Paul A Green

Astral FM

Audio micro-drama for voice, music and soundscape

for J. Michael Yates

©Paul A Green


The only voice of the piece is the DJ, whose accent and inflexion constantly fluctuates over a music bed. He's mid-Atlantic, Mockney, Anglo-Ebonic, Metro-Camp, RP — as if his inflexions are out of control. When he talks over the instrumental music tracks he introduces, his voice is processed.




MUSIC BED (funk?) under:

DJ VOICE: Midnight here on Astral FM where the clocks just keep on melting. At 99.6 analogue and beaming in binary across the digital multiplex. Across the contracting cosmos, all over expanding universe. The format of the formless. Night FM.

And I'm your rip-chord Night Tripper, holed up here for you in my funky bunker. Because I'm old, an old gold soul ghoul, old as the gold in a sunken Nazi sub, and I'm bubbling under here at Astral FM, 99.6, your radiophonic sub-station, the words just keep on keeping on talking, don't they? It's the hot black meat of the night talking. . . Don't touch that dial!

Don't talk while you're listening to me. Don't talk, don't talk about me when I'm gone, when I'm done gone. . .

Sorry, peoples, I mean — don't touch that hot phone, don't call 0806 939323, the lines are all bugged up. And we're not taking requests tonight. No requests by request. I don't want to hear from you. I got no ears. You hear me?

Let me moderate that. You can call Retro-AM on 0806 787845, and chat up old Ken Easy — nice and cheesy, if you're a queasy-listening addict — or you nag Ricky McDog on the Tower of Power if you crave new bootleg kicks from the Cheetahs, or rap with MC Massive on Phat City Radio bigging it up for dudes with attitude innit — and there's Doctor DNA on Island FM got heavy black metal from Hrothgar's Feast. . .

But you can't reach me. I'm in sub-space. This is multi-dimensional radio. I'm the droid in the void. I'm probably the Quantum Brother. I'm Sam the Sham Shaman. I'm almost Captain Mid-Atlantic Midnight. I'm tuning up my vocal chordettes. Stay tuned.

But no big tunes tonight. Gonna trash the golden goodies. Oldies but mouldies. . .

FX Synth sting and sounds of breaking glass

Kick in our touch screen that cues the ads and the trails. Just hacked into the playlist software and wiped this week's releases.

FX Synth sting and protests of angry computer voice, warning beeps etc

Here goes. The weather is hung over , overheated, it's all over. Thunder in the overcast. You have been warned.There's no news or maybe I'm the raw news, scribe of the roaring moment, the bad-ass bard. . .

MUSIC/FX: Start new music bed under:

No more time checks. It's always midnight with the High Priest on Astral Night FM. Synchronise your meme bombs. This is Astral Radio running on analogue, running back to the analogue years. Running on empty. . .empty air inside my skull.

(closer)

Here in my chrome dome I've got the syndrome, there's nothing to say, nothing to sing. Other boom baby wonder boys strummed three chords, got miked up, learned all the words, shouted themselves silly against the spitoon hurricane of mobs and yobs and clubs and pubs, won their glittering prizes and the golden breasts. . .

I spent the golden decades faking some intros and extros and went home to archive my skin mags. Not good enough, old life. Empty head blues.

No, no. No way, this ain't the afterlife. Yet. We're tanked up to roll. Let's roll. Full firepower. So I'm backing you into the time vaults, releasing the B-sides, the backing tracks, the monstermash of megamixes, the alternate-universe takes, all the coils of old tape on the edit room floor. We're gonna abseil down the walls of sound. Climb into deep time.

Yeah, I'm an old skool radio monstermouth. Those young turntablists in the clubs are just mute skinny presences scratching away behind the Technics — only their silence, their telepathy with the crowd gives them their cred, their brand of autistic cool that justs laps up those liposuction girlies. All they care about is precognition, tracks of the future, tracks of my fears. Samples of samples of samples is all. It's all they do. Mix and match. Dumb kids, I tell you.

But I'm talking up our godfathers, the old jive daddies — Wolfman Jack, the Magnificent Montague, Russ Weird Beard Knight, Joe Niagra, Murray the K, Emporer Rosko, Allen Freed, Daddyio Daley, Symphony Sid, Red Robinson, Rufus Thomas the funky Penguin , all those hyperdrive wordmen. . .

Because we don't need singers when we‘re under the flightpath of a Strat. The instruments are the real thing, the tingle of the thing, the actuality , the authorial voice. I know what musicians are saying. I can translate for you.

SFX/MUSIC: Cross fade music bed into slow bluesy guitar under:

Because I can hear the walking bass. The talking guitar. Here's Alimony Slim. . . Here's the blues. . .

FX: Change voice treatment as he “translates” the track on:

Mister Blues
crawling around my bed

Mister Blues
is the foggy light of the rocket's red glare

Mister Blues is a phantasm of the living
dead

Mister Blues
is seeking a burning asylum

Mister Blues
is heat-seeking his victim

Mister Root of Minus One
lives right here

Grains of his vocalese
drift through the continent. . .

