Jennifer Myers Graphic, Web & Creative Design Toronto

The sound of crushing bone reverberated off the dank and merciless surface of the room, echoing in total silence. Niku Ongaku checked the levels on his system. Nothing. The LCD bars remained motionless, the microphones in his body picking up none of his sounds. On playback, Niku could hear only the faint hum of the neon lights that illuminated the operating table. Nothing. With a sigh Niku yanked the thick hexagonal cord from its socket. His eyes welling up with tears, he suited up and limped back to his cadaver.

The walls were built with solidarity, of clay bricks and mortar. Over time, Niku had pried the bricks down, one by one, with suspicion. After exploring every possibility, he went through a period where he was convinced that some electronic, nuclear or subsonic field was interrupting and corrupting his equipment. Now the walls were dirt. He was deep below the walls of the subway tunnels, deep beneath the city. The back half of the room was the designated taxidermist area. The walls were damp and dark grey, with pin-ups from the periodicals covering them for the most part. Thousands of paper cranes hung suspended from the ceiling, shaking with the vibrations of the subway train. A chest built from glass and neoprene held over a thousand vials of OFontaine, lined in perfect rows like soldiers waiting for duty. His next subject lied lifeless in the freezer, waiting until tomorrow to fulfill her last destiny.

“Welcome once again to youth and immortality.” Niku said; his words acerbic and mute. “It’s a good thing” he mouths silently as he lets the wrist drop limp.

Niku looked like an average guy. He had round rimmed glasses that beveled out slightly on the lower edges and brown eyes flecked with black. He had a shock of hair, bright yellow, which weaved its way down his back like a phosphorescent snake. Niku’s body modifications were less noticeable. Faintly, one could see wires running alongside his veins through pallid skin. They ran thick up the back of his neck where they knotted around the base of his brainstem. Behind his left ear, just above the temple, a hexagonal patch of skin had been removed - exposing the mess of circuitry below. A thick web of scars ran along his entire frame. Some were fresh. He wore thick rubber boots, utilitarian gloves, and a white plastic sheath. Through the plastic you could faintly see a Meat Puppets T-shirt.

An apparatus took up most of the corner: Alongside a slightly raised surgical table was a box with many switches and sliders. LCD bars, measuring sound in decibels, bounced slightly with each word spoken. A phonograph of brushed chrome sat haphazardly on top with an influx of wires expanding from its base. One of the wires, thick and heavy-looking, bore a hexagonal shaped attachment on its end - the same size and shape as the exposed space behind Niku’s ear.

His place smelled dank and sweet - like sweat and rotten bananas. A thick chemical fog hung a foot or two below the ceiling, faintly green and cool. A Throbbing Gristle poster was hung on the back wall beside the taxidermy setup. It was torn and old – Genesis. P. Orridge’s eyes wide and bearing down directly on the operating table.

Aside from being a taxidermist, Niku made music using the sounds of his body. Blood rushing base, neuro-transmission hooks, even bone crushing beats. He had broken, unbroken, and over-contorted his body. He had destroyed pieces of himself for the sake of his craft. His heart beat in bars of 8 at 180 bpm.

Niku hadn’t made music in 141 hours and 7 min and it was tearing him up inside. Piece by piece his organs ached to be heard, manipulated, dented for the sake of generating sound.

All day he stuffed and stuffed - teeth gritting and grinding inaudibly. In fact, his body made no noise any longer. His joints didn’t snap when he cracked them. His blood didn’t beat up alongside his ears, no matter how hard he got it pumping. His metronome heart hadn’t ticked in days and days. Niku had always had relied on his inner drive, and the desperation of his body. He enjoyed slipping into a trance and emerging with a spectacular melody, ringing with gushes and cracks and snaps.

It hadn’t always been so easy. Niku got nailed once for chopping liquid adrenaline when he was 16, just emerging from the neuro-womb-cocoon and leaving his mother. It was right after he left the Hanisako Penn that he built the Multi-track Meat Modular Synthesizer. He got wired up while in there. A fence named Yokimo coiled lengths of wire around all of his muscles during small night shifts.

Yokimo’s face was a mess of pixel data, which stored features in an internal database from every face he had seen. Every few seconds his face would blend and shift, bearing no resemblance to the one previous. So by the time Niku had decided to link his body noises to music, it was his very own face that stared back at him and spoke of metabolic and psychic functions.

The streets were littered thick with dirt, plastics and grime. The sky was heavy. Bright lights shone into the viscous grey sludge fighting for intensity. Everywhere he looked there was neon and reinforced concrete, as if the city was struggling to stay upright and alive. The air was intense and generally devoid of oxygen. It pressed down hard on Niku’s shoulders as he walked. He paused only to kick rubbish out of his path. The air was dead and noiseless, like being in a room lined with Roxul, or like being in a cavity in the center of Niku’s body. He sighed a soundless sigh. Wedged between the filth and bustle, Hanisako was a lonely place.

