after i got stuck in the record
by Mattia Ravasi
After I got stuck in the record I crash-landed in a dark, raging ocean.
I had no idea where I was, nor how far the water stretched around me. I’d been walking across Milan on my way home on a rainy evening, and I thought that I must have sunk into a puddle (the potholes in my neighborhood can be fairly vertiginous), or fallen off a bridge and into the river Lambro. The Lambro didn’t cross the neighborhood I was traversing – it was somewhere else entirely – but this was a hazy period in my life, and lately I’d found myself stuck inexplicably at green traffic lights, staring at my infuriated manager, and doing much sillier things than walking into a river.
I don’t swim, but I shuffled my arms, too dazed to panic, and made my way to the surface. You don’t really breathe in the record, but smells still circulate. As my head broke through the surface my nostrils were filled with a tickly copper smell rich in salt, static, and a sour note, unfamiliar to me at the time. I picked it up years later during a trip to England: malt vinegar. The stench of chip shops, the greasy and tired kind.
(The band who made the record are from Weymouth.)
I was lost among waves crested with jagged foam, under a sky ripped by lightning. It was difficult to pick the roll of thunder apart from the roaring of the waves slapping rhythmically against my head. The water was so ebullient, effervescent even, that I couldn’t tell if it was empty or festering with tentacles and fins. I let the currents carry me, like a bottle guarding a shipwrecked sailors’ final message.
I was scared, sure, but in a fatalistic, tragic way, rather than in the blinding, sweaty, sphincter-dilating manner fear manifests itself in the real world. Feelings and emotions function differently in the record, resembling a refined, fuzzy-edged version of their real-life counterparts. Even with the lightning’s help I could barely see further than ten feet around me, but the darkness wasn’t maddening or oppressive. It reminded me of my teenage years, sitting alone in my dark bedroom, clutching a pillow or my knees and shooting music at ridiculous volumes into my head through tinny earphones. Those weren’t happy years by any stretch of the imagination, but past sadness is easily romanticized, perhaps because we know that we survived it.
*****
There is no sleep in the record, but naps exist. At various times during my stay, I was able to close my eyes, blot out thought, and wait for the world around me to change.
I “woke up” on a thin strip of sandy beach bordered by a grassy ridge where the sky shifted from black to a dull metallic gray. I sat on the sand, running my hands through it. It was coarse and irregular, like shattered glass.
A vast plain unfolded before me once I climbed the ridge, dotted here and there with compact thickets and bordered far away by sleepy hills. Rabbits and hares made their way through the tall grass. The trails they left behind, if one could observe them from the sky, might convey some kind of message, perhaps a solution to the enigma of existence. They didn’t seem to fear me when I met them on my way, but they all hopped away the second I tried to pet them.
Shortly after my clothes had dried up from my swim, a cold, diagonal drizzle started falling on the plain. My wet shirt clung to my arms and torso. I didn’t mind: it felt like a chilly hug. In the world of the record, it feels pleasant to be miserable.
I reached the top of the hills and saw a valley stretching at their feet, lying under a sky as blue as the river slithering from far to my left to the horizon on my right. Along the riverbank stood a city of glass skyscrapers.
*****
The record’s tracklist:
1. Cat People (2:34)
2. English Tomato (2:40)
3. Karmic Charge (0:39)
4. Football Breakfasts (4:35)
5. Simon Says (2:53)
6. Danger in the Water (2:58)
7. Casper (3:03)
8. Blue Torment (5:01)
9. Familiar Strangers (4:35)
10. Border Wars (4:40)
11. Albion Farewell (2:03)
12. Travels in Elastane (2:20)
*****
When they saw me walk down the hillside, a contingent from the city ran up to meet me, racing each other for the pleasure of welcoming me to my new home. They seemed especially curious to know where I’d landed, the term commonly used to designate a newcomer’s entrance into the record. Was it a swamp full of ducks? A Mediterranean city with ivy-draped walls? A stormy ocean? The ocean, I said. “Blue Torment,” everybody nodded, affecting erudition. An agonizing instrumental of heart-shattering synths over incessant, sweaty drums.
The plain that connected the sea and the city was “Familiar Strangers,” a moody, quiet song about small-town apathy with brooding, resentful vocals.
The city whose streets I was now walking was “Border Wars,” an airy yet passionate reflection on political divisiveness and lost childhood optimism. The song sounds angsty, but its lyrics remain ambiguous, sanitized. They name no names. Label executives, I assumed, vetoed any verse that would antagonize conservative listeners, or perhaps the band themselves were more spineless than I imagined. “Border Wars’” beat is irresistible, and the song is one of the album’s two chart-topping singles. It’s been used extensively in car commercials.
Its streets are paved with yellow cobblestones in spiraling motifs and lined with glass palaces reaching for the sky. Every intersection opens up into piazzas bordered by trees with perfectly round tops. The larger piazzas also contain rows of stands forming semi-circular amphitheaters.
