Echoes in the Static

The flat was in the inner belt of Marseille, cheap and dim, the kind of place that exists to hide from time. A single window looks out on the port cranes and the dull shimmer of diesel light over the sea.

Inside, the air swirls with dust, tobacco, and lentils gone soft on the stove.

“Sick of fucking lentils, green, red, Palestinian or otherwise,” Yanez slumps back near the window, lighting a half-smoked butt from the ashtray. He flings his hand towards the stove and turmeric followed by ash settles over the lentils.

“What do you want?” mutters Dimitris, still raw from sleep, hunched over a notebook filled with half-legible scrawl.

“Lardo di fucking colonnata D! I want pig fat that has been slowly cured in marble vats, in marble from Massa-Carrara. The same marble used for Michelangelo’s Davide and mansions lived in by fat spoilt Arabs.”

Dreaming of lard, Yanez flips through local channels on a broken set with wood panelling and analogue dials.

“Fuck all on, we need internet”

A weary Dimitris, looks up and snaps the notebook closed.

“Lonely and bored people still find comfort in watching scheduled programs. Even if they know it’s synthetic. It’s the illusion of collective timing that holds the spell. However disconnected.”

Yanez doesn’t answer at first. The channel cuts to a low-budget variety show: clapping, fake laughter, glitter. Scheduled programming still aired, game shows, ladies in bikini next to men in suits, infomercials for beds and pots, adverts, court proceedings. Berlusconi’s legacy was by no means unique but the kitsch of his channels perfectly matched the grubby mobster politics. Anything Trump managed, Berlusca did it first and with more style.

“It’s like a séance,” Dimitris said. “A theatre of ghosts.”

“We’re creatures of rhythm,” Dimitris continued. “To be together, the simple act of participating with others at the same time, across the land, even with strangers, laughing in the same instances, means moods are shared.

These acts still holds crumbs of force. And modernity’s greatest sin was completing the process, engineering it right out of us.”

Like radio, or stadiums. There used to be transcendence in a crowd. In noise. Cinema, football, concerts. All of it was ritual. People dreamed together.

“Spare me the sermon D”. Yanez turns off the TV. The silence left in its place feels like a scream. The void is soon filled by Dimitris “Like radio or cinemas, or the stadium, there was a time when being part of a mass was the only transcendence left. Packed auditoriums and cinema, the story-telling dream machine was an act of being together, in the pub or bar, difficult if not impossible to watch alone. Crowded masses, cheered and jeered together, commenting on the news or football match.”

“Football chants were far too close to collective singing. And that means it’s dangerous,” Yanez mimes an ultra singing with passion, pumping his arms with closed fists.

Dimitris raises a half-smile: “The mob, the raving crowd, the collective body—if left un-channelled it often spills over into violence. All that potential is seen as terrifying, further isolation is needed, at the very least it’s to be confined to stadiums.”

“Solitary pleasures. Solitary grievances.”

“Solitary screens,” Yanez finished.

There was a beat of silence.

“You know,” Yanez said, “in Roma culture, the worst punishment wasn’t flogging or exile. It was banishment. Being cut from the group. They understood: to lose the collective is to die slowly.”

The city hums outside indifferent. The sea carried the same smell it had centuries ago, brine and rust, reminders of human decay.

A thud from the next room. Lalla emerges, hair loose, wearing Yanez’s shirt. She moves quietly, but they both inevitably turn round, faces magnetically drawn to her. Only gravity is a greater force. She hums something half-melodic and stirs the lentils. Neither man is quite able to fully banish a hungry look.

“You two look like widows at a funeral,” she says.

“Of civilisation,” Dimitris mutters.

“The ghost of AI haunting our future,” intones Yanez, not to be outdone in apocalyptic pronouncements.*

She ignores them both, “More to the point, lentils need more turmeric.”

Dimitris leaned forward, speaking low.

“Even in work. Washing clothes. Baking bread. Harvesting, picking crops. Killing a pig. These weren’t just chores. They were survival rituals of forced connection. Tasks so large or tedious, they made community necessary. And in that necessity, there was song.”

Yanez smiles faintly.

“Even the misanthropes had to share their bounty.”

“Exactly. Even lack of greed was a social obligation,” Dimitris said. “Because a pig is too much for one family at first. Some parts have to be eaten right away. Because a barrel of wine isn’t made or drunk by one man. And chestnuts don’t peel themselves.”

He pours wine from his glass jug. The silence returns. But this time it felt fuller, the soundless scream replaced by a denser air, something listening instead.

“That was the other severance,” Dimitris said quietly. “Not just the net or the land or the Lattice. But the song. The daily singing. The living chorus. From ships to fields to mines—there was always music, not for performance, but for power.”

Purely practical sometimes, keeping the beat when working in unison, be it hoisting rigging or sawing wood.*

“No coincidence that all slaves and captives sing,” Yanez added. “And those songs still live.”

