than would be considered healthy.
The truth can be hard to swallow.
But I’d rather have it this way.
The station where I’m supposed to change trains is announced over the speaker, and I collect my bag and get up from the seat.
Moving between platforms is as challenging as usual, with thousands of commuters passing through this hub every hour.
I zig-zag my way in-between the absent-looking faces, ghostly lit up by the screens they’re gazing at, and I eventually get to the platform my next train leaves from.
I enter, and find a seat by the window.
As the train starts moving, I sit back and look out as the city dissolves and gradually morphs into green fields and small clusters of trees.
There's a slight drizzle in the air.
I love this kind of weather.
The colours turn richer and the smell of trees in bloom and freshly cut grass intensify, as if the fabric of reality has thickened in some way.
I grab my camera from the bag and take a couple of snaps through the window, leaving the exposure time long in order to get some abstract, blurry shots as the train moves.
I’m going south.
To the seaside.
Partly because it’s nice with a change of environment and air quality, but partly because I’ve got business to attend to.
Well, calling it business might be stretching it a bit.
There’s no money involved.
But money is only one way of measuring value.
And more often than not, it’s far from the best way.
Maybe even the worst.
Something a large number of people still have to experience.
In time.
I take my notebook out, and start writing my notes for the day.
It’s something I’ve just gotten used to do over the years, as a sort of meditation.
Every entry starts with the day of the week, the date and my whereabouts upon writing.
Today, I’m writing down all of the above.
It’s not really meant for anyone but myself, and I rarely re-visit my notes, so I guess it’s more about exorcising my thoughts, so that they can live inside black ink and not continue to clutter my mind.
Making space for new ideas.
In any way, it seems to work.
As I finish writing, the tape has slowed down considerably due to the batteries getting empty.
I quite like the effect.
The voices pitching down a few cents, the dark sound of slow cymbal crashes.
It’s great how technology can put its unexpected mark on anything creative.
The creative interference of the machines we embrace as tools.
That’s why we should carefully consider what machines we invite into our culture.
Some of them can become more difficult to cooperate with than others.
As we should all have learned by now.
35 - THE COWBOY
I’m walking from the station down towards the seafront.
I’ve agreed to meet The Cowboy at the usually spot.
The old Lido.
Ever since first meeting in the flesh, following our contact through the DisCon postcard and tape network, this has been our location of choice.
Partly this is now out of habit, and partly it’s because of the rare opportunity for me to get some actual fresh air, while out of town.
As I walk along the pebbled shore towards the pavilion, I glance out at sea, towards the ruins of the Temple.
Now nothing but a skeleton of black beams rising up from the water, like the bones of some gigantic stranded whale, it is only serving as a reminder of the disaster that changed this place from a site of carefree joy, to one of death and destruction.
Because of The Wave.
The big one.
Actually, this beach used to be one of my most treasured hangouts when I first came to this country, and needed to leave the city for occasional breaks.
Back before I unplugged.
But I was so absent-minded because of my condition back then that I didn’t take much notice of any details in my surroundings.
Surely there must have been signs.
I pick up my camera from the bag, and take a couple of pictures of the ruins, with their black clouds forming in the horizon behind.
You never know when everything suddenly changes, and nothing will ever be the same again.
Better capture any given moment before it happens.
As I approach the Lido, I start looking out for The Cowboy.
Not that he’s very difficult to find, with his six foot, sporting a huge Stetson hat.
Even here, he would stand out of any crowd.
I spot him sitting on a bench, looking out towards the sea with his million-mile-stare.
The sea that took everything away from him that day.
As much as The Cowboy is a visually striking figure, he’s as powerful a figure within the DisCon movement.
He was one of the first ones to notice the early signs.
Being part of the original gaming-generation, he, like so many of his peers, embraced every new advance in computer technology.
From a prominent part of the Commodore 64 demo scene, to pioneering file-sharing in its early stages, he would always be one step ahead of the masses.
All the way up until the digitalisation of the masses exploded through personalised media, and everyone caught up with him.
But then he had already started feeling the effects on a personal level.
The loss of focus.
The shallow intellectual and spiritual discussions he frequently involved himself in.
The need for constant and instant gratification, followed by a new and unstable temper whenever the world around him moved too slow.
Which seemed to be most of the time.
As he logged off, and stepped aside, he started doing his own research.
Looking at a new kind of data.
The suicide rates among young people.
The explosion in ADHD diagnoses.
The number of unhappy souls in search for a new kind of happiness.
In fatal pursue of the photoshopped version of reality.
Many, like himself, experienced a growing feeling of detachment, even though there were more connections made than ever before.
Connections made through zeroes and ones.