FX:Cross fade track back into DJ's music bed under:

Yeah. . .Red light over the console. The electric altar. Be my virgin sacrifice, baby. I'm talking to the lone skull microphone. My signals flow through the desk, through the equalisers and compressors. An invisible geometry of fields and forces, fluctuations of particles that only flux one way, and I got my crooked finger on the pulse, riding the faders, talking compressed warmth for you.

Just gonna put a new word in my mouth, test it for plosive impact. How about love. The groove of love. The howl of the love crowd, right? The itchy-koo groove of lerve. Love is the plug. The plosive butt-plug of desire. My voice stretches through the night like a tendon, a striation of nerve tissue. We jocks have always been intimate with you. Long before the sticky web and the long galleries of the triple-X night we gave you aural sex. Let's get bio-degradable, baby doll. The Close-Fitting Girls. Enjoy. . .

MUSIC/FX: Cross fade into slow electric piano under:

Smoke across the club
time to go

ghost trails of a girl
hitching a lift in the car park

Her quickening grin. . .
slant of her eyeliner. . .

superstrings of our bio-glue
tugging after all these years

time to leave with empty claws
across the temple of the broken glass

simply the chill of guitars
no alibis on Lonely Avenue

my rain showers blood off the tiles
and a warped metal trough
couldn't hold back my beery tears.

which I have lost in you, anonymous caller of runes,
(and in my large gallery of imported night. . .)

I'm keeping going on nonsense songfests

to capsulate the globules of good time we title as lerve
an anchoring in the roaring flesh of being that falls out of the telly

Here I am puckering up the skirts of my sub-edited demons
who live on in the amygdala

trying to spirit up my my meat
and when you gurgle on the cordless

there is hope like the fresh piss of babies, baby. . .

but the poor cry like a sky

(and the night crime is the right crime)

MUSIC/FX: Cross fade back into DJ music bed groove under:

You think I'm playing geeky Kabbalah with rock gobblings and pop gabblings — you know — reverse the White Album and behold the vinyl tells us Paul is dead, or foretells John's execution by the FBI — or rewind Atomic Rooster and a voice tells you Satan has given instructions to destroy the Queen with scorpions in her bed chamber, because she's a lizard from Sirius, you know that vibe. . . but it's not that simple. It goes beyond conspiracy theory and anorak website politics. I'm overdubbing the truth here.

Maybe I'm going to revert, go Astral, devolve, start a simian chatter as the molecules in the DNA start unravelling, bling, bling. . .

Music creates entities. Ghostly harmonics evoke beings. Like me. I'm the disincarnation of music. I'm discarnate entity, created by overlapping fragments of chat, the vibrations of old speaker cones. I'm an overlap of wave-forms. There's fifty years of rock and roll behind me, it rolls through our heads. . . and I fit into the gap between between the peaks and troughs, I just ride the cycles, a meta-wave, a metaphor. It's all information, misinformation, reformation across the nation.

Yes, it's all been instrumentals tonight. I am an instrument. An instrument of delirious pleasure in the orifices of millions. And I am the living voice. Turn up your radios, plural peoples, turn on and onwards and onwards.

The longer you listen the more easily you'll become addicted to disembodiment. You'll become a word in your own ear. Implanted with my voices in your cochlea. While you're home alone with the wireless. It's our personal convergence, a journey out of the body, a rap rapture, my friends. And there you go. The colour drains, the world washes away in a rush of dark matter.

It's almost time. Time to go. You've been listening to the Tower of Unearthly Light on Astral FM, runes across the aether, a vibrant quota of quanta, like this.

MUSIC/FX: Cross fade into spacey groove under:

You can talk about the multiverse all you like, and I know you like to lick around the roots of its infinite connections. So squint at the reality-tunnel. You've been dropped in it, the mess, the noise, the code of odours. And we're all rolling around in the time-cone, I know.

The blackened flags of Old England; down on the tow path behind the skip boys with barge poles beat out an accelerating rhythm on the bodies of their teachers.

Deep in the underpass, the urine sump, a shadow man claws at a fretboard, sings inaudibly through the crowd scene. He is wheedling the blues, to trap cyclists, loiterers, young women in anoraks with big eyes. He knows what he likes. He sings of food.

I'm the tongue of fire, the deep throat of the end-times. It's written in the tribal bible. The ultimate voice the final high voltage shock jock with a living voice. a voice that's lived in and we can live in it together. All together.

The fade. . . the fade tells us something's immortal. . . the song circles into infinity, and it's going to get better, hotter wilder and wilder. . . At the very moment it peaks, we lose it, it's going, gone. . . chasing the fade. . . the fade. . . fade

SFX: His VOICE breaks up into white noise. . .


CREDITS