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THE SILENCE OF MUSIC

DEATH FM

By Dom Watson Published 4 years ago 4 min read
5
THE WORLD IS A VAMPIRE ...

A bass line. Vocals that make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. The guitar solo that will stick with you to the grave, and beyond. Music can reach the range of emotions we didn't think we had. Unravel thoughts and faces from the dusty tomes of memory. Experiences stuck in the amber of the mind, ready to be revisited by the rolling drums of a familiar song.

Songs are an extension of the soul.

The death of a friend is never easy. Especially when you saw them alive and kicking twenty four hours prior. It hollows you out. Brings you closer to the possibility of being finite. You have lived your life free from the constraints and leash of Lady Death and yet her cool breath now lingers on the air and you can't shake the feeling that life will never be the same ever again.

We were barely adults dammit.

You have lost family, of course. Attended a funeral for grandparents or maybe an aunt or uncle. But the death of a friend can rock the foundations of the soul more so. You have shared childhood, puberty, fought your way through the minefield of secondary school and its rogues gallery of bullies and teachers with a penchant for ridicule. Confessed your unabashed feelings for the boy at number 22. Shared the last cigarette of the night. Each instance claims another part of the soul.

My dear friend died many years ago, and yet his soul still shines in my own. He surfaces in my memory whale-like, breaching the smooth surface for air. He's still there, locked in memory and the woody scent of cigarettes. His own song still shining bright.

Music has a power to resurrect the dead. In our minds at least. Death FM calls to us when a song of lament, or joy hits the airwaves. A stark reminder of our fragile existence. A wavelength forged in the fires of life. An arrow dipped in love fired across the veil between death and reality.

My friend did just that. They played his favourite song at his eulogy. It shook the church to its foundations. Our clique, smirked and realised it couldn't be any other. Billy Corgan's lead vocal rises from the grave, stark, as if he has just woke to cramp in his foot. 'The world is a vampire . . .' How succinct, because today Mr Corgan is a prophet to us. We are drained and full of emptiness, the song the only thing in the cold church to offer comfort in our grief.

'Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage.'

How true.

The song, Bullet With Butterfly Wings, speaks to us in abstract. We hanker for meaning in the tumult. My friends death was the cause of a high speed crash. This song is not just a memory of a life lived but a love song to Lady Death herself. A body of metal travelling through the air at a hundred miles an hour, its impact fatal. Out of arbitrary carnage a life moves from the chrysalis of meat and blood to ascend into the hereafter in a collage of blinding light and limitless colour.

'Then someone will say what was lost can never be saved.'

Fucking A.

The Silence of Music.

Silence.

But we are saved. In our friend's transition he has left us a piece of himself, forever etched in vinyl and memory. A musical monolith that can not be knocked down or substituted. A clarion call to take arms against the cage that surrounds us. Life. It beats us and knocks us to the floor until we bleed and cry. Hold your songs and memories. They will define you, mold you into the people you aspire to be.

Death FM is always on the airwaves, in our minds, in our souls. We are made of music and stories. From a couple dancing on their wedding night to your first gig. Walking, talking sonnets of flesh and bone created from the raw chemistry of life. Out of the muck of sex and enlightenment another is born to memory and song and so the great wheel turns. We are, walking and talking songs born from the litany of the airwaves. Parables of the time that bore us.

Hold your songs close. They are our totems, an evolution of the spirit; a guide in which we choose our own paths. A pedigree beyond the biblical parameters of belief.

My friend speaks to me now, as my playlist rattles on. Bullet With Butterfly Wings by The Smashing Pumpkins filters into my ears, a soundscape that creates itself. Friends united, laughing, the song a free-thinking entity that is creating a palatial construct in which you can traverse the barriers of time. I'm with my dead friend now, smoking high tar cigarettes on the post office wall and shouting abuse at Wobbly Bob. He has had too many ciders once again. We are safe here. Nothing can stop this reunion. A moment frozen in time.

Hello old friend.

The silence of music is exquisite.

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About the Creator

Dom Watson

Dom is the author of the fantasy novel The Boy Who Walked Too Far and the upcoming Smoker on the Porch. Writes in his underpants. Cries in the nude.

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