Like with most phenomenon concerning human culture, The Cowboy wasn’t alone in these new discoveries.
To begin with, contact between those who were concerned with the status quo was actually made online.
In hidden rooms.
In the dark basement of the neural network.
But soon plans were made to move the discussion outside the information matrix.
To what used to be called “the real world”.
Thus, an alternative global network emerged, disconnected from the grid that gave it birth.
My entry into this network came later.
And my mission has been less radical.
I’ve only taken my life back.
But The Cowboy is a hardcore player.
His pirate FM station was one of the first ones to be established when they outlawed transmitting on the FM band, and all legal and mainstream radio went digital.
Who knows how many times he’s had to move his temporary studio, and have had his transmitters confiscated?
But he somehow always manages to set everything up again.
Usually with a stronger transmitter each time.
His station has now become one of the main DisCon channels on the southern coast, reaching as far as the outskirts of London on good days.
I’m here to give him my new tape.
With my music.
My ∆KTIVISM.
My vehicle for opinions and ideas.
Like music used to be when I was younger.
Before it was reduced to mere entertainment again.
By the forces in power.
And the ignorance of the public.
To be honest, it may or may not be the most potent tool within the movement.
There are those who are far more extreme than I am, utilising far stronger means.
Like the “Sunstorm” bombing-squad, who use electromagnetic pulse bombs to wipe all data from people’s nearby devices.
Or “EMP-terrorists”, as the authorities prefer to call them.
Surely in order to make them sound more dangerous than they really are.
After all, they’re not hurting any living being.
They’re just wiping out digital memory.
Very efficient wake-up calls for Screenslaves, it has been proved.
Some have converted to the movement immediately after being exposed to an attack.
Bless them.
But still, music has always been my way.
The chosen medium for communicating my own thoughts and emotions, and hopefully also a tool to inspire others.
Imposing change from within.
Somewhere along the way, we kind of lost the essence of music.
The mainstream’s endless pursue for experimentation and progress is something I’ve been working hard to oppose.
Still I don’t feel that my tastes are conservative.
For instance, I know that noise music was part of a counter-culture at the very beginning, but as soon as the commercial forces saw its potential, and decided to embrace it and make it the new mainstream, it was robbed of its true force.
Now we have to live with million-streaming superstars like fellow Norwegian Lasse Marhaug and UK’s own Russell Haswell.
Not to mention the horrible noise boybands like I’DENN or URRU TR’UNN.
Amplitude devoured of meaning.
Fashion constructs of the digital overlords, preaching their commands to consume more information.
In order to make you stay asleep.
That’s why I’d rather chosen to focus on the aesthetics of the so-called “alternative” music and “unpopular” pop that once shaped me.
The new underground.
Embracing the human element in music is the only way I can keep sane and grounded.
To create something that slowly moves forward, but reflects the world I live in.
Although the one I live in might not be the same as those around me inhabit.
Peripheral by choice.
As I approach him, The Cowboy snaps out of his thoughts and smiles as he sees me.
I sit down next to him, and we catch up on the latest news and events.
And the latest music.
He’s doing well, he tells me, with lots of new people entering the scene and sending him stuff.
I tell him I’m happy to hear.
We go and get an ice-cream cone each, and pretend it’s still warm outside.
Then we go down to the beach and sit on the ground, talking loosely about life.
Towards the end of the conversation we swap tapes.
I give him mine, containing some of my new tracks, and he gives me one with a recording of two of his latest programmes.
Then we rise, and bid each other goodbye, whereupon he touches the brim of his hat with his right index finger, as he nods ever so slightly.
Then he walks off into what would have been a sunset, had it not been cloudy.
36 - MY LOST BROTHER
On my way back to London, I think about home.
And I think about my family.
About how much I appreciate the bonds between us, even though we don’t see each other much these days.
The importance of roots.
Elastic ones, but roots nevertheless.
I send them letters on a regular basis.
Pen and paper.
Slow mail.
My mother often replies, and always passes on greetings from my dad.
He’s not in as good shape as he once was.
But somehow I know he still cares.
My youngest brother also replies from time to time, although he’s busy with his own life and family.
But I miss my other brother.
We all do.
And even if I never see him, I can still feel his presence.
As if we’re connected in some invisible way.
Like twin particles.
Entangled.
I don’t think he really meant to disappear this way.
Sometimes life just intervenes.
And pushes us in new directions.
I pause my string of thoughts.
Grassy fields zoom past the train window.
A landscape at peace.
Still containing the probability to randomly change at any point.
I wonder if that’s what happened to my brother?
That some unexpected wave hit him, and swept him away.
Dragged him out into the deep waters.
Never to return.
TO BE CONTINUED