Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [46]
In the middle of Great Pan Place, surrounded by a gang of white-clad suffragettes dressed like the young woman who had handed him the flyer, a van was parked, mounted with blaring compressed-air amplifiers from which the four songs of Lilian Lenton’s last recording were being played in a loop.
It was fairly distinct from what a toe-tapping Brentford remembered from the Sandmovers. The electrified guitar still had that tense, clear-cut rhythmic urgency that was Lilian’s hallmark, but there was a darker, droning undercurrent to it that carried the song beyond the caffeined nervousness of the past. Her voice, also, was different. Lilian had replaced her former girlish nursery-rhyme mannerisms with a talk-over that seemed at first neutral but that became, as you listened to the lyrics, laden with a certain venomous tongue-in-cheek. However, it was the content that had undergone the most drastic change. If it remained allusive, a string of seemingly unrelated, enumerated words, the accumulation drew a picture that was, once deciphered, unequivocal: “Destroy,” said the song coldly, destroy everything.
But the subsequent tune seemed to explore a quite different ground. It was as urgent, but heavier, more dramatic, with wide sweeps of noisy guitar and spine-tingling accelerations. The lyrics, too, came as a shock: they were a translation of a famous Eskimo chant in which a dead hunter speaks through the voice of a shaman, telling of how he died in graphic, moving images that Lilian’s less distant delivery underlined so powerfully that Brentford could almost feel the vermin in the hollow of his own collarbone. This was a daring addition to the genre, taking a rather innocuous form toward a whole new dimension. But most of all, it was when you added or contrasted the two songs he’d heard so far that something happened: there was a message in them that was both as encrypted and as clear as the one in A Blast on the Barren Land, warning that the city would go nowhere fast if it forgot exactly where it was and whom it had been stolen from.
The two remaining songs were in a lighter vein but right on the pulse: one was about the boredom that went with the city’s current undirected lifestyle—or that’s how Brentford interpreted it; the other, playfully but painfully, riffed on the widening gap between poor and rich, breaking again with amazing ease what had been regarded as rather taboo. The whole recording, when you summed it up, reflected exactly what Brentford thought about the city: that the utopia was neither given nor granted, but, quite on the contrary, had to be defended and redefined.
The crowd, first silent and then bursting into applause and cheers as the music ended, may have had understood the same thing, or maybe not. John Linko, on the other side of the square, seemed especially rapt. Lilian, stepping forward under a wide-brimmed hat, saluted, surrounded by her band mates. Brentford was surprised to see how much she had changed: her eyes, which used to be slightly unfocused and teary from excessive sand consumption, were now piercing and determined; she had thinner lips and sunken cheeks and generally looked as if she had been sharpened on a grindstone. She was pretty, he thought, a blade to Sybil’s flame.
Brentford could not resist buying a copy of the record from a cute suffragette whom, as she lifted her head under her slouch hat, he recognized and saluted as Jay, or Guinevere de Nudd, one of his friends from the now defunct School of Night. She was a mean little troublemaker, and seeing that she was involved in this was for Brentford further proof that there was some kind of false bottom to the “musical event of the year.” But the crowd was pushing behind him and this was neither the time nor the place to discuss the matter with her. Thinking a bit too late that Sybil would not be too