Dimitris nods. North American slave owners knew the danger, and promptly banned singing, the colonial Brits took away the drums.*

“Reverberations. But vestiges really. You sense the connections at concerts sometimes, or raves and festivals. If enough of the crowd forgets itself, a DIY shamanism if you will. When we becomes one.

‘Part of one giant whole?’ a deadpan Dimitris can’t help himself.

‘That’s when it flickers into being,’ Yanez studiously ignores him. ‘But it’s a glimmer—like a ghost limb no longer connected into the full body. Because there’s no bloodflow.”

Yanez nodded. “We used to and then stopped, after millennia of singing, within a mere century, it’s practically gone by the wayside. Many didn’t even notice. Thousands of years with uninterrupted musical force and we managed to liquidate an entire collective practice in less than a hundred years.”

Lalla enters again from the back, carrying a stack of bowls.

“We were talking about singing again,” Yanez says, accepting a bowl and handing her a full glass.

“Even during the industrial revolution, people still sang: from ships to mines, construction sites, fields and hopfarms, washerwomen, sailors and miners all sang, singing that connected us and alleviated the task’s drudgery.”

“And for the power,” added Yanez. “When did people stop singing in pubs?”

“The severance was already centuries old by then but tendrils remained until well into the 19th century and in Greece they still do!” Dimitris’s jubilance softens. “But I agree that the connection has long gone.”

“Ireland too, no doubt, but unlikely to be real performances, pale shadows of what once blazed. Irish music, flamenco, gnawa, the tarantella, any forms with remnants of that fire are denied spontaneity and reconfigured into spectacle,” Yanez is adopting the lecturing stance.

Lalla listens and drinks but doesn’t sit immediately, preferring to stand, one hip cocked quizzically toward them, almost pointing.

“I don’t think we ever really stopped,” she said. “But most cultures forgot why.”

“Go on,” Dimitris says cordially, his tone grow more polite when disagreed with.

“Every language has its musicality, and every task would carry songs. Every territory and village had their own, some were shared whilst others were strictly local. Places or cultures particularly skilled in one field had an equivalent repertoire of songs.

The more important, the higher the amount. Inuits had the same amount of words for snow as most cultures, but you can be sure any grass-eating cattle herders have plenty of words for green. Regardless, the singing served dual purposes, one practical and another more esoteric.

A handy form to transmit knowledge, organic memory banks storing information handy for survival.

Navigation. Seasons. Past events. Even the dangers of a forest path or a weather phenomenon. A repertoire that anyone could add to or access. These songs also acted as organic servers, storing nonverbal, inherited memory, survival strategies, cosmologies, and warnings of ecological imbalance.”

Yanez tilts his head.

“The Jukurrpa... the Dreamtime,” he murmurs.

“More than that,” she replied. “The Jukurrpa is a framework used by the Aborigines to make sense of the world.

Songlines are just one form that connects. The Aborigines are nothing special, their elevation to mystical status is more due to collective remorse or guilt, you’ll find most cultures managed to develop one.

Our collective knowledge, the sum of everything we’ve learnt and experienced, is a tuning to what has kept us whole: being part of a bigger whole.”

Dimitris finds resisting the low-hanging fruit difficult. “I know a pretty big hole not too far from me.”

This time, Yanez sticks out his tongue in response.

“And now,” Lalla says softly, “we’re left as stranded individuals, humming fragments of songs we don’t remember knowing.”

She looks at them, her eyes unreadable.

“New generations are now being born without knowing what we’ve lost, until the time when we reconnect and the world shall remake itself.”

She drains her glass and silently stands, stepping into the centre of the room. She starts moving. Not dancing, not exactly, more a demonstration. A low hum beneath her breath, her hands tracing a rhythm that pulled at the edge of memory. Not the graceful polite forms of Tai Chi or the structured moves of a classical dancer; these had an erratic edge, an undercurrent that made you sit straighter, breathe deeper, and remember something you’d never lived.

The two men watch in silence. Dimitris remains unconvinced by the earth-mother act or that the world would be remaking itself anytime soon. Yet, he miracously holds back from sarcasm and the presentation is a gorgeous seduction. Yanez concurs it’s a pretty persuasive argument.

Outside, the antenna on the roof whined in the wind, searching for a signal that wasn’t there. The radio on the table clicked to life. A hiss of static, a burst of half-language, then a name whispered through the noise. Bellamy.

The three of them froze.

Dimitris exhaled smoke through his nose. “Always the ghosts.”

Yanez stood, hand on the dial, listening for more. Nothing. Just the endless hiss.

Lalla watched him, a faint smile crossing her lips. “Maybe they’re still singing,” she said.

Outside, the sea beats against the pier with slow, patient rhythm and the oldest chorus still performing.