The Experience
I’m going to see them tonight; the greatest musicians ever created, playing in the best band in the world. The Experience. They originated out of Harmonic Laboratories, and the three modified musicians have at least five brains between them.
The drummer has eight arms, three legs, and plays on a drum set that’s supposed to look like a small city built up around him. He’s got a multi-rhythmic-metronome attached to the base of his brainstem that enables him to keep track of thousands of intersecting time signatures at once. The article I read about the band stated the drummer constructs beats so complex, that if you try to follow them, “you could get lost inside a labyrinth of percussion.”
Their lead guitar player has nine fingers on each hand and can play so fast that it looks like he’s moving in fast-forward. His hands become blurs moving up and down the neck of his twenty-seven-string guitar. The article described the sound of his playing as, “a deluge of cataclysmic cacophony.” This description doesn’t necessarily sound that pleasing but it certainly seems impressive.
Their singer has two entirely separate sets of vocal chords and can sing overtones with both of them. He can sing a four-part harmony all by himself. Apparently his lungs are so powerful that he can suck all of the oxygen out of a room during a single song, and when exhales it physically pushes you back.
Their bassist, however, is just an unmodified, simple dude. The article I read suggested that the geneticists at Harmonic Labs couldn’t come up with any genetic modifications to endow a bass player with. My guess is that they tried something and it failed. I imagine there’s a prototype stumbling around their lab somewhere with effects pedals for feet.
The plush cushiony seats of the concert hall are quite comfortable. After an hour of waiting in lines to get through the multiple layers of security who confiscated anything remotely resembling a recording device from all the concert goers, I finally settle in for the show. The lights dim and a voice booms out across the room, “And now, for your entertainment, the greatest musicians who have ever lived, I present to you live; The Experience!”
Instead of the energetic, lively musical geniuses I expected to see bound up onto the stage, the three altered musicians get wheeled out on platforms by stage-hands. They are massive individuals, with lumpy uncoordinated looking bodies that seem like mounds of limbs and flesh that got dropped on top of each other, then dipped into a vat of glue. The bass player walks out behind them, mundane in his appearance - a regular dumpy run of the mill musician type.
Without further introduction, they begin. A wall of sound assaults my ears. I grit my teeth, and my fingers dig into the plush pillows surrounding me. I try to retreat into my brain, but there’s nowhere to go. The noise has somehow invaded every inch of my being.
Then, through the grating sound of a million plucked notes and the piercing overtones of the singer’s screeches and the complexity of crashes coming from the drum kit, I hear a simple undertone. I look at the bassist and to my surprise he seems to be playing a single note. He’s playing the crap out of it too. I quite like his sound, so that’s what I focus my attention on until I hear nothing else. The modified musicians fade into their ocean of convoluted noises, all drowned out by a single solid note. I smile and the memory of why I fell in love with music washes over me.
Biography
I am a transfer student (Junior year) and this is my first semester at SSU. I grew up browsing my father's bookcase of old Science Fiction novels.
I am a transfer student (Junior year) and this is my first semester at SSU. I grew up browsing my father's bookcase of old Science Fiction novels.