Album cover by Beryl Chung
No Hard Feelings by Saskrotch
Track 1: The Nerd Wave
Koi had been coding a website template for some automotive company and needed a break, so he sat in front of his computer with Google on his screen. After thinking about it for a bit, he typed in ‘how to sound like architecture’, but nothing particularly relevant came up. He continued to sit, thinking. He had no instruments at his apartment and thus hoped to download a program that would allow him to make music. Specifically, he hoped to download a program that would allow him to make music that sounded like the band that had changed his life. Knowing absolutely nothing about them made this especially hard to do, so he brought up Wikipedia; from the opening paragraph of their user-created article he felt like he was entering an entirely new world.
Architecture were an English IDM duo consisting of Shop Round and Tom Sleuth. Shop had met Tom at an underground breakdancing competition in Bristol in the late Eighties, where Tom had put on a homemade electro mixtape, its selection meshing well with Shop’s own tastes. From this mutual affinity towards novelty culture they quickly became friends. Tom introduced Shop to the notion of making their own electro tracks, and these early forays led to the creation of the Nose Hairs record, a two-song EP filled with grated-cheese beats, melodies and samples. It was not until their first proper album – Anthropomorphic Pillow Bug – that they found their trademark sound: clinically precise and clear beats, each hit hand-washed, along with ambient noises and melodies that recalled early Eno. With each subsequent record, the beats became more complex, eventually growing into math equations to be understood only by idiot savants. The melodies became squelches cranked out of impossible machines. By the time they had put out their eleventh album, Wheatfield, their fan base had whittled down to those who viewed the internet as an alternative lifestyle.
Koi clicked on ‘IDM’. IDM was a term created in the early nineties for the experimental and ‘intelligent’ dance music being produced by musicians on the Teleport Records label. These musicians included Nuptial Squid, Flannel, Architecture, 4:30am and Nedward Nightingale. Each artist had a different sound but a similar goal: to make electronic music for the head instead of the hips. The Dance part of IDM came from what the listener’s brain did when they listened to the Music. The Intelligent part was entirely subjective: Nuptial Squid’s Ducks album was a three-disc masterpiece rife with digital intricacies and acoustic applications to some, but to those people’s brothers it would sound like a nervous breakdown. One had to consciously immerse themselves in the alien soundscapes before being able to slide in at ease and coax pleasure out of the experience.
Koi opened up BananaFinder, the program he used to download K-pop and anime theme songs. Instead of searching for Architecture, however, he hunted down tracks by Nuptial Squid. He was worried that Architecture’s recorded output would not match the sheer experience of their live show – which had, admittedly, more than likely consisted of pre-recorded music. Nuptial Squid brought up enough search results to temporarily freeze his computer. The track titles read like viruses written in dead languages; he tried downloading a track that had (Architecture Remix) in the title and went back to coding.
A cartoon banana wearing black sunglasses and playing a golden saxophone popped up on the lower-right-hand corner of his screen.
‘Nuptial Squid – Truckaluck F93 (Architecture Remix) has completed,’ the banana informed him before disappearing behind his taskbar.
Koi’s phone rang before he had a chance to open the file.
‘Uh,’ he answered.
‘Hey, Koi,’ came the static-y and concave cell phone voice of Ryan. ‘It’s Ryan. Want to come to the Catfish King on Wellington? I have to tell you something.’
‘Uh, sure,’ Koi replied. He figured he could do with some food as he had not eaten all day. He hung up the phone.
He shut off his monitor and looked around his room for his hat. He then slid into the sleeves of his baboon-fur jacket and collected change for the bus from his chair, the change having fallen out of his pockets. He grabbed a toonie and two commemorative quarters.
Before leaving his apartment, he looked it over one last time, wondering if he had forgotten something as he so often tended to do. Feeling he had everything he needed for once, he nodded satisfactorily to himself and left.
After re-entering his apartment and grabbing his wallet from his desk, Koi left his apartment again and went downstairs.
