Annihilating the Past Read online

me.

  “It’s nice.” I said, handing the pipe back.

  “We grow it right here on the ranch.” He said. “Totally organic. Xavier says it needs to cure longer, but I think it’s fine.”

  “Another month and it’ll go down smooth as goat shit.” Xavier said.

  The dinner that night was not as well prepared as the first one, but everyone was just as sweet and nice to me. Trevor wasn’t there and when I remarked on his absence Candice said he was probably out looking at the meteor shower. They had what they called a ‘natural observatory,’ I’d seen it earlier with Becca and the girls. It was a high mound that was flat on top. The kids started asking about the meteor shower and it was decided that after dinner we’d all go check it out.

  When we got there, there was no sign of Trevor, but there was quite a show in the sky that night. Eventually I walked back to my bungalow and climbed into my big bed, wishing I was a member of the clan. Tiny had warned me against nostalgia, but it seemed like everything I’d encountered there, every person, place, and moment at the ranch, was designed to elicit that response. When those kids grew up and had families of their own, there was no way they could live up to this. It was a loving, caring family unit on a resort/compound on the beach, eating big meals together and watching meteor showers.

  I woke the next morning before dawn to the sound of scratching at my window. At first I thought I’d imagined it, but I kept hearing it so I finally got up to investigate. It was Trevor Brushton. His white hair was wet and slicked back and his eyes were shining and smiling among the multitude of lines on his face. I opened the window. “I can talk now.” He said. “Do you want to talk now?”

  I got the impression he’d been up all night doing something very exciting and he wanted to talk before the feeling wore off. He was like a performer who had just gotten off the stage. “Sure,” I said, “come on in.” I got my small-screen out and set it to transcribe and record.

  -BEGIN AUDIO TRANSCRIPT-

  Me

  Let’s go back before the sorties. You grew up in Baltimore Maryland, is that right?

  Trevor

  That’s right.

  Me

  And what was your family situation like?

  Trevor

  It was a pretty typical middle class upbringing, you know? My mom was a teacher and my dad worked for an information technology company.

  Me

  What did your mom teach?

  Trevor

  She taught English as a second language to immigrants -a job that doesn’t exist anymore. (inaudible) My dad left us when I was twelve, a sort of typical mid-life crisis thing, you know? He ran off with a much younger woman who then left him a couple of years later. It was all heavy drama and heartbreak at the time, but looking back it seems like a lot of foolishness. My brother got the worst of it because he was really close to my dad, where I was closer to my mom. It’s much easier identifying with a victim than with a villain, which was the role my father took on. I can see both sides of it now, and I think the whole situation could’ve been saved by some honesty and truth-telling.

  Me

  Is your brother still alive?

  Trevor

  No, the super G got him in ’29.

  Me

  Was there music in your house growing up?

  Trevor

  Oh sure, my mom was an old hippie, so I heard a lot of music from that era, and she was very indulgent of my tastes. I used to play hip-hop with really obscene lyrics sometimes, and she would just laugh. She saw the humor in it.

  Me

  Was it always music for you?

  Trevor

  Oh yeah, from a young age I knew I would do something with music.

  Me

  Did you go to college?

  Trevor

  I did a couple of years at University of Maryland, but I figured I didn’t need a degree to make the kind of music I wanted to make.

  Me

  You were making club music at the time?

  Trevor

  I guess you could call it that, but it was just house music. When I was in college I was already having some success playing gigs and putting out material.

  Me

  You were DJing?

  Trevor

  No, we brought gear with us. We called them live PAs (laughs). We were playing underground parties, raves I guess, and we did some high-tone shit in galleries too.

  Me

  You were working with a partner?

  Trevor

  Yeah, Sean Miller, we were called Monoluminous Uvula, or just ‘mu.’ In ’14 or ’15 an ad agency bought one of our songs and played it on TV every five seconds for two years, and I used my share of the royalties to start Revolving Records. I made some good bets early on, and the label started making money.

