Square Wave by Mark de Silva Page B

actually hearing, with his ears. Then, as now, it was Moto. He was retuning his drums, directly behind Larent, with what must have been, judging by the sound, little quarter twists of the drum key, moving from one lug to the next along the smaller tom’s perimeter, tapping his stick against the center of the head. The pitch dropped as the drum deflated. He kept loosening the head until it fell a whole tone above the larger tom he’d already tuned. There was a pause before Moto smashed the open hi-hat. The rattling alloy cut its way through Larent’s silent song.
    He bent his head around to Moto. The drummer’s hair seemed to glow under the white lights crossing the loft’s ceiling along a concrete beam. He was expressionless, or perhaps he wore the thinnest-lipped smile, and it seemed as if he had finished adjusting his setup, though the differences looked meaningless to Larent. Now, the splash cymbal was just to the right of the hi-hat, and the crash hovered over the left tom, overlapping it slightly. The ride was still on the right, and for whatever reason the china had been pushed away from the set.
    Moto dropped Larent’s gaze and stared through the transparent heads of the toms. A deep, compact note answered his taps of the bass pedal as an eighth-note pulse took shape. The snare flams came next, interlaced with a roll so slow you could pick out every strike.
    Larent returned to his silent fingerings, though, to the inner music that seemed to be leading somewhere. But Moto persisted, and eventually he relented. He set aside the baffling chords he’d been toying with and returned to the scales of earlier, bowing every third note, sounding ascending fourths and sevenths, flattening and sharpening notes as he crossed through several modes. Having won Larent’s interest, or at least his commitment, Moto distilled the thick rhythms down to a quiet line on the toms, a tapping of the ride, and a sharp snare.
    Larent switched on the amplifier and the delay pedal. The notes collected in layers, mode on mode, his route through one superimposed on the others. A kind of aural fog emerged, with only Moto’s snare-work, increasingly central to the sound, making it through.
    It was painfully indistinct. He threw the bass onto the bed in the corner and dropped to the floor, his back against the nightstand, facing Moto, and his arms wrapped around his knees. The bass notes continued to flow from the speaker, though slowly the haze thinned as the layers fell away, one at a time, the delay being less than infinite. Moto carried on unperturbed, his stare deep into the drums unbroken. It wasn’t clear if he’d noticed Larent had stopped playing or whether he assumed this was the bassist’s intention, a piece that, once set in motion, faded away in its own time, a release of potential energy.
    The bass notes finally disappeared. Moto carried on a few more bars and let the loft go silent.
    “Well?”
    “Nothing, really,” Larent said. “That’s the problem, I guess.”
    Moto paused a beat, raked his hand through his long black hair. Four cracks of the snare and then his sticks were on the floor. They rattled and spun, settling into circular sweeps that barely began their motion before being interrupted, one by the wall in a too-bright yellow, the other by the olive couch pushed up against it, across the room from the bed. Moto smiled and sat down on the couch.
    “What were you expecting?” Moto said. “We barely know each other.” He laughed into the empty space between them.
    “It’s been half a day and we’ve found nothing at all, not even the beginnings of something.”
    “We could go back to something unamplified, really clean, simple, start from there.”
    “A single instrument—a melodic instrument—and it’s a bass. It’s too little.” Larent put his hands on the bed behind him, pushed up, and sat on its edge.
    “And these?” Moto asked as he tapped the tuned toms with his fingertips.
    “We need more,