The Shearness Pool is a “soundtrack is prepared for low power radio and laptop speakers,” according to the description provided by People Skills (Blackest Ever Black, Siltbreeze), but I’m pumping it through my Marantz into my vintage AKGs. Once you’ve gone Hi-fi it’s hard to turn back, and I went Hi-fi back in the 70s when it was still a fine and viable idea.
Back then, I was all about Hi-fi and nature. That is, one or the other, though they complemented each other. Blame them—Hi-fi and nature—for shaping my personality. I’d fall backwards into my soft shag coffin, lost in the psychedelic heavens of electric kingdom come; then daylight broke, shattered my strange sonic dreams, and I’d hit the trail, head to the lake, take a loop or two before heading back to the hideout to sink into another sonic retreat. Or was this in the 80s?
You see, things were different then. We didn’t have phones. We didn’t have television or calendars. No radios either. There was no way to get from one place to another without a struggle.
But we had Hi-fi, enough to blow the moon out of orbit; and I had speakers hot glued to my skull that sent me spinning around like uranium in a centrifuge. And we had the lake, where we bathed and congregated, a sort of “New England town hall” for the olden days.
And then stereo was born. No firewall could hold it back. The sounds were alive, a living stereo; they were screwing in there. I could hear the little sizzle of their cybernetic sputters, the burn-out of nodes as they spread their code across the network. Right. Neuromancer was born inside a typewriter, and so was stereo, and quadrophonic, then octophonic, dodecaphonic… and so on—I could see Gordon Moore in the middle of all this, inside the machine, the keys slapping ink against the paper, the ink splashing his chest and open shirt. He was using the ax again, mincing the letters into smaller things. I waved my arms to get his attention. I was hoping he’d come over and use that ax on these mammoth speakers still glued to my ears. It was 2049 now and I was tired of lugging them around like some oversized dumbo ears, tired of flapping around in the inner rings of an octophonic circus.
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