‘You said you wanted to make tracks,’ Ryan said, dabbing the grease from his lips with a paper napkin.
‘Pardon?’
‘You know – at Phone In Sick. After Architecture, you said you wanted to make your own music.’
Koi set his boiled potato back onto his plastic tray.
‘Uh, kinda. I was thinking of downloading a program. Why?’
Ryan shrugged.
‘It’s interesting to me. I’ve never seen you do anything creative before and I want to help you out.’
The boiled potato tasted like soft wax that had been soaking in hot water all day.
‘I was thinking you should talk to a friend of mine about this,’ Ryan continued. ‘His name is Taylor Jackson, but he records under “Trevor Noirchild”. He’s put out a few independent cd-rs – nothing big – but he has his name out there and knows what he’s doing. He might be able to set you up with something. Are you interested?’
Koi paused and stared at the cartoon catfish on the paper place mat beneath his food. A word balloon coming out of the catfish had it saying ‘Buy my food or I’ll die.’ The catfish did not have a face, a glob of plum sauce having fallen onto it, but the plum sauce’s bright yellow colouring gave the catfish the semblance of a cheery demeanour.
‘Uh, I’ll have to think about it,’ he said. He returned to his potato.
‘All right, give me a call on my cell when you decide,’ Ryan told him.
He then checked an incoming text message on his cell phone.
‘I’m going to peace out,’ Ryan said.
Koi watched his friend shimmy out of the booth. Once Ryan was out the glass doors and into the parking lot of sharp autumn air, fixing his handmade scarf, Koi felt it was safe enough to wonder what his friend’s ulterior motive was. Ryan usually only wished to ‘assist’ or ‘help out’ when he personally benefited from it in some way. Did it have something to do with this Taylor Jackson fellow? Koi had never heard of him before.
He slurped up the watered-down Catfish Cola that came with his custom combo. The drink was as good as any he’d get at Burger King: it was watery and wet his tongue and had a vague tinge of cola to it, which was all he could really ask for.
‘Ugh,’ he said.
The view outside his window was a view through the curly ‘a’ of ‘Catfish’. The sky was grey and random dark spots spotted the parking lot. Beyond the parking lot was the river, which he was unable to see, and the many red-orange-yellow trees that lined the river, which he could see a great deal of. Beyond the river and trees were twin apartment buildings set at different angles. What caught Koi’s attention were the windows: scattered yellow lights piercing the landscape like the glowing eyes of all-seeing gods.
‘Can you please move your feet please?’ asked the employee on clean-up duty, her mop as hungry as Koi had been.
Koi lifted his feet.
He stood at his bus stop with his hands in his pockets, feeling the crumpled, expired bus transfers he had amassed in the last few months. His shoes were soaked and his socks were soggy and his feet were wet; he regretted walking through the slush of the parking lot instead of taking the long way of the sidewalk. These sudden bouts of snow and rain were beginning to be a hassle. He wondered if he had missed his bus.
He thought about Ryan, who had the idea of writing a two-man play that was to be performed on a city bus. The plan was to have it acted out in whichever front seats were available, and the audience was to be unaware that they were witnessing a play. Ryan desired two performances of it and neither was to be recorded in any fashion; the play itself was all that mattered to him, its existence to go undocumented. He hoped to get Don and Poe to perform it. It would be about them riding a bus until their lines ran out.
Koi was fine with it as long as he did not have to take part in any way. Some of Ryan’s ideas – or ‘performance pieces’, as Ryan called them – were a bit too strange and confrontational for Koi’s liking, and he preferred hearing about them over experiencing them firsthand: the three-man scarf, in which Ryan, Don and Poe walked the streets of downtown Toronto with a single scarf wrapped around their necks; a piece called ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’, in which Ryan stripped to his boxer shorts at Don’s student townhouse in Mississauga and demanded the others follow suit; a time Nancy accidentally stepped on Ryan’s heel while they were out walking and he suddenly collapsed in faux pain, refusing to move until somebody called an ambulance. Koi enjoyed the simpler acts of absurdism, such as the time he visited Ryan at his old house and Ryan unexpectedly leapt through a bedroom window, bursting off the screen (which had already been broken, Ryan said) and tearing his favourite plaid shirt.