The skyscrapers’ doors are all open and their elevators all work, but there is nothing inside them. Empty halls take up all their floors.
*****
The most widely credited theory to explain the varying nature of the record’s regions was that the components of each song determined the environment of its area.
A song’s beat was its light: intense, rocky songs made for lightning or blinding sunlight, bouncy four-on-the-floor meant blue skies, and bluesier beats gave us overcast expanses.
The bass influenced a region’s air. Not surprising, then, that the air around the city was so invigorating and fresh, with its catchy, hips-shaking purr of a bassline.
A song’s guitar and keyboard melodies shaped the ground and water. Riffs and scales led to deserts or lush forests. Cliffs and ravines stood where guitar solos had shaped them. A tormented piano might create a troubled ocean, while a funereal synth might mean a slow, muddy river.
The song’s vocals, finally, gave birth to its fauna, like the shy bunnies on the plain I’d traversed, or the birds perching atop the city’s scrapers, bursting into wistful melodies, calling each other from the opposite ends of town.
*****
Everybody in “Border Wars” was unfailingly polite, and I never witnessed any anger or violence in the record. (What would we fight over, since we didn’t have any needs?) There were only three people, however, that I counted as friends.
The first was John Vineland. I remember him as gray-haired and stork-like, but there is a chance I have fabricated his appearance from his character and the tone of his voice. (Did we even have faces, in the record?) He was the person who won that uphill race to welcome me to the city, and he did so with a pompous, elaborate speech, containing many citations to poets and songwriters. He had honed the ability to add inverted commas to his tone of voice to communicate that what he was saying was a witty reference, and a knack for picking these references from an obscure personal canon that was guaranteed to be unknown to the person he was speaking to. What a twat, I thought when I first met him. For a while I felt very self-conscious, knowing that I was trapped in the same record as John. What did it say about me, if he and I liked the same music?
He introduced me to Delilah, a chatty woman with a polemical streak, the animating flame in many of the debate sessions held in the piazzas’ amphitheaters. She was a bit of a celebrity because of the unique story of her landing – or better, of what she’d been doing at the time of her landing. Just like me, most people had found themselves in the record at a time of distraction, mindlessness, and darkness— both figurative and literal: asleep on the bus on a night trip one second, sitting chest-deep in muddy water the next.
Delilah’s story was more gruesome, more sinister. She had decided to take her own life and got into her bathtub with the right tools for the job. She put the record on through her portable stereo, lay back, and when she next opened her eyes she was in the placid lagoon of “Football Breakfasts,” with ducks, and not razor blades, keeping her company in the water.
The most impressionable among us took Delilah’s story as an ominous sign. Had she died in that bathtub? If so, were we all dead, the victims of accidents so sudden we hadn’t even realized they were happening? (Had a driver lost control of their car in the rain and run me over as I was walking home?) Was this the afterlife?
My third friend was Toshi. He was curious and inquisitive but ventured few opinions. He reminded me of myself.
*****
Among the most debated questions in the city’s piazzas: Hadn’t the world caught up with the fact that an entire legion of aficionados of this one pop album had all mysteriously disappeared? Was anybody looking for us? Were our real bodies in the real world going through the motions of our daily lives, stocking supermarket shelves and typing away inside cubicles, while our subconscious minds lived this wondrous adventure?
Was it just this one record that trapped people, or were there others like us caged in parallel soundscapes? Armies of fans stuck in Sgt. Pepper, paranoid loners lost in Fear of Music, dazed daydreamers in some Daydream Nation?
*****
The only other city in the world was “English Tomato,” the second single from the album. It’s a simple melodic affair of strummed guitars and jangling tambourines; you probably heard some scruffy youth improvise it around a beach campfire. Delilah, who had spent a long time there, described it as an old town of moss-crusted palaces, sun-bleached walls, and sleepy courtyards. Half Tuscany, half Oxford.
John, Delilah, Toshi, and I set off for “Tomato” accompanied by a farewell committee from “Border Wars.” We were told to come back soon and bring news from the other end of the record. We crossed the plain beyond the hills, where I noticed that the rabbits didn’t mind it when Delilah picked them up to stroke their fur.
We reached the dark sky and onyx waters of “Blue Torment,” and held hands as we walked into the sea. We didn’t have to swim: once the water reached our necks, the currents snatched us away, and we lost sight of one another. We had counted on this, and didn’t panic.
We were washed ashore sometime later on the beach in “Casper,” a cheerful tune that stretched toward infinity as a desert thick with identical oases. The waves and storm had scattered us far and wide, and I was nowhere near my friends when I got up from the sand. It took me an eternity to find Delilah, and it seemed even longer before the two of us stumbled upon a dazed John. Toshi we never found.
