The Natural History - Watch This House
Another excerpt from my forthcoming mp3blogging memoir, "Bit Rate and Hit Rate"The first time I thought that computers were capable of magic was freshman year of college, when someone handed me a disk and said, "Give this a listen." The person who handed me the disk was a well-known guy, someone who had dropped out of school but who still hung out at the student-run coffee shop and dispensed unsolicited advice regarding continental philosophy and worldwide political conspiracies. The disk was just a 3.5 inch disk, with a blue cover, and a post-it note stuck to the front that said INVOCAT #12. I took it home and forgot about it for a few weeks until, one night, drunk and bored, I put it into my roommate's computer to see what was on it. Upon reading the disk, the computer began to emit noises without warning--with no visible change to the monitor--a series of high-pitched beeps that seemed to bleed throughout the room, and definitely vibrated the empty Mountain Dew cans that sat on the tower of my roommate's computer. "What bullshit," I thought, it's just a glitch. But then the tone of the beeps changed, and a new layer or series was added, deeper than the first, and a element of percussion--which sounded, incredibly, like the computer was coughing, or had something caught in its exhaust fan-- came through as well, complementing the beeps and dividing the music and thereby creating a more comprehensible overall piece. I listened to the disk, to INVOCAT #12, for three straight hours, and fell asleep to it. When my roommate came back, he found his computer off, the disk melted into the drive; all of it overheated. When I saw the hanger-on again, the guy who had given me the disk, I apologized for destroying it, but told him about the experience I had, and how much I had enjoyed the music. He looked at me for a long time, and I thought he would tell me something horrifying--that there had been no music on the disk, that it was some sort of test, or that the disk had actually been full of virus-infected porn, which had spun the computer off into unknown algorithmic aphasias. But he just said, "That's okay, man. I've got like seventeen other copies."[Buy Beat Beat Heartbeat]