Who was Trevor Noirchild to Ryan? Ryan had once written a short story in which a character named Trevor Noirchild sought the secret of the universe and found it in a young girl named Amy Kadmon. That was when Ryan and Koi were still in high school and all of Ryan’s writings were violent and dark, dark and violent and Koi enjoyed all of it. Ryan tended to title and name things for his friends, so ‘Trevor Noirchild’ reappearing in this form – as an alias for a real person – was not terribly unusual to Koi. Still, he had to wonder if it was a joke, a prank or some performance piece that had been bubbling in the back of Ryan’s brain since the concert.
The bus splashed grey slush onto his khakis.
‘Ah, man,’ Koi groaned.
He fished into his pocket for his bus transfer, lost in a sea of expired bus transfers. The search was as frustrating as trying to find a specific needle in a needlestack; Koi spent the first few blocks on the bus standing by the driver, looking for it. When he finally found it the driver no longer seemed to care, and Koi turned to his fellow passengers, a slight group consisting of a senior, an adult, a student, a child and Dana.
Dana was holding an apple with both of her hands and pressing her teeth into it without actually taking a bite. Koi wanted to pretend he didn’t notice her but Dana’s eyes followed him from the front entrance to the back of the bus. She pulled her teeth out of the apple and looked at him.
‘Uh, hey,’ he said, nodding awkwardly. ‘Taking the bus, I see.’
Dana tossed her apple at him and it bounced off the side of his head. The apple then rolled stumblingly beneath a seat. Koi had never been one to catch things.
Dana got off at the next stop, her hands in her pockets and looking both ways down the bronze wetness of sidewalk. The bus pulled away before Koi could see which direction she went in. He figured she was going to see Ryan.
He decided that after being confused by Ryan and struck with an apple by Dana, what he really needed was some K-pop. He planted the ear buds in his ears and let Kowie grow into them.
He tossed his jacket onto his bed and set the still-playing Walkman on his desk. He sat on his desk chair and grunted zombie-like and turned on his monitor. The BananaFinder folder greeted him as soon as he pushed away his screensaver with his mouse. Inside the folder were various tracks set in the order they were downloaded: the first was the ending theme to the Legend of the Christmas Knight, an obscure anime he had gotten into when he was fourteen. The last was Nuptial Squid – Truckaluck F93 (Architecture Remix). He double-clicked on that and waited for his media player to load.
The Play indicator inched along in silence. He checked the Volume setting. The Volume said 100. He then turned on his stereo and was hit by the machine gun sounds of an entire army of rebels. As his brain adjusted to the suddenness of it all, he noticed a violin sound circling the beats like a lost ghost. High-pitched squelches popped the violin out of the picture from time to time but the violin always came back, not quite through with its haunting. When it ended, the buzzing of Koi’s computer tower was an impossible loudness. He played the song again.
‘Uh, hey, Ryan,’ Koi said tremblingly into his phone. ‘Uh, I was thinking I should . . . maybe I should meet this “Trevor Noirchild”. Uh. I don’t know. Do you actually think I’d get something out of it? He’s not going to teach me how to play music or something, is he? Oh, okay. No. I just . . . I want to make tracks. I want to make cool beats like Architecture. No, I don’t want to speak to Dana. That’s okay. Uh, yeah. Thanks. Thanks. Okay. Sure. Tomorrow— Uh. Tomorrow is good. I have to code this website. Uh, okay. Bye.’
He hung up the phone and stood staring at it. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve.
He grunted. Meeting new people was not easy for him. He tried not to think about it.
