The Magpie Wing by Max Easton

Author:Max Easton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Giramondo Publishing

The Americas, Baby

Of all Helen and Walt’s music projects, it was a joke band that ended up being the most successful. It was an experimental noise project, initially devised to scam a friend of theirs who booked a weekly band night in the front bar of the worst pub in town. Each act could invoice $200 to play a fifteen-minute set, so Walt and Helen threw a two-piece together to minimise the fee split. They modelled their ‘sound’ on the late 2000s message-board noise-rock explosion, and named the band, with no attempt at subtlety: Look@Us.

Helen played a synth inherited from her last sharehouse (its owner unknown) and Walt programmed a drum machine (by pressing play on one of twelve presets) while playing a child-sized electric guitar with a cheap vibrator. Helen sang through chains of effects pedals, her lyrics a postmodern mash-up of passive-aggressive texts she collated from the series of broken relationships she’d been dovetailing. To muddle the image, they split the signals from their instruments into amplifiers on opposite sides of the stage, resulting in a sound that evolved unpredictably from a deep, guttural rumble to a high-pitched whine. At times, they would sink into a rhythm by accident, and would have to resist the impulse to play along with it. When the impulse got too strong, Walt would clang his guitar strings with an enormous dildo that he kept strapped to his back like a sword in a sheath, or Helen would mash the keys on her synths to break the flow of the performance. It was grating and sounded horrible, but it seemed that oftentimes, that was just what the people desired.

The thing about this project was that, while they might have been pulling the piss out of the experimental music community, it was no less absurd than the guy who played a pane of glass with his teeth or the woman who inserted a contact mic into her vagina. It was certainly no less absurd than the litany of reclusive men who collected analogue synths off eBay to play in front of an audience of eight. By comparison, Look@Us was self-aware, and there were those who appreciated what they were doing. Their first set was recorded by a member in the audience of their first show known privately as Alan the Creeper (a fifty-year-old lifer of the Sydney DIY scene), who later asked to release it on his mysterious cassette label.

Weeks after the offer, Alan made unwanted advances on both Helen and Walt, and as far as they knew, the tape went unreleased by virtue of their not wanting to fuck him. In truth, the tapes were distributed unannounced around local and international independent distribution channels. Walt and Helen were later surprised to find it discussed in a glowing review by one of the more influential users of the very message board they intended to make fun of. Their scam continued to gather steam when the Look@Us live cassette (which Helen titled ‘Press Any Key’) made its way into the hands of an American noise promoter.

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