[Clover, AU] In Your Hands

[petronia]

For Kristin, who requested DJ Ran in Montreal. The flist is large, so if you have no idea what that's about: for the past couple of years canis_m and others have been tossing around a WAFFy Clover AU in which Ran is a techno DJ and Gingetsu bodyguards or otherwise sticks around, and they travel (details vary depending on who's writing; there's been very little attempt at background coherence XD). There's an aesthetic correspondence... but mostly it's about t3h cute.

original drabble (eightfold)
art (canis_m)
trans-Pacific flight mix 1.0 (petronia)
drabble, Los Angeles (canis_m)
trans-Pacific flight mix 2.0 (petronia)
how-they-met fragment (canis_m)
drabble, pre-meeting (lazulisong)
Europe: Kitzbühel (canis_m)

I'm missing stuff. There was at least one with popstar!Suu and producer!Ran. XD; Link me if you're better organized. Anyhow other people fic and I... post mp3s, but this time I was told to write the akchul DJing bit. So this isn't really a story, it's a description of a minimal techno night as they occur in these parts. I found I had to base myself on something so I used what I was listening to, namely Michael Mayer's Immer 2 (SCSI-9, "Morskaya" -> Jesse Somfay, "Lying in a Bed of Mist"), but very inaccurately.




In Your Hands
for canis_m


He wasn't going to dance, and there was nowhere convenient to stand. It had become a frequent dilemma.

Gingetsu took his drink from the bartender and made his way back to the front of the room, hugging the wall. The venue was a bona-fide converted warehouse, lit in ominous fluorescents and low on available seating. Ran stood front and centre like the singer of a band, gear spread before him on a picnic table that rolled on locking casters. Massive speakers surrounded him, above, below and to either side. Wires ran everywhere. The kids up front had piled their purses and knapsacks and discarded clothing around the table's legs, strengthening the impression of disorder. Every once in a while a staff member swept the front of the stage for empty cups and beer bottles.

The kids danced in jerky puppet-motions, with concentration, their faces uplifted. Gingetsu recognized the track, but the gauzy atmospherics Ran's laptop speakers had produced were transformed by equipment and acoustics into storm-cumuli of synthesized violins, the skitter and clatter of subterranean mechanisms. Vocoded machine-words that may or may not have been human language. Harpsichords... From the ceiling hung translucent screens, on which were projected geometric patterns and various images that moved, not quite in lock-step, along with the music. Black branches against a white sky – a slowly turning ferris wheel – abstract, eroded vines that grew to cover the screen – white branches against a black sky. A formerly nigh-inperceptible bass note throbbed on the frontier of sensation and hearing. His body vibrated as if he himself were an instrument, tuned to harmonize with that monstrous heartbeat. He saw a girl clasp her head between her hands and shake from side to side, not frenetically but in accordance with the rhythm, in a ritualized gesture. Whether designed to invoke or placate he did not know.

They inhabited the belly of the beast.

For the space of a few bars the bass fell out, leaving the violins in an echoing sostenuto. Ran bent and flipped through his record crate. The crowd stilled, swayed and breathed. Then the beat dropped again, and they moved as one.

Ran picked out three records, removed the sleeve from one, and left the other two on top of his bag. He replaced the record on the second turntable with the new selection, placed the needle, twiddled knobs. His headphones were only half on. Gingetsu had learnt this did not mean he was listening with only one ear, but that he was matching the beat of the new track to that of the one currently dominating the club speakers – mathematically the operation was an adjustment of pitch as well as speed. This done he returned the record to its starting position (the eight-bar was marked in green pen – or, sometimes, an iridescent sticker in the shape of a clover leaf), held it, waited, and let go.

At first Gingetsu heard nothing. Then a fast-decay snare entered on the downbeat, followed by glassy percussion – tink, click, tink – then handclaps. The screens showed fractal squares in shades of grey, interspersed with static. Then came bells, the sound of stars whispering. Layers of polyphony shifted, lines rearranged. Flashes of images: a shuttered window, a bird's wing opening and closing. Fast – slow – normal – fast. The wing was that of an automaton, the feathers plastic panes linked with wire. Ran's hands moved again. There was a warping as the track returned to its original pitch. Someone cheered, and the cheer was taken up. Ran looked up and smiled, shyly.

In the interim the previous song faded to inaudibility, and the new took over.

When Gingetsu had first dissected the process he had been taken back by its sheer analog imprecision: the reliance on ear and manual skill, the real-time constraint... He had assumed there was a catch, but there was none. The task could be accomplished via software, as well or as easily. It might as well be accomplished via software. He had said it, and Ran had laughed.

There are people who do it that way. I use software to add loops and effects, sometimes—the Powerbook sat open to one side of the table, its screen wavering and green—and for trying out ideas. Anything production-side. But for a DJ set I go back to vinyl. It's old-fashioned, I have so much of it piled up... some of these records are older than I am. They've never been digitalized.

It feels more real, somehow, to do it by touch. You hold the music in your hands.

The music in your hands, yes. The music is silk strings, it's electric wire, the music binds our limbs and plugs into our spines and overrides our nervous systems with its own irrefutable imperative, and in the darkness we give ourselves willingly to your whispered command. Gingetsu closed his eyes and for a few moments merely breathed. Then he reopened them, and saw that Ran was looking his way.

Dark hair fell in disorder around his face; in the greenish light his eyes were wide and luminous. He wasn't smiling. Not quite, not yet.

Gingetsu tossed down half his drink in one gulp. The ice had cooled it, and it was a few seconds before he tasted alcohol.


***


I'm doing a techno mix too, not a chillout one. ^^; Maybe I should get permission and repost everything to my minimalicious account? I just had the idea of turning it into Ran's fake blog à la yuushidiaries only with moar mp3s, but I couldn't write it, Kristin would have to write it. At best I'd obtain and abuse Fruityloops for great veracity.

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[petronia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's it. XD