Bohemia Village Voice

Instruments of Torture

It was probably a dark and stormy night. I was working in a club. Actually it was more of an empty storeroom under a pub than anything as grand as a club. Anyway, the place was empty except for the sound-checking hipsters upon the packing-crate stage, and me in the foyer, sitting at the ticket kiosk.
Teen-stink wafted from the back room and my belly growled. I unwrapped my sardine sandwich and spied the arty kids through the open door as they unravelled ten thousand metres of tangled electric cables and built skyscrapers of samplers and synthesizers and drum machines and tambourines and record decks and Theremins and broken Hoovers. They began connecting them all together with switches and sockets and leads and adapters and extenders until the kids began to disappear into this humming, throbbing electronic chaos.
A loud bang! The door at the top of the basement steps crashed open, and there, in terrifying silhouette, stood those who would bring the night’s proceedings to its awful climax.
Streetlights clunked on like an am-dram stage prop and the backlit duo melt upon the stairs.
I cowered before them in their lederhosen and furs, and searched for the reason why they so utterly petrified me, and as I tried to focus, these sinister walruses turned to me in unison and said “Where can we get something to eat?”
The flat phrase fluttered from their lips like pizza menus through a letterbox and I was reunited with rational thought. These people were obviously musicians! Yes, or from Brighton. I offered up my sardine sandwich with thanks as anxiety faded, yet what remained was a sensation as persistent as tinnitus. I turned to find the throbbing cable mass swallowing music technology students wriggling and leaking through the door!
I reached for the visitors but they were gone! Gone! Up the stairs to the street. I caught their shadows on the wall. I stuffed the whole of my sardine sandwich into my mouth. Inhaled. Grabbed a mike stand. I pounced on the soul-sucking techno monstrosity. Stabbing it repeatedly in the intestineous bulk. Stab stab STAB. Stab in the imprisoned faces of arty teens. Stab in the guts of digital disorder. I stab and I stab . . .
The mess of living machinery made a scuttling retreat into the back room. I sat again on my ticket kiosk, exhaled and listened to my heartbeat return to a slower pace.
But as it did so, the foreboding tinnitus returned and my heartbeat replayed its panicked rhythm.
I swung round to find myself nose to nose with the silhouetted visitors, all their former petrifying presence restored in absurd amplification.
“Where’s our sardine sandwich?” they demanded. I tasted it moving back up my throat.
“I ate it.”
“Oh YEAH??” they said, turning the terror dial up to eleven, they stormed forward, shoulder to shoulder and burst into the back room. A hand plunged into the high tech abyss and out was pulled . . .
A beige Casio keyboard.
“Do you KNOW what THIS is?” they hissed, fingers switched the keyboard on, umbilical cords connected to the cadaverous electric lump behind. They turned their cartoon faces towards me and screamed, “This is Saddam Hussein’s Casio Keyboard! Now hear its prayer !!!” STAB STAB STAB STAB!
And the voices of torture victims unleashed their cacophonous hymn from this Casio keyboard and the noise burrowed into my ears and up my nose and through my eyes and into every pore of my skin.
Until blackness came . . .
And blackness remains.