It was a dull, dry Chicago day when I received my first warning about the Thrill Jockey. I'd been making preparations to head up to his cabin when I got a call from my editor. "Be extra careful on this assignment, gumshoe, I hear the Jockey's been a little touchy lately," he growled, the underlying message being 'don't screw this one up.' A trip to the outfitters produced another, strangely conflicting warning: "T.J.'s sort of settled down, so don't expect to get a wild horsetale up there, fella," said the shopkeeper, slipping some No-Doze tabs in with the standard flexigrip ballpoints and steno pads. "Grown roots?" I added. "Nah," he snorted. "More like ossification."
Now just why he'd given me stimulants wasn't exactly clear. Time was, the Thrill Jockey made for the most exciting headlines, stories about madcap fusions and all that jazz, enough to turn a tortoise into a trans am. But as rumor had it, the Jockey had begun to slow down a bit, quite possibly under the influence of some prescription from Vienna only classified as 'Radian'. So I took the stims against my better judgment and headed out towards the rail lines. The directions were a little vague: past the Town and Country Inn, halfway 'round the oval track, back behind the all-natural farm. When I arrived a cold, dead wind rose, like in those cliché Westerns you always catch on broadband.
Then I realized the 'wind' was coming from inside T.J. H.Q. itself. I stepped gingerly through the door and spotted the Jockey himself. The old coot was propped up on a rocker with his feet kicked in the air, and he motioned for me to sit down. The environment was strangely clean, pristine even, except for the sine wave I'd heard before and these erratic patches of noise. It was clear he'd been under the influence of this Radian: far from a tornado, he just sat there and absorbed all the random sounds, bass modulations, shifty percussive shimmers and the occasional ring of a vibraphone. It was boring as all hell. If I'd had a piece I might have put him out of his misery right there.
The Jockey and I got to talking, and a peculiar thing began to happen. The longer I listened, the more those random synthesized shapes shifted into place, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. In fact, at one point a sound just like a buzzsaw rose up, spraying out electric sparks that would eventually fall to the matte of feedback on the floor. The hour passed patiently as the sounds of electricity were brought to life: appliance purr, amped-up feedback hiss, the threshold hum of a jack-in port, all were animated and made to dance in their MacEntirety. A strange rhythm developed, like dub stretched out even further, with the skittering drums rolling into the sharp punctuation of the bass.
I wasn't sure what the Thrill Jockey was on, though it was obviously more European than American in origin. The only strains that came to mind were occasional dalliances with FennO'Berg and Stock, Hausen & Walkman. The Jockey seemed to have found his own little world, a controlled environment that he could manipulate with pointillist precision. It wasn't the scoop I'd come digging for, but it was news all the same. I left him to his vices, sort of glad that he'd found a quiet spot away from the clamor of the thrill-seeking life. But a part of me hoped that he wouldn't confuse his repetitions-with-delay for progress just because he'd created warped machine funk. Still, I wasn't worried-- the Jockey still had a few good kicks left in him.
