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goldzweig · 6 years ago

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12:15pm - GRAPEVINE EPISODE #46: The episode fades in to the sound of various clips from news coverage of the music festival over the weekend.

Each piece of audio sets the scene - there’s a “before” video in which someone expresses excitement, having just reviewed the lineup. Another, from a local radio station, announcing the location, the date, the headlining bands. There’s all the usual buzz words - anticipated, must-attend, free. Overestimations of the festival as the event to ring in the end of summer. The clips are disparate, and overlapping, layering until it’s hard to make out any one voice.

And then, there’s a volta as the overlapping voices give way to one a single clip, pulled from a small-time YouTube "news” channel, layered over a very funky song. The voice reports: “Attendees of a local New York City music festival are still trying to determine what exactly happened at the event over the weekend, after an unlisted act took the stage and the entire audience broke out into an impressive flash mob that none of them recall rehearsing for. I’m in the studio with-” And the voice fades out, cut off by artfully edited in static, as the intro tapers off, finally giving way to a familiar voice.

“If you live in New York, maybe you heard about what happened at this festival over the weekend. Or maybe you didn’t. Let’s face it, so much fucked up shit happens around here, I don’t blame you if you can’t keep up with all of it.

“It’s easy to tune it out, to let it fade into the background like an underscore. Until it happens to you. And the real stories? The real stories are so much fucking weirder and better than any of the rumors.

“So if you haven’t heard about New York’s latest wild one, stick around. Because fuck, guys. Do I have a story for you.”

-- Objectively, it’s the most interesting, coherent episode of her podcast she’s put out so far, and for good reason. Her raw audio isn’t the best at times, muffled when she had to shove her microphone in her purse, almost entirely drowned out by the sound of her drumming, but when she trims away at the excess or unusable material, the narrative almost writes itself.

Throughout, the raw footage is dispersed with exposition, clarifying details where the actual events are shaky, using the audio to corroborate her story, using the explanation to corroborate the wild rumors that have been circulating since the event.

This is how she frames the events:

It starts in media res. An unscheduled act has taken the stage in the middle of a planned event, after what sounds like an altercation takes place backstage. As soon as S Ray, the musician in question, starts playing, the audience falls into a trance, dancing in synchronicity. This is where Rivkah’s recorder clicks on, and she starts pulling audio.

She describes the feeling, even with her headphones on, of feeling detached from herself, compelled away from her own sense of free will. She explains how the they discovered that the more interference they created with her ability to hear the music, the more sound of mind they felt. She highlights the moment she turns up the levels on her Zoom recorder, filling the audio with the sound of static to cancel the noise until she could get a chance to put the earplugs in, and readjust the levels.

And then, the story takes a turn, sounding more and more like the plot of a very weird movie. She leans heavily on the audio to make her tale at all believable. Rivkah leaves in the best clips - realtime jokes they exchanged, S Ray’s music in the background, about mind control and synchronized dancing. Making sure each of them had earplugs in and secure - in the ears, not up the nose. The audio of Rivkah bickering with Parker over who thought of the idea for a Battle of the Bands-esque scenario first. The group decides, with little commentary from Rivkah’s retrospective, to take up instruments and attempt to drown out the sound of S Ray’s song, in the hopes of freeing the zombified audience.

She plays the first few notes of their song, their amateur attempt at fighting back with the power of music. Here, Rivkah stops the tape. She reels, even with her script in front of her, for the right words to describe what happened visually. The sound avatars that emerged from each of them as their took up their instrumental weapons. She describes her own, the garish golden kangaroo, and S Ray’s, the cricket. She spends five minutes speaking in pure, unadulterated animation, and slowly brings the music into the background, competing songs eventually taking center stage.

And finally, the crowd comes back to life with their victory. To polish it off, Rivkah leaves in the clip of her rushing the mic at the end, plugging her own podcast to the disconcerted audience, before hopping off the stage - and the audio cuts out for good.

After almost all the facts are on the table, she gives herself the liberty of editorializing, bookending the story by cycling back to the very beginning. At the food tents, at a table selling water (and also jerk chicken), a man in fantastically vintage clothing hands off earplugs to each of them - which was weird, but charmingly eccentric - and makes a point to advertise his SoundCloud, passing off a business card.

As for S Ray, she paints him as neither good nor bad. She confesses to his his talent, but voices a concern for the ethics of what can only be described as... mind control? She comments on the passivity in the media coverage, the complacency of New York in its acceptance of and desensitization to the weird. She reflects on the beauty in synchronicity of observing the crowd in unison, and finally - she admits to what she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know why it happened, or how, or if it ever will again. “If I had to guess,” she muses towards the end of the hour, “I can’t imagine that’s the last I’ll ever hear about that guy.”

As a closing thought, she offers the only source she can for anyone that, like her, is still looking for more, true answers: Ray’s music, available now on SoundCloud. She promises to make the link available on her website. She advises anyone interested in the uncut audio to shoot her an email. And she signs off.

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