First year out of uni began well. The house had rid itself of the psycho drama of the marriage that had bruised its air and my brother who had been given the lease by my father got some new folk in. Among them was a couple called Steve and Lisa. As a team they were exhausting, topping every opinion with a correction or needless clarification. They walked among the ignorant of the Earth but perspired a kind of forecfield of sci-fi grade smugness which probably still protects them. Lisa was never less than an elitist goose, beyond redemption. Steve, though, was a different case.
He brought his massive stereo system into the house which survived every syllable of his over-egged descriptions of it to provide us with some fine substantial music reproduction. Like a lot of audiophiles, Steve bought his records for how they would sound on his system. I was woken one morning with the the percussion of a Japanese dance troupe. It was defeaning. The Brisbane stilt house we lived in seemed to shake in terror of the din like a kitten hearing a human sneeze for the first time. When I say morning I mean about eight thirty, not eleven forty-five. No one deserves that. Another favourite was played at a different part of the morning (like two twenty-three).
Steve rode a motorcycle. So did my brother, also a Stephen. Both of them rode machines that were too big for them and the air around them was hinted with a constant whiff of animal competition. The difference between them was marked by sense of humour: Stephen, for his sins, was a lightning wit and usually very funny; Steve was utterly humourless recognising only shifts in self-esteem and personal power in those around him as indications that he should smile. One morning Steve was trying to start his bike but failing repeatedly. Stephen put his head out the window and after every failed chuggalugga failure intoned loudly in the voice of the Count from Sesame Street: "One - ah ha ha - two - ah ha ha - three - ah ha ha ..." He was even physically above him.
Steve, though, had a quality completely absent from my brother's personality. After all the nervy pedantry and unintentionally comical preciousness about his stereo and drip filter coffee maker (seriously!) he was finally a decent man. There was, between the ridiculous flare-ups about "crippled" speaker dust covers or broken flimsy teapots (seriously! "can't it be repaired?" "IT WAS CLAY!") there was a real blush-to-find-it-fame goodness to him.
This came in handy once.
Early 1984 I was on the dole and had the first disposable income since high school pocket money. Every fortnight I'd treat myself to a second hand record, usually from the Record Market in Queen Street. As I'd started revisiting my first musical love, baroque, I was replenishing much I'd lost throughout my later teens. One record I bought and wish I still had (as it never made it to cd) was a set of chamber pieces by a Canberra-based trio called The Capella Corelli suggestive of both the great Italian composer but also his chapel or big room. A little later that year I went to see them perform at my old Alma Mater, Griffith University, in one of the monster lecture theatres of my first year. They were brilliant.
Beautiful is an accurate but unhelpful description of this music. The trio were violin, viola da gamba, recorder (one of them played both of those) and harpsichord and the recording was on vinyl but originally digital. The music alone might have been enough but there was such warmth to the room that fed out of the speakers straight into the listener's nervous system. This was a warm bath with soma of a record. When I first listened to it I was in bed and closed my eyes and fed myself through some headphones and took in a kind of aural forbidden fruit. While the trio affected the slacker strung tuning of the bowed instruments (which can add to both the nourishing warmth of the legato notes or measure the sprightliness of the brighter passages) there was none of the bumfaced aesthetic constipation of the early music movement from the time.
After the rest of the house had heard the record on my scuzzy little player over the week I was asked to present it to the main audio station one night when we were all getting along well, drinking a little and the night was smoothing out to a genuine relaxation. Except for Lisa.
I can't remember what it was but she was irritated. Not having the wit to express her gripe as sarcasm or anything indicative of what she was upset about she moved among us stiffened and alert. But as she joined Steve on one of the mattresses we put there in lieu of couches she managed to lie back (though with visible emotional tension). Being ensconced the way cat owners are when their pets deign to join them on the couch, Steve elected not to move and allowed me to approach the turntable and lower the stylus upon the surface of the Capella Corelli LP.
When I did, when the harpsichord unlocked the portals of the sound and the violin and viol moaned out from mid space and flowed into all of us in the semi-dark by the light of the next room and we all closed our eyes and fed, I saw Steve lightly kiss Lisa on the forehead and guide her back down into the cushions and took her from her living rigor mortis to share the rising euphoria. Before I closed my eyes myself I saw her face soften into a pallid, gaunt but very real peace.
PS - try as I might I couldn't find an image of the cover art of this record. Pity, it was a very tasteful negative image of a musical manuscript coloured yellow and red, a kind of antique psychedelia.
No comments:
Post a Comment