The Songsmith
by Ken Foxe
In 1977, by coincidence the year that I was born in Dublin’s Rotunda Hospital, humankind sent Voyager into space. Its two golden records etched with the music of Bach and Beethoven and other Earthly geniuses were sent hurtling through space, waiting for an intelligent species to intercept them.
We humans weren’t the only ones with this idea. I was 46, going on 47, when their voyager passed through the Kuiper Belt, a cigar-shaped space probe that conclusively ended any debate over whether we were alone in the universe.
We find it nigh on impossible to piece together what they want to tell us because they are so much more advanced. The only thing we have unraveled so far is their music, though I’m not sure our word “music” could ever begin to do it justice.
Try to think of your favourite songs, the one that helps you sleep, the one that makes you dance, the one that gets you out of bed in the morning, the one that makes your spine shiver. And imagine an amalgam. No, that’s not it. I can’t do it justice. Our language is not fit to describe it; we simply do not have the words.
Today is my last day in Dublin, the city of my birth, the city that raised me. I know its every lane and square. I know where to find an iron bench being devoured by a tree, the coziest snugs to drink in of an afternoon, the best beer gardens, what way the wind is blowing when the smell of hops comes floating over the River Liffey to my little two-bedroomed cottage in Stoneybatter.
Until last year, I was a moderately successful musician, could fill small venues in Ireland and the United Kingdom, had my songs played on alternative radio stations, enough fans scattered round about the world that I could scavenge a living through my art.
I liked to think myself a songsmith because I loved the image that it created. Of a craftsman, bending words into the shape of lyrics and music. As if it was a calling, handed down through generations, a family trade, an inevitability. My father was a songsmith too. He was lucky to be dead by the time our vocation was made redundant.
It’s all gone now, lost to this incomparable alien sound. The music they “gifted” us lasts twenty-four hours and thirty-seven minutes exactly. Scientists say that might be a clue to the length of their day. I just wish it would disappear, at once in thrall and fury, loving it for what it is, hating it for what has been taken from us. From me.
Hardly anybody listens to live music anymore; there is no point. People like me have been made redundant. The new music works just about as well in your living room on an Alexa speaker as it would in the Elbphilharmonie or in the Musikverein. When it plays, nobody talks, nobody drinks, nobody feels the need to amplify it with a drug. It fills those spaces like incense; in its own way, it’s a lonely sort of music.
Some people have become “shut-ins.” They fall asleep to the sound of the music, and wake to it as well. They leave their houses only for necessities. There are TV stations that play it on rotation; all twenty-four odd hours, over and over again. Music radio is all but gone. and the only place you will hear my songs is acoustically in the living room of my cottage.
Mostly now, it’s current affairs and talk shows, and endless speculation on what other mysteries their “Voyager” might hold. I often wonder what their paintings will look like, how their short stories and books will read. Do they make television or film?
For most people, thirty to forty minutes a day of it is enough, anything much more than that overwhelming. People say two hours or more every day for over a fortnight is sufficient to create a powerful addiction, so that you become one of these “shut-ins,” living in a near-permanent state of harmonious bliss and sustained uselessness.
Let me try to describe it again. I suppose it’s most similar to what we think of as ambient music. It would make me think of artists like Klaus Schulze, the Black Dog, Autechre, or the Aphex Twin. For you, it would be another set of musicians. But you must stop yourself thinking of any artist you know. If you try to compare it to our music, you will fail. You would not try to compare a block of marble to Michelangelo’s Pietà. It is not that marble cannot be beautiful, but it is a rock.
I’ve tried to copy it; we all have. To remix it, to improve it, to reproduce it, to blend it with our own meagre melodies. But I may as well have been taking a paint roller to a Goya masterpiece in El Prado. I could no more improve upon perfection than I could understand it. Its near-hypnotic effect, the way it would set the nerves tingling, a music so blissful that former addicts compare it to the rush of an opiate injected directly to a vein.
Have you ever loved an album in this way? It was one you could barely stop listening to. You could have listened a hundred times and then for some reason or another, a new LP arrived, or just wanting a change, you took it off that infinite loop. A few months later, you return to it thinking that spark will rekindle. But it doesn’t. And it’s not that the music has changed; it’s you. What once seemed fresh is stale. Previously unheard flaws rise to the surface, and once heard, you cannot unhear them.
Except now it’s every album that has been compromised. Whether you once loved classical or electronic or folk or rock or metal or traditional or any of another thousand varieties of what we boldly thought of as music. If you once loved my music, were willing to pay to see me perform in Whelan’s on Wexford Street or in Dolans Warehouse, I couldn’t pay you to go now.
It’s been six days now since I last heard it. That’s not been easy. It’s so easy to accidentally catch a note in a coffee shop, in an elevator, or from the radio, and find yourself still there ten minutes later rapt, listening intently. But there are places in open revolt now, sonic refuges; pubs, cafés, and grocery stores that promise you will not be exposed. I, like everyone else, have tried other things, noise-canceling headphones the favoured choice. But it’s hard for me to shut out the world like that.
There is a conspiracy theory that circulates now, that the music was the only message we were meant to understand, that its near-hypnotic effect is not an accident, that this is its sole intention: a path is being laid towards control of humanity. Do I believe that? I don’t think so; it seems a little too easy to pull yourself away. It’s been almost a week since I’ve heard it. Do I miss it? I know I do. Can I live without it? I hope so.
Those addicted to it are probably those who would always abuse something or other. They say it’s been enough to break the chains of cigarettes, alcohol, even heroin for addicts. Prisons have used it, playing it through their sound systems two or three times a day, never more than ten or fifteen minutes. Rates of violence in those jails have plummeted. Crime is falling, too, as demand for street drugs evaporates beneath the melody of the siren song.
There is another theory that circulates among the religiously inclined, that it is the word of God. I don’t believe that. What is it that Clarke said? Any sufficiently advanced technology will seem indistinguishable from magic for those who do not understand how it was made. Maybe I’m adding a few words to that.
I’m taking a final look around my little cottage. I was content here, much more often happy than sad. So many memories are entangled with this terraced street, with this corner of Dublin 7. Relationships have come and gone. The fridge is empty, the rubbish is out. I close the door for the last time, turn the key in the lock, gently tap the “Sale Agreed” sign.
It’s time to leave Stoneybatter for my new home. There’s a colony that has formed out on Ireland’s western seaboard, a new society without the paraphernalia of the twenty-first century. There, painters, sculptors, and musicians live beneath the glimmer of gaslight and glow of turf fires. Not a watt of electricity powers their little society. They eschew radios and iPhones, televisions and streamers. They seek to restore that past where humans felt consequential, felt primal, felt superior.
I’m on the train now, leaving Heuston Station, my belongings in a backpack, my guitar in its case. I don’t need anything else. I may not see my city again but that’s OK. I’ve come to terms with my departure.
We are headed west. A misty rain floats as we pull away from the train terminal and on through Kilmainham and the rail yards of Inchicore. The grey suburbs turn to damp fields and stone walls, the clouds thickening as we cross the mighty Shannon. I want to be a songsmith again. I am going to be a songsmith again.
Copyright © 2023 by Ken Foxe