We collected pebbles from the beach and scattered them behind us in a straight line as we crossed the desert, trying to ensure that we were heading away from the sea rather than looping back toward it. It was otherwise impossible to orientate ourselves under the blinding sun hanging constantly above us. Some sinister, imperceptible wind, or some hidden life bristling just under the sand – mischievous snakes or coleopters – must have been playing with us, because no matter how carefully we placed our stones, we always ended up spotting them in a straight line across the horizon before us, and we could never find them when we retraced our steps.
The desert ended abruptly, with a black band on the horizon swelling fast into a line of trees, the edge of a cool and ancient forest. “Danger in the Water:” bluesy, gruff, catchy. We stumbled upon many clearings containing farmhouses and barns, free from cattle or human life but gorgeously furnished, with wonky hardwood floors that squeaked and creaked when you walked on them and wooden chairs piled with sheepskin rugs. John, Delilah, and I stopped for long stretches in a few of those buildings. We were happy there, or at least as happy as you can be in the record, which is not very much. Like fear, joy is also dulled and defanged around there.
We put the time we spent in the forest to good use. We cut down a few trees and carved canoes out of them, a lengthy task if you don’t know what you’re doing. Eventually, we dragged those canoes to the very edge of the forest, and paddled our way around “Simon Says,” the trickiest territory in all the record: a bubbly melody with a dopey, twee choir whistling over it, appearing as a flat ocean broken by the craggy islands of a vast archipelago, and by frequent spouting from enormous whales.
Beyond “Simon” was a swamp infested with nervous ducks. “Football Breakfasts:” the only place in the record I didn’t like. The light in the sky had a sinister yellow quality and came directly from the horizon beyond the spindly trees, as if the sun had already set but refused to give up its claim on the day. There were huts on stilts around the lagoon, but Delilah advised us to avoid them.
The swamp gave way to fields lined with leering scarecrows, and, soon enough, to the vine-draped walls of “English Tomato.”
*****
I think we spent a long time in “Tomato,” but my memories of the place are blurry and disconnected, very much unlike my sharp recollections of “Familiar Stranger.” I cannot say why this should be, and my best guess is that it has something to do with my mood when we reached “Tomato.” I felt instantly bored with it. Not so much with the town – it is the record’s loveliest corner – but with what it represented: the climax of my adventure. I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to appreciate the mossy courtyards and sandstone libraries.
John must have felt something similar. Seemingly minutes after we got there, he started to elaborate on a theory he had devised during our journey. He believed that, if one traveled across the record in a given, unknown direction, they might end up in a different record. Perhaps an earlier effort by the same band; perhaps an altogether different album that shared certain sonic-geographical affinities with ours. The work of a source or an imitator.
It wasn’t long before John was off, searching for his bridge into the next world. He never invited us along. I believe he could tell we were not bothered, and if that’s the case, I wonder if he could also tell that I didn’t like him very much.
It took some time for my own longing to become intelligible to me. I didn’t pine for new lands like John: instead, I wanted to go back to “Familiar Stranger.” Not because I missed the old city by the river, but because its skyscrapers and wide avenues reminded me most closely of Milan, definitely more than the sun-kissed streets of “Tomato.” I had finally started missing my native reality, or at least my hometown, which I guess is one and the same.
A few seconds after this realization I opened my eyes and woke up in my bedroom.
*****
I could never figure out how much time I spent in the record. I had lost my job at the supermarket, but my manager was quick to re-hire me when I reappeared. He knows how little the company pays me, and he doesn’t have it in him to give me too hard a time.
My mother, too, seemed offended when I phoned her (I usually make a point of calling her once a week, though sometimes I forget), but not anxious or relieved, as if I’d disappeared for six months. My friends, who I see rarely, never noticed I’d left.
Four to six weeks would be my best estimate. It could be more. It could be no time at all.
John Vineland is an obvious nickname, the kind you invent for yourself if you’ve spent too much time chatting with strangers on specialized forums. I was never able to find John. I’m certain he has a boring name, Peter Evans or Carlo Rossi, and that he lives in a dull place, like Slough or Lissone.
Toshi works as a teacher in Japan. I messaged him, and he replied, but I got the impression that he wasn’t particularly interested in reminiscing about our adventures. I hope he is not mad because we continued our journey without him when we couldn’t find him on that beach. We really tried, Toshi.
Delilah actually did kill herself. There was an article about it in the local paper from her Scottish town. I don’t really know what this means. Perhaps the Delilah I knew was a fragment of her consciousness, traveling through the record at the same time as the blood was dripping away from her in the bathtub. Maybe the record is where she went after the fact, and where she now resides.
It’s a good record. Give it a listen. Just stay away from those huts in the swamp, and don’t trust the desert with your pebbles.
BIO: Mattia Ravasi is from Milan and lives and works in the UK. Her short stories have appeared in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Planet Scumm, Underland Arcana, and other magazines. They have been chosen as editor picks on Locus and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Mattia’s criticism and book reviews have appeared in various magazines and websites, including the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, several Italian publications, and her own YouTube channel, The Bookchemist (44,000+ subscribers).