People Are Not Fixed Points

From the first note his eyes have been fixed on the violinist. Not the drummers, both of whom are pounding out a demented cavalry charge, heads down, shoulders slicked. And not the guitarists, five in total, ripping great sheets of noise from their instruments and tracing silvery patterns that coalesce and separate in a fevered waltz that spills out over the Hampshire field. He watches her, and her only.

Michael’s clothes are smeared with mud from squeezing under the fence to get in. He’s come to see a band that has never released a record and never been interviewed. Band isn’t the right word really. They’re more a sort of oblique collective, the personnel shifting regularly, only communicating through posts on messageboards hidden within which can be found the location of their next, increasingly rare, show.

His reward for months of scouring is a place among this crowd – gaunt obsessives dressed in black, big-eyed kids clutching at each other smiling, well-connected hipster scum – all here to see the last great rock and roll band. The few bootlegs he’s managed to get hold of sound to him like Gorecki’s 3rd rewired for an artillery battery of Marshall amps – a slowburn build from aching, barely-there drones, through lockstep drums and keening guitars, to a final brutal crescendo and release.

Only tonight the release never comes. At the centre of the makeshift stage the violinist is a lithe smudge, hair tied loosely back, sawing faster and faster at the strings as she binds the music around her. Behind the band a pair of screens show looped Super 8 footage. On one a dog chases its tail forever on a pane of glass, on the other the camera hurtles through derelict factories, washed blood red.

Michael glances around him and sees that people are no longer nodding their heads. More and more they wince and cover their ears against the onslaught. He grins. Lightweights. Still she plays, spinning on her heels and kicking out in time to the mighty cymbal splashes. Gradually the melody decays, overwhelmed by coruscating noise.

Just as Michael thinks he might not be able to take any more of it, she arches her back and shouts something guttural that splits the sky open. And with that the rest of the band falls silent, their noise replaced by something even louder that rushes in through the tear she has made, around which the stars are now parting. It is the sound of an arrival.