  Me

  These were actual physical records?

  Trevor

  Yeah, and CDs and cassettes and MP3s too.

  Me

  Were you part of the whole vinyl resurgence I’ve read about?

  Trevor

  Yeah, but you know records aren’t really made with vinyl. They…

  Me

  But black discs, phonograph records…

  Trevor

  Right. We sold a lot of records, and then, after the great corruption, when the internet was all fucked up, we had about three years there where you couldn’t listen to music on any kind of computer. Luckily audio enthusiasts had kept the record-making process alive, and we were in a perfect position to capitalize on the moment. Those three years, after the internet died but before the pick system went up, those were amazing times for me, and for the country.

  Me

  There was panic though, right? People thought it was the end of the world?

  Trevor

  It was! The internet was this thing that everyone assumed would be there forever. People had everything invested in it, not just money, but their whole identities, their hope for the future. Then poof! It was gone. The scales fell off everyone’s eyelids. We were actually lucky it happened when it did, the old infrastructure was still more or less intact. The old phone lines still worked, even if the satellites didn’t, and most cars still had manual drive as an option. If the old internet had continued to develop for another ten years before the great corruption hit, it would’ve been way worse. As it was the world just reverted to 1990 or some pre-computer age. It was a terrible shock though, and a precursor of things to come.

  People forget that the big end-of-the-world was preceded by a lot of little end-of-the-worlds.

  Me

  It’s not usually put in those terms.

  Trevor

  I know, it’s either portrayed as coming out of nowhere, or arising from greed and avarice like some kind of morality play. I teach my kids and grandkids that the house fell down after careless people kicked out each brick of the foundation. It was done little by little, for short term gain.

  Me

  Let’s get to the sorties, how did that whole thing get started?

  Trevor

  It was during those three years of the tech-blackout that we started throwing parties. People needed diversion and stress-relief, so the scene got really fun. People had money too, remaking the physical economy took a lot of work, and there was cash flowing like it hadn’t in a long time. People really loved our parties so we kept doing more…

  Me

  What ‘we?’

  Trevor

  Revolving Records. We set up a division to put the parties together thinking it would be a money loser, but our very first party made money. Beyond that it was a great way to test new releases and see how the floor reacted to new stuff. And it was fun. Now this whole time I’d been putting out my own records, either as white-labels or under one of my aliases, and one fine day my phone rings and it’s this guy in San Francisco who says he’s been using some of my records in his research. He tells me he’s researching electrical and chemical responses in the brain, and that a recurring pa
ttern in some of my tunes triggers a specific chemical response in the brain. This guy wanted to know if I was working with a neurologist on my music!

  Me

  This was Dr. Allen?

  Trevor

  Yeah, but he wasn’t a doctor yet. I thought the guy was nuts and told him so, but he did a good job convincing me he was serious. A week later I got a package in the mail that had his research data and an early draft of his findings. I understood none of it, so I got Eric Morehouse, the smartest guy I knew, to look at it. He had a degree in chemical engineering, so he knew how to read that stuff, and he saw the potential right away.

  Me

  How did he describe the paper to you?

  Trevor

  He said it proved that external stimulus could effect the brain just like a drug. This wasn’t anything new necessarily, the brain is changing constantly based on its surroundings, but what was new was the specificity. This pattern, pattern X, produces this result, result Y. Apparently a pattern I’d put on some of my records triggered a long-acting hypnotic response in something like 42 percent of listeners.

  Me

  This was just a pattern you put in because you liked it?

  Trevor

  Yeah, and when you’re working on a piece of music you’re hearing it in the studio over and over. When I really got going in the studio I would always lose big chunks of time. I’d look up, like, ‘have I been working on this hi-hat pattern for seven hours?’ (laughs) I was practicing self-hypnosis without even knowing it. I was just unconsciously trying to make tunes that would put me in that state. It was all accidental. When Dr. Allen put what was happening into scientific terms