Adventures In Sound, part II

For all intents and purposes, my summer began on a series of pleasantly warm nights in late May where, done with my work, I wandered over to the Arb - a reservoir a few blocks from my house - where I followed foot trails and listened to a swelling orchestra of frogs. It was a good beginning. As far as pure symbolism goes, it worked out pretty well -- it was just mysterious enough to have resonance, but just ambiguous enough so as not to have to assign any particular meaning to it. It just seemed like the natural beginning of a cycle.

Over the course of the next three months, I traveled pretty far away from the frogs. I spent a lot of nights in strange, unfamiliar places. At night, it all leveled off. Keeping somewhat odd hours, we would usually arrive a bit after everyone else had gone to sleep, the time of night where we would have to ring the bell at the front desk of the motel and feel guilty for disturbing the night clerk who was sleeping in the room behind the office. Like people, most places feel stunningly innocent at night, dormant and relatively unbothered.

And quiet.

Swimming in that silence, if just for a moment, I would flash to the frogs. They were there, however many miles away, singing and burbling. I had a boombox and a couple of ambient CDs that I carried with me everywhere I went. Most nights, I fell asleep to the warm hum of an album by a guy named Tetsu Innue that I got from my friend Bill the same week I stumbled on the frogs for the first time. The music on the CD is absolutely magical. It's subtle and gorgeous, morphing with a natural fluidity that wraps itself around any given environment. It also evokes almost precisely the same mood - though not the specifics of the sound - that is created by the frogs.

By the middle of August, I was back in New York for a few days, catching a couple of shows by Electron and the Disco Biscuits. Coming out of a late night set at Wetlands, I climbed into my car to find that I had stupidly left a bottle of water on the floor. It opened and spilled over everything -- newspapers, magazines, postcards, and my CD book. The first few pages of the book - where the Tetsu Innue CD was stored - got hit the hardest. A couple of booklets were almost entirely ruined. The CDs were pretty water damaged, though they've since been restored.

The next weekend, though, I still hadn't made any attempt to clean them. I was too scared to take them out of the book. Finally, at around three in the morning, on the first night of Camp Bisco, I swallowed my fear and put the Innue disc on. It worked fine for a few minutes before starting to skip horribly. If music is a way of marking time, of making it audible (as somebody else once said), then here it was creased and cracking up. I turned it off quickly.

Camp Bisco - the Disco Biscuits' summer festival held in Morris, Pennsylvania - was staged this year on the side of a ski mountain, the stage set up right at the very bottom of a ski slope. In the off season, the grass had grown wild and weeds had crept up. Before the festival, it had to be cut down. The bottom half of the mountain was manicured and treated. The top half was carved into crop circles. At set break on the second night, word got around that the view from the top of the mountain - from up in the crop circles - was spectacular.

Near the end of setbreak, a mass of people began to trek up the side of the hill. DJ Mauricio, who had been playing with the Biscuits on and off since the beginning of the year, was spinning during setbreak. While we were climbing, I heard familiar voices coming from the stage. I hadn't noticed a break in Mauricio's set. "Far out," I thought. "Mauricio is sampling the Biscuits. That's pretty rad."

The middle of the lower crop circle was on a flat plane about three-quarters of the way up the hill. As we approached, I realized that there were dozens of people sitting on the cleanly cut plateau and watching the band. People sat in neat rows. On the hill, far away from the stage, the lights glowed a little bit dimmer than normal and reflected slightly on people's faces. It looked as if everybody was watching a film being projected in the distance. I turned around and saw a glint on the stage. I squinted. I realized the glint was a bobbing bass guitar. The band was back on.

Looking around, I discovered that there weren't too many places left to sit. I also realized that there was a straight path that continued on up the mountain -- a long, narrow strip that connected the crop circles. My friend Carol and I pushed on up to the next crop circle. The ground wasn't quite as level, so it wasn't possible to stand and dance, but there were considerably less people. Taboot, the view was even more incredible. Because the lower crop circle was moreless on a ledge, it limited one's view, putting the stage at the absolute bottom of one's field of vision and forcing one to crane unnaturally downwards at the events going on below.

>From the top crop circle, the stage hovered right in the middle, suspended between rolling hills and a crystal clear sky, occasionally cut with swathes of white light from the stage. Because we were so far from the stage, we were somewhat removed from the intensity of the P.A. as well. We could hear the music clearly, but it wasn't overpowering in a way concert sound usually is. Instead, one could almost hear the layers of air between himself and the amplifiers.

The Disco Biscuits' signature sound, if one wants to call it that, is fast and chirpy. A lot of it very much defined by high-frequency keyboards that, at top speed, sound like crickets. As we settled in at the top of the hill, I realized that we were surrounded by thousands upon thousands of crickets, all fiddling and singing at top volume. Because of our distance from the speakers, the crickets were almost - though not quite as loud - as the music. In short, they fit perfectly into the mix. The whole thing could well have been coincidental, but the band also happened to open their set with a song called... Crickets.

I stayed on top of the mountain for the entire set, listening to the crickets and smiling. Somehow, I felt, it brought my summer full circle -- tying it back to the frogs where I began, to the music that I chased halfway across the country, and the elusive mystery that I chased across the other half. It was a complete and poetic ending.

Sometimes, Jesse Jarnow lives in the country, sometimes he lives in the town. Sometimes he gets a great notion, to jump in the river and drown...