Instead he played the track again, this time trying to figure out which parts were Nuptial Squid and which parts were Architecture. He decided to download the original to find out, and again the search netted enough results to stutter his computer. He found it strange that so many people would be into something he had only just discovered; as far as he was concerned, if he did not know about something, then it did not exist. If he did not know about the second half of this sentence, then
‘Nuptial Squid – Truckaluck F93 has completed,’ the banana told him.
Koi double-clicked on the file. As it loaded he sat himself down on the edge of his bed. The track began with a bouncy melody. Then the beats came in, far more spastic and messy than the ones from the remix, and with the beats came that ghostly violin, this time without any acidic squelches to interrupt. Koi lay down as he adjusted to this new type of ‘IDM’. He rested his head on his hands and gazed up at the all-too familiar ceiling.
The track ended. Koi clicked on the rotated triangle in his media player and lay back down on his bed. The sounds were coming from an entirely different universe than the one Kowie lived in, a universe where K-pop did not exist and never would. These two tracks were portals into this universe and Koi felt somewhat intimidated by it; listening to them caused the blue electricity of his soul to shoot up through his spine and into the mush of his brain, a not altogether unpleasant experience that left him sweating and cursing under his breath.
He pried himself from his bed and again sat at his computer desk. This time he closed down his media player and opened up the default wav editor that came with his computer. Although he did not have any programs of great complexity – or any programs at all, really – he at least had this, the basic recording program that allowed him to create and save New Wave Sounds. He did not have a microphone to record anything, nor did he know what he’d want to record, but he knew he could easily download various wav samples from tv shows and movies and videogames from the internet. He recalled coming across many when he was younger, back before the internet became a thing to take for granted like love and air, the glory days of browsing various Geocities websites with their Under Construction gifs and tinkling midis. He typed in ‘evangelion wavs’ and, out of sheer nostalgia, clicked on the first Geocities link that came up. The site had not been updated in eight years.
Koi downloaded a clip of the theme song. He tried downloading a clip of Kaworu telling Shinji that he loves him but ‘Sorry, the page you requested was not found.’ He considered himself lucky that the site was still up at all.
He opened up the theme song clip in the wav editor and played around with it, slowing it down until it became a sorrowful moan, speeding it up until it became the chittering of raccoons, reversing it and chopping it up. He then made numerous copies of the original file and placed them in a folder called ‘Track 1’. He manipulated the first copy of the file until he had created a colourful, clean and looping beat. With the next copy he culled an ambient melody by slowing everything down, reversing it all and selecting the quieter bits. He then lay this ambience over the beat. The third copy netted him random splashes of synth that he placed over select spots of this concoction, a means of maintaining interest throughout the track’s two-and-a-half minutes.
Koi quietly considered his own embarrassment as the jumbled mess of sound popped and cracked through his speakers. He slowed down his track, reversed it and then deleted it. He then cleared it out of his recycling bin so that it would be gone forever.
But he had the taste. He opened up Google again and tried another search. He deleted the track that resulted from this, but he tried again, and it was this third time that he found himself pleased. He was not defecating ecstasy, but he was pleased. The track consisted of giant robot sounds manipulated and mashed on top of a reversed and slowed-down baroque melody, and that was really all it was, but somehow it worked. Koi thought it worked, anyway.
He copied it onto a cd, burnt it and wrote ‘Wav Smasher’ on the disc with a permanent marker. He felt that Wav Smasher had a nice ring to it, and that it was not far-off from something like Nuptial Squid or Trevor Noirchild. He decided that it was what he would like to be called from now on.
Koi's Story Continues In Track 2: Playing Koi
Track 0: Uh
Track 1: The Nerd Wave
Track 2: Playing Koi
Track 3: She had said the only words that could have affected him totally and truly
Track 4: A Sudden Loud Knocking
Track 5: A Two-Man Play to Be Performed on a City Bus
Track 6: Now It's Summer
Track 7: Study of a Drawing by Bobby Myers
Track 8: Loose Change
Track 9: Foam
Track 10: The First Person
Track 11: Please Be True
Track 12: Title Track