After some time, Niku made it into the district of Stim where the shops were undersized and tattered. They had holographic fronts and chemical floor coverings. The floor coverings crept and changed with the specks of dirt that had weaved their way into the patterns.

Everywhere in Hanisako was just too high contrast, the edges rough with noise. The air reeked with intent and crystallized ginger. The sound of the streets could be seen in waves - piercing and electric. In between the electronic squall Niku spotted a shop that made him take notice. The front flickered leaving a bright blue stain of light on the filthy concrete of the street. Thin cracks lined the entire facade, matching the thin grafts that made their way up Niku’s forearms. When the door opened, a tinny synthesized warning bell went off, bringing a man from the back to the solid and soiled counter. The man had a Plexiglas plate across his breastbone, exposing a mass of cogs and wheels. Every breath he took corresponded with the ticking of the clockwork. His breath was rank and sordid, his mouth forming each word carefully, his lips stretching wide.

“This store,” he said gesturing to each corner, “is one that sells second-hand souls. Personality,” he said with a wink, “is extra.”

Niku looked around in silence, hearing nothing but the ticking of the man’s breath pattern. Thousands of Polaroid LCD panels lined the walls, in 4’ by 4 ‘squares, from the chemical floor to the concrete ceiling. They flickered quickly, flashing through thousands of lives at 59.92 frames a second.
“If you interested”, the man said, “you can try one on in the back.”

Niku touched one lightly and felt a quick surge of passion and pain. The brief flashes of face composed the most beautiful visage he had ever seen. Under the Polaroid, he found a small purple chip shaped like a starfish. On the underneath was engraved a Universal Soul Recovery Number, 1719.872. Niku held the chip close to his metronome heart and approached the counter slowly. He passed his wrist across the Imbed Identity Scanner.

“I will take this one,” Niku said with a rasp in a voice. “And I would like it partitioned.”

Consciousness. Flickering at speeds beyond comprehension. Niku tried to grab hold of and make sense of a frame but it was gone as quick as it had come. The only thing Niku could gain from the new segment of his soul was emotion, beauty and pain. He tried to focus on the emotion behind the iris and channel it into brilliant harmony. Melodies came instantly, and he could hear her voice in his head. The frequencies were high and breathtaking, just like the Tibetan singing bowls sold in the Stim. Niku felt himself slipping. Somehow he made it back into his studio, disoriented and high on mind-altering frequencies. Extending his arms, he stumbled/waded through the cranes making it to the Meat Modular Synthesizer. Picking up the thick hexagonal cord from the floor, he braced himself and jacked in – green sparks flew, illuminating the eyes of Genesis. Nothing. Dead silence. Niku opened his eyes and looked around, the synthesizer hazing his gaze and making everything vague and monochromatic. He saw no beauty, no sound-waves, and no harmony. His partition sang silent. Niku jacked out and stumbled sorrowfully to his re-hydration module. After stuffing and filling all day, he couldn’t bear to stuff and fill himself with food and flesh – especially when he felt so empty. He hooked himself in, took a nourishment supplement capsule, and fell into sleep. Niku’s dreams were dense, gritty and dark.

The next morning brought with it six bodies to be injected with Ofountaine, four to be drained, and nine to be stuffed and sewn. By 13:00 Niku had sent two up the freight, prime and precisely stuffed, for dressing and styling. He had been moving along slowly, feeling drained. Niku felt as if he had gone to the edge too many times. He began to stuff on rhythm. On every fourth beat he would grab a handful of stuffing and clench it hard in his fist. He closed his eyes and tried to listen to the electronic percussion. Nothing. 173 hours and 26 min. Two more cadavers up the freight. 14:23. Niku’s brain began to race through the last six days. Metabolic silence at top volume. Suddenly the partition began to sing again softly. Niku suddenly had a flash of realization. He tore into his workroom and began to shred the cadavers to pieces. Each of these deceased had received his creativity in handfuls. He wanted to reclaim it. Pieces of skin, hair, and stuffing were soaring. He fell to the wall exhausted. He had found nothing and his soul still rang silent. The partition began to hum softly. Niku closed his eyes and listened. He finally got it. He ran to the Meat Machine and jacked in. He let himself and his anxieties go. In rapid and dizzying bursts he began to expel the most beautiful beats at top volume. The more he understood, the louder it got. Niku’s clothes began to flap in the vibrations of the bass and a smile began to spread across his face. It wasn’t subsonic, or electronic, and it wasn’t his creativity lost. It was the passion he dispelled that had recorded the sounds like vinyl recording vibration.

Amidst the dark and the shallow, the contrast and the calamity, and the tiny bits of skin and bone floating amidst thousands of cranes, Niku made his music again.