THE AM BAND

there was a time in my life when its sound was the only lullaby capable of hushing me to sleep; my fingers, deadened, rolling the knob this way or that, sometimes touching on a classical music station and listening, for minutes at a time, but not to the music, no, i didn't care for that, but for the moment when a human voice would burst over the waves like a flash of lightning, no, that's a cliche, like the resusciation scene in pulp fiction, a concentration lifegiving in a hypodermic needle, injected straight into the heart not out of any necessity but because that is its only possible destination, its ultimate destiny, its reason for existence: oh they try to sound all chill and laid back, it is immenndiately clear that their producers wish them to be as innocuous as possible, mere filler for the space that must appropriately exist between one work of Art and the next, but it can't be, noodlings on a piece of string cannot approach the raw emotional power of those immaculately controlled strings contained within this man's larynx ("this man's"!!!): this is the HUMAN VOICE we are hearing! and its sheer force causes a twitch of the thumb, was i caught offguard again? but the transition is smooth, it should've been peaceful, but it wasn't, and what's he rambling about? i don't remember, it's been too long, and don't they all sound the same anyway...? oh, but it was awful, almost funny, really...he's 40 but he bangs 19 year olds because he's an asshole, he says...now a foreign tongue, dripping with mystery and enthusiasm: where is it coming from? who does it belong to? what is it saying? it's saying...rolling the knob again slowly, rapidly, it doesn't matter, the result is inevitable and always the same - signal. something out there, moving, breathing. trying to communicate. with me. and sleep was never far off.

what are your experiences with THE AM BAND.