Albeit abjectly listened squinting into the far corners of non-isolated earbud soundplanes, albeit detuned and fractured into fragments by the loud subway scrape of metal in an interminably ferocious battle to the death with like metal; albeit imperfectly heard perhaps to the point of not being there at all he still could swear he heard a whispered voice in the far back right of this one track, beginning exactly at this point shortly after 2 minutes into the track that he skipped back to for the rest of the ride downtown.
The trouble followed him up the street and into his apartment, through making dinner and eating standing at the kitchen counter and staring meaninglessly at a book with the player cued unconsciously back and back before declaring it pointless, closing the book, turning out all the lights and dipping back into the track again.
He poured himself a drink, lit mood lights and even smoked a joint: There simply wasn't any understanding what was being whispered from 2:04 to 2:19 in this godforsaken track. He tried changing the equalizer settings and plugging the thing into his stereo with an auxiliary wire, he borrowed better headphones from his neighbors (a little too stoned to venture out, but not so much so that he couldn’t pull it off). Nothing did it. It wasn't an exceptional record, it wasn't anything he'd listened to more than a dozen or so times, but this tucked in corner of this one song would be his defeat or his turning point, his entree into a new world of close attention, of deep listening and an acolyte's awareness, of no longer fail.
There has to be a way to remove some parts of a song in real time. This should be a feature of the format by now, he thinks, that mixing down ceases to be a prerequisite for the transfer to home listening. Rather, every song should be delivered whole, to be mixed listeners in real time. He pictures the whisper isolated and looped by itself or accompanied by the barest spectral synth or TR-808 pulse, and the thrill of deciphering the code. He briefly searches online for software with such a deconstructive feature. One link looks promising, but turns out to not be freeware or open source at all. Rather it’s a piece of software that costs about $50, but promises to allow mixing in the moment. Remix any track, the pop-up ad promises. Mix like a master.
He looks around for others, but all roads lead him back to the Master. He smokes some more and pours another drink and sets to looking around for a hacked copy. Some look promising, but none of the torrents work. He looks more closely at the legit website for the program, hoping to find a free trial but seeing no indications of the slightest download option. He scans the FAQ and finds nothing about a trial version of any kind, but the questions and answers (mostly about intellectual property rights, most of the answers suggesting erudite terrains for aural revisionary exploration, a dense catalog for a world he'd only daydreamed of minutes before) only serve to pique his interest further.
He has an odd little feeling purchasing the software, like he's crossed some threshold to bourgeois respectability that he'll struggle fruitlessly and without grace to escape for the rest of his life. The download process takes five minutes, the installer another five. It's after 1 in the morning when he nails down the last of the soundcard settings (slaying an irritating pop, a stuttering beyond the first few seconds of any clip), and it's later still when he figures out how to port the track from his player to his computer and into the program itself.
Are you ready to Mix like a Master? He is. And then it appears; a beautifully-designed, absolutely simple mixing board, with auto-guess labels for each track of the song, each customizable on the off chance that a specific audio track was incorrectly identified by the program’s expert and unprecedented algorithms. The distorted guitars and meandering bass and wander-to-a-click drums go without a fight, as do the lead vocals and the backing vocals and the spectral synths and the well-intended but probably excessive theremin and string section. There's still a little bleed, from an irksome, optimistic egg shaker, but with another hit and some readjusting of the light levels in the room the whispering turns out to be some inscrutable indie shit, words for the sake of sound only, devoid of meaning and never intended to convey a single thing.
He scoops himself a robust bowl of ice cream and loads Dark Side of the Moon, mixing and remixing and isolating and recombining until first light, past the first steps in the hall and the school buses and a guilty Diet Mountain Dew from the fridge, later still when he decides he'd better call out from work.
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