The Sal Mar Construction

The Sal Mar Construction

By Bill Schaeffer

I was an Undergraduate student at the University of Illinois, studying engineering, and trying to make sense of the world;  and trying to have fun on the weekends.   I saw an announcement for an experimental music concert and thought it would be fun to attend.   The student price was reasonable and I had nothing else to do.   I had some interest in synthesizers and rock music and liked the albums of Emerson Lake and Palmer that I had heard.    This could be fun. 

The concert was in a small studio in Kranert Hall.   The room seemed circular, or at least the chairs were set up in a box or circle.     The room was dark and everything in the room was black, black curtains, black floor, black ceiling.   Against one wall stood the Sal Mar Construction, silent and menacing.    It was about the size of a refrigerator and mostly gray metal, like army surplus electrical machinery from the 1950’s.  

There was a shelf that stuck out from the center of the box that had smooth silver buttons inlaid in the surface.   The buttons were arranged in a simple geometric pattern and there were no markings or labels of any kind.   It did not look anything like a keyboard or a teletype keyset; it seemed to be more like the control panel for a space ship, or a time machine.    The surface was smooth to the touch and the buttons appeared to be activated by heat or galvanic skin response.

Out of the top of the machine burst a huge bundle of wires.    These wires were connected to speaker housings hanging throughout the room. The back of the speaker housing was a smooth bubble of clear Plexiglas that allowed the electronics to be seen and gave the whole assembly a very futuristic look.  The speakers were one of the amazing parts of the machine.   There must have been at least twenty different identical speakers hanging from the ceiling by invisible thread.  These boxes each housed a single car stereo speaker and a small light bulb that acted as a circuit breaker.   If the voltage was too great the light would glow and protect the speaker.  As the concert progressed, the lights would be activated more regularly and gave the impression of little robotic fireflies glowing to the futuristic music.   .

We were seated in aluminum chairs and waited for the concert to begin.   The studio was silent, except for the low hush of people talking and rustling around trying to find a seat.   Eventually the lights dimmed and Salvatore Martirano entered the room.   A solidly built man with a graying beard and thick mane of hair, he projected an aura of confidence, amusement, and reserve.    He said a few words, but I do not remember what they were, and then he sat down at the machine.   The lights were dimmed except for a pool of light illuminating the machine and the man sitting in front of it.

For a long time he sat still in front of the machine.  Then he moved his arm and gently touched the control panel.  Nothing happened.   He touched it a second and then a third time and then a sound erupted from the machine.  A loud electric squirt of a sound shot out of the machine and into some speakers on the opposite side of the room.   Then another sound followed, like a big ripping electrical buzz saw, and then some little clicking and whistling sounds and then a series of sounds that can only be described as big, wet,  electronic farts.

The sound was incredible, and dense and spacious.   For a long time the machine would emit strange noises and then these noises would move around the room from speaker to speaker and eventually disappear, only to be replaced other strange sounds that also moved around the room on invisible trajectories.  We could guess their position by the activated lights in the speakers.

These sounds seemed to have shape and volume as they moved around the room, but the eyes could see nothing to connect with these sounds, only the occasional blinking of the little speaker circuit lights.    It was like being in a cave and hearing bats flying overhead, but you cannot see them. But these sounds were like huge mechanical flying machines and groaning spirit entities from some other dimension; and they  were flying just inches over your head.

The whole time, Salvatore sat like a great wise magician slowly guiding the concert experience with occasional gestures of his arms.   It was unclear exactly how he was controlling the machine.   I watched him closely, and only occasionally did his motions seem to have a direct effect on the sound.   Many times, however, it seemed as if he was just stroking, or petting the instrument, as if he was psychically coaxing it to reveal patterns long buried deep within its architecture.   Like the machine needed the loving strokes of the great master to get it to slowly reveal the cryptic secrets buried in the very heart of mathematics, electricity, and logic.   And we, the audience, were witness to this strange spectacle.  As if watching a pagan sorcerer  conjuring up spirits from another world, but instead of seeing specters of horror we were hearing marvels of another age.   We were hearing prescient echoes of the future yet to be.   We were hearing the first sounds of the next new era of man.   Sounds so strange and unfamiliar that they were as frightening to us as the gunshot and the steamboat were to the primitive man.

As the concert progressed, the sounds increased in their volume and intensity.   They whirled around the room in a beautiful and violent cacophony.   It was as if we were musical explorers and all familiar reference points of pitch, melody, rhythm, timbre had long since been abandoned.   We were novices again traversing in an entirely new musical space.   We were the aliens -- listening to a master’s lecture in a strange yet familiar foreign tongue.    It was as if the space between sounds had somehow been unfolded to reveal whole new landscapes of noise that lay hidden within the quietest pin drop.

It is difficult to say how long this lasted.   For a long time, we just sat there trying to make sense of the sound  and the volume and the little lights on the speakers.    And then it was over.    The noises suddenly abated.   They became less frequent and insistent as if they were being called back into the machine.   And then silence.  Silence, and the lights were slowly brought up.    No one knew what to think.   We weren’t even sure that it was music, but we all knew that we had heard nothing like it before.    We were dazed, and slowly filed out of the room, blinking our eyes as they adjusted to the lights in the lobby.  

We didn’t really know what had happened, but we were sure that we heard the future somehow, and we were not sure what to think of it.   It was frightening, and complex, and unpredictable, and we couldn’t wait to hear it again.    Little did we realize exactly how long it would be until we had another opportunity; and that it might never happen again in our lifetimes.  Irregardless, we knew we had just heard the future.

Copyright©2009, 2014 Wm Schaeffer