Issue #5 : Time (Tid)

This issue’s featured piece of music is:
9 Beet Stretch by Leif Inge and Ludwig van Beethoven

Midday, Salisbury Plain. The wind thundering across the tree-free countryside like several thousand jet engines is so strong you can lean fully into it – it’ll prop you up. Overheard, actual jet engines slung beneath multi-million-pound jetfighterwings criss-cross the charging bullclouds, adding a piercing top-end white noise to the inescapable blasting earclog. This is a profoundly disconcerting now; every moment is screamingly of itself; of sound as overwhelming, fundamental physicality.

‘Ah, what weather!’ I believe says my Black Metal friend Christian, visiting from Norway, rather like the Muppets’ Swedish Chef might have said it, i.e. in uncannily precise English that rises and falls in slightly the wrong place, like German spoken backwards.

I scream back: ‘Eh?’

‘This weather. It’s…’ but the wind steals the adjective from his thin Norwegian lips.

This is Christian’s first time in the United Kingdom outside London. I have brought him here almost directly from Gatwick Airport. It seemed like the right thing to do. 

‘We will soon see it!’ I shout. He nods and we stride on, Christian’s metaphorical leather trousers pinned back in the gale, to the top of a rape-reeking ridge where we gaze out across the undulating, wind-blasted plain. A mile or so to the north, we spy a small, vertical protuberance which from here could be anything – a house; a large bus; a herd of twenty-feet-tall Norwegian elk. Christian stiffens, sniffing a sacrifice.

‘There it is!’ I holler. ‘The mighty Henge! Fall to your knees and repent if you please.’ And Christian does indeed fall to his knees, because I’ve smacked the back of his legs with a stick. We approach Stonehenge in a wide, concentric circle: checking it out from every glorious angle while Christian, a Black Metal photographer, tries to take photographs, only the wind makes it impossible for him to hold his camera straight.

As we get nearer, the more the stones’ physiological effects increase, the louder my sandblasted consciousness radiates a single word – a singular concept: time. Throughout most of our lives, we’re generally unaware of the greater abstraction of time. At birthdays we feel it, of course; that’s often when it hits us the hardest; but we’re usually oblivious to its gentle yet merciless passage. Out here though, it’s impossible not to be kinda gobsmacked by its… what? Its depth? Its silkily ephemeral tangibility? Standing here on Salisbury Plain, it feels like we have some kind of febrile access to a landscape still metaphysically throbbing with its ancient history: 5000 years, they’re all right here. Such pretentious thoughts on time and its passage remind me of a piece of music that has a similarly unique, time-viewed-sideways effect, created by another Norwegian by the name of Leif Inge. Inge took a recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and digitally stretched it out to 24 hours, removing any pitch distortion, ending up with a monumental oceanic wash of sound that turns a 45-minutes-long piece of music into a whole day’s-worth of cathedral-leveling drones. Time is bulldozed; rendered meaningless in the flood. You think that sounds boring? It isn’t; it’s thrilling. You think it might all sound the same? It doesn’t; it’s immediate and multi-hued. The orchestral bits sound like the sea looks like it ought to sound like, and the choral bits (inc ‘Ode to Joy’) sound like what the sky looks like it ought to sound like. It’s true music of the spheres, in that like, erm, pi, it goes on forever. Pretty much. And you can download the entire 24 hours for free merely by clicking on the link below. (I’ve also included an edited – choral - snippet for you to sample before diving into the full-fat, bona fide 24.)  

Arriving beholden at the stones, Christian expresses his disappointment at being fenced-off from obeliskene interminglement; he’d hoped to butcher a sheep or a goat among the stones, seduced from a nearby field. Instead, we shuffle around among buffeted Yankee tourists who make Christian’s complicated arcane Black Metal rituals difficult to enact without endless questions, questions: young man, would you call that bloodstained disemboweling device merely a large dagger or a scimitar? And isn’t it a tad windy for all these candelabra? Christian’s lustily-howled paeans to Satan complete, we sit at a picnic table out of the wind behind the Welcome Centre and eat cheese and ham sandwiches. Giant black ravens stare menacingly down at us from a nearby fence. Christian is delighted.

‘We don’t have these birds in Norway! Very Black Metal!’

He snaps away at the ravens with his camera, and they pose for him almost as if they share some deep, devilish cables of Nefarious Understanding, like in The Omen. After lunch we walk back to my car, where I spend ten minutes trying to explain what a rhubarb & custard boiled sweet actually is (‘Sweet yellow sauce? It sounds quite disgusting!’ We were to have a similarly confused discourse the following morning, over a jar of Bovril: ‘Liquid steak? It sounds quite disgusting once more.’). From Stonehenge, we drive 20-odd miles up the road to Avebury, where Christian (the irony of whose Christian name is not lost upon him) is, I feel, underwhelmed.

‘Stonehenge is 5000 years old, but Avebury is 6000 years old,’ I try to explain. ‘So, you see, Avebury wins, no matter what you might think.’

‘We don’t have anything like this in Norway,’ says Christian, staring at the extra-hot Pepperami I’ve just placed into his entrails-encrusted hands. And indeed he doesn’t eat it; he puts it into his bag, and frowns.

‘Look, I’m sorry, but we don’t really do herring in this country. You’ll just have to try and adapt a little, OK?’

Christian grunts, and mutters something about liking salt ‘n’ vinegar crisps. Back at my house later, he’s on the phone to his wife back in Bergen and even though my Norwegian’s not all that great, I can tell he’s complaining about the Bovril and the rhubarb & custards and the extra-hot Pepperami and the general lack of herring hereabouts. Over dinner my wife politely enquires as to his favourite kinds of herring recipes.
‘Do you like pickled? Or roll-mops? Or, um…’
‘I’m sorry but I have no idea what you are talking about,’ replies Christian. ‘Please, pass the crisps.’

Download an excerpt of ‘9 Beet Stretch’ for free here
Download the entire 24 hours completely free from here

‘I listened to Beethoven’s ‘Grosse Fugue’ in the bath and fell asleep. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad. Is that meant to happen or not?’ – Ms V. Bowram, Shropshire

‘Have you experienced the blind whistler that haunts Winchester High Street on a lot of Saturdays? Six feet, six inches of hulking blind bloke, leaning heavily on his white stick as he puts his lips together and blows. Hard. I can usually bear it for about 20 seconds, and I’ve never once recognized a single tune. It’s political correctness gone mad, if you ask me – he is goading people to go up and say ‘my ****ing ears! Turn it in mate, you’re ****!’, but no-one does and I think it’s because he’s blind.’ – Mr S. Webster, Badger Farm

‘Have u ever busked? Well, what I mean is, if u ever see ME busking, please don’t throw the money u r donating, but place it in its container. Thanks again. Great writing.’ – Ms A. Stim, somewhere in America

‘…as for Injun music, I have my reservations.’ – Mr R. Verner-Jeffreys, Alton

‘Pretty good, I guess.’ – Ms B. Dugan, Michigan, America