Mr. Beast trudges down an old gravel road, whose stones have been ground to bits, yielding themselves over to marauding dandelions and prairie grasses; snowflakes fall like dust from the heavens, lightly, absently; flurry turns to snowfall to blizzard, the flattened autumnal grasses, soggy and brown and naked, first lightly veiled in white, but gradually suffocated in the cold, watery heaviness of it. The squishy mud turns to hard, brittle stone, fossils of menacing footsteps made invisible and irrelevant and pathetic under the fallen mass of sky.
____________________
Glasgow Mega Snake
Approaching the dark factory town, Mr. Beast walks the shoulder of a rush hour highway, each vehicle rushing past him, the sequence of wooshes and horns, wooshes and horns, speeding faster, faster, indecipherable obscenities shouted at him through open windows.
He stops for a moment to watch them all, turns in his place and faces their speeding passenger doors, each vehicle flashes a human face, most in profile, but then one - a girl in the back seat gazing at him. Something in her gaze. Sympathy for him. Fear for herself? We're both doomed. We're both beautiful. And the noise of the highway came back to him, pounding, pounding, pounding, pounding, shrieking. If only I could close my eyes.
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Acid Food
A drum machine beat, mechanical and whispery and regular like the lullaby of ticking clock. Mr. Beast came to her that night in a dream in a witch's cloak of electronic drone and sweet, flowing country western guitar. He was speaking something, low and quiet, like the ghost of a robot. She knew he was talking to her. But was it about something lovely or dreadful? Honestly, she couldn't hear a word.
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Travel is Dangerous
Once in the city, Mr. Beast stumbled from corner to corner, drunkenly. Everything felt like noise to him, white noise that he had to try to overcome to reach whatever it was he was feeling. And so when he finally could hear his own thoughts, he, quite unconsciously, spoke them aloud, a melodic mumble trickling out of him. He seemed homeless to people who passed, and they gave him wide berth on the sidewalks. Stray dogs and cats fled alleys as he fell into them.
____________________
Team Handed
"Who are you," she pleaded as he sat and thoughtfully played the ground like a piano, each chord deliberate and heavy, swallowing up the buzz of the city, all the electricity, the humming of factories, the whirring of giant servers, the grinding of office copiers, the chirping of wireless communications. "What are you?" There was tenderness in that.
"I'm not anything. Please pretend I'm not here."
____________________
Friend of the Night
But I love you. It was too late. She had gone. She had watched him, and cried, and finally gone. The snow had started again, and his body filled with a helpless, wordless, soundless cry. I could be your rock star, he cried into the night, and the sky opened up to him and showed him its stars, its moon, its midnight and its blue like a woman slowly undressing, offering herself up, giving herself sweetly. Sweet melodies. Sweet, sweet, sweet night.
____________________
Emergency Trap
Forgiveness comes with forgetness. A tiny melody first played on a single acoustic guitar over the hum of the dark factory city. The piano. Bigger and louder it grows, and it shows us how small things are. First the man. Then the dumpster. Then the building. The city. His smallness emboldened him. But I love her. She knows.
____________________
Folk Death '95
Somewhere in the city, there's an empty warehouse, and in that warehouse, a band rehearses songs for their new album. Mr. Beast. The songs are mostly wordless. They fill the space with volume and echo. Piano. Guitars, acoustic, electric, overdrive, fuzz, tape loops, computer files, equalizer bars, reel-to-reel digital, bass notes vibrating against dirty window panes. Cracks in the glass buzz to life with the sound. At times, its like opera. The way it rises and falls. The way the melodies creep and crawl over one another, amplifying each other. It makes no sense, and it makes all sense, all at once. It's new age. It's heavy metal. They could be our rock stars.
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I Chose Horses
He bows his head in prayer. Angelic tremolo in his head. He speaks the words humbly, quietly, in a different language. Confessing. Things. Feedback and spacy buzzing swirl quietly in the air around him and for the moment, all is calm and well. When the light turns green, the cars resume their courses in steady slow motion. And they move and they move and then the slow down again, slowly, slowly, slowly, they come to a silent stop. And the light turns red to tell them to stop. Amen.
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We're No Here
He's just sitting there after rehearsal, looking out the window. It's all quiet and he's alone with the echoes of the day's jams replaying themselves in his head, like ghosts flitting in an out of open windows amidst flying white gossamer curtains. Like that Bonnie Tyler song, he thinks and chuckles to himself. Epic. A sound like the earth shifting. A white flash.
A crowd had formed around the pile of bloody rubble - debris, concrete pulverized to gravel, structural steel beams twisted into post-modern sculptures, broken glass, suddenly non-functional every-day appliances, scraps of office stationery and scraps of human flesh, both charred around the edges. The grim faces, lit up in flashing reds and purples by the emergency lights, kept a weird vigil all through the night, as if they might spy the monster who did this, coming back to survey his art - a private audience to a symphony of sirens, panicked voices on walkie-talkies, and the subdued sobs of just anyone walking by.
Mr. Beast walks the shoulder of a rush hour highway, each vehicle rushing past him, a sequence of wooshes and horns, wooshes and horns, wooshes and horns...
- - - - -
BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"Mr. Beast" by Mogwai
Matador Records
Released 3/7/06
Produced by Tony Doogan
43 min.
SONGS: Auto Rock - Glasgow Mega Snake - Acid Food - Travel is Dangerous - Team Handed - Friend of the Night - Emergency Trap - Folk Death 95 - I Chose Horses - We're No Here
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