More than anything, Caspar liked to make tracks. He would make them of all file sizes and shapes, using every program and resource at his disposal in order to get just the right sounds. His tracks would be called intelligent if they were not so random. The tracks defined his glitchy thinking process, incorporating favourite aspects of the tracks of others and layering madcap beats and bruises on top of them, rarely in sync with one another. Whenever Caspar took a rare day off work at the Forest City surplus store he would spend it by focusing hard on all of the undetectable intricacies of his ear-bending experiments.
Like many others, when he was not hanging out with friends he was sitting in a desk chair, staring at a glowing computer screen. Armed with a skipping Drowned Radio CD, a used microphone from work, an illegally downloaded drum machine and a free sound editor, Caspar was a bomb set to explode with creativity; despite this, however, the tracks he made were only intended to be as clinical and unemotional as possible. Yet certain scenes could be drawn from them, distillations of the imagination of an electronic Buddhist:
In a soccer field at night there was a puddle, a puddle so large that drivers passing by on the nearby road mistook it for a moonlit pond. In the middle of this massive puddle was whiteness, most likely a section of the puddle that had frozen over during the course of the chilly winter day; looking closely at the puddle revealed grass underneath, swaying gently whenever the wind rippled the water, reminiscent of seaweed. To the far left of the puddle was a long row of tall, black, skeletal trees, their long and complex branches veining the night sky, while to the far right was a strip mall, its empty parking lot barely lit by yellow lights. Above it all was a glowing white object that seemed to leave as soon as it arrived.
Although the trees and strip mall would still be there the following day, the puddle would not: the flooded field was merely a miracle and thus would only be remembered by those who had witnessed it as such.
That was a track he made.
On another night it had become so warm that two girls decided to go rollerblading in shorts and t-shirts; they bladed awkwardly, one girl latching onto the other, clutching onto the back of her friend’s shirt in order to keep her balance. They made their way through a major intersection which, at the time, only saw traffic from a few taxicabs, the drivers ogling the girls as they drove past or waited for green lights. The girls, however, were only concerned with the warm night and filled it with giggles, sometimes even yodeling when the mood struck them.
They bladed through a yellow parking lot where a few boys were performing tricks on their bikes and, in an unusual turn of events, neither of the parties called out to one another. The boys simply performed the best tricks they could think of in order to show off and the girls bladed out of the parking lot without looking back; they turned down a random street where they disappeared into blackness, leaving only their voices behind.
That was another track he made.
Nighttime seemed to bring out some of the most unlikely and unexpected things. For example, there was the memorable night when a small group of paper-thin punks lurked in the darkness of a respectable alley in a respectable neighbourhood on Richmond Street.
They continuously harassed the passing socialites, knocking over their treasured gift baskets and spitting on dresses that cost more than any of the young punks’ families could ever dream of making in a year. Between performing these attacks they feasted on gyros they had legitimately acquired from a nearby stand.
After a while some of them slumped down and patted their rumbling bellies, bemoaning their decision to purchase the gyros. It was around this time that a young Chinese man entered the alley wearing a white suit and holding a round purple object that had a long antenna sticking out of it. As the young punks struggled to get up so that they might assault this odd trespasser, the Chinese man punched one in the side of the jaw, knocking it off its hinge and causing a spray of blood to trace a line across an alleyway wall. He then pressed the purple thing to the broken-jawed boy and pulled a hidden trigger. The punk became a great bloody blob that reeked of copper and his cohorts scurried out of the alley as the blob splashed against the cement and trickled down into the street.
The music stopped.
That was one of his most popular tracks. More than anything, Caspar liked to make tracks.
Paper-Thin Punks
This Pretty Mountain
Paper-Thin Caspar
No Thanks to Godard
Let's Be Frank