The Amazing Disappearing Man

I met Chris Tanner, a.k.a Skware Sircut in high school. We grew up in different social circles but we both were interested in music, especially synthesizers, electronic music and drum machines. So we would hang out sometimes and go to shows together. We didn’t socialize often in school.

I carefully moved a circuit board and box of electronic parts off a tattered recliner in his room and sat down. We were eighteen I think, seniors in high school. He was staring at the computer screen in front of him demonstrating software he had written. His hair was down to his shoulders back then, sandy brown. The walls were almost barren except for a couple posters of shows we had seen. He started to play some notes on the synth keyboard connected to his computer.

“This module generates various oscillators: sine waves, triangle waves, sawtooths, noise, etc. And this section filters the oscillators and then the last module routes the signal to various other envelopes. You can map any of the parameters to any of the knobs on the synth.”

I didn’t really understand everything he said. I loved music and especially the electronic and dance music stuff we were into. But I wasn’t a technical guy. I liked girls and sci-fi movies with lasers and monsters. Understanding technical things was not an interest then.

“How did you write the code for this?” I asked. “It must have taken forever.”

“I didn’t write all of it from scratch. Basically you take chunks of code that you know does something specific and you put together the different pieces and fill in the gaps. And so you cobble together pieces of other’s invention into your own creation. And maybe someday others will take your conglomeration and it will be a component in their application. Bricks forming walls and those walls becoming bricks in other’s walls.”

“Sounds easy to get lost.”

“Yes, you can get wonderfully lost. Its easy to get so wrapped up in the code you forget about the music.” Not to long after we graduated he moved from Boston to London.

Fifteen years later, about a year ago, he was in my office. I’m an associate at a sizeable law firm doing business transactions. I had a new wife and a new child. Keeping up with the latest trends in music is low in my list of things to do in a day. But over the years we had kept in touch and I followed his career. When I walked him in from reception people spilled their coffee, dropped files, a partner and paralegal stopped flirting. His hair was shorter, but spikier and with a couple braids. He had multiple earrings in both ears and wore torn jeans, an eight hundred dollar sport coat with a sex pistols t-shirt, probably original.

“I’m trying to outsource my creativity,” he said immediately when seated.

“What is the legal definition of a person?” he asked before I could muster a response.

“Well, there are natural persons, people who are alive,” I said. “And then there are corporations, which in many respects are legally treated as persons. A corporation is composed of many natural persons.

“Does the corporation have to have a live person behind it?

“Yes,” I squinted at him, unsure what he was getting at.

“What about trusts?”

“Trusts are a legal plan, usually with funding of some sort, administered by someone designated by the trust, usually a lawyer.” I paused. His head was down, he was thinking I knew. I continued, “There are lots of legal options, usually we can make happen whatever a client is trying to do. What are you trying to do Chris? Is this a plan for after you’re gone, like a will?”

“Yeah, sort of. I think I need a trust then.” He was still looking down as he so often did before speaking. “I’m afraid I have to say that I have cancer. The doctors say there’s a chance, but only that.” So began the first of many meetings hammering out the trust I was to administer. I told him I didn’t do trusts. He insisted and the partners of the firm allowed me to continue with some help from a couple other associates.

In one of our meetings I asked him, “I heard a rumor that you bought an old metro station in London and lived underground.”

“No, but I did make an offer on one a few years ago. It would have been too expensive to renovate. But it would have been great to have a place like that to work, away from the all the shit on the streets.”

“You don’t seem too concerned to correct inaccuracies about yourself.”

He shrugged. “I like the mystery.”

“You’re a prankster.” I smiled. He tried not to smile and looked away. I found a interview introduction from a few years ago which I think sums it up better than I could.

SkwareSircut: A million dancers, ravers, chipheads, electro-geeks, and Gogirls know him. He’s the father of multiple sub-generes of electronic music. His music is esoteric, subject to endless fascination and ownership by the hardcore electronic music fans that dissect every synth line and rumour of the equipment in his studio. Yet he’s had breakout hits that are infectious and hummable. SkwareSircut, legally Chris Tanner has been the background of multiple commercials and made multiple appearances on the dance charts. His days as a DJ in Europe and America, boots on the ground training, sharpened the knife of his bass and drum lines. Finally, his music broke out of the clubs and into the earbuds the masses, some who thins clubs are what high school students use to pad their college applications. He sat down with us for an interesting chat, including the use of the internet for musicians and artists, programming and beer.

***

Years prior, he invited me to one of his shows in Boston. I was still in law school. I dragged a couple law school friends, who were concerned with seeing unlawful drug use. And excited/afraid that some twenty year old in tights would tempt them away from their long distance girl-friends at other law schools.

This was the beginning of the Thrashtech scene in the Northeast which had traveled from the U.K. and Germany. Kids were heading to clubs, basements and warehouses, dressing up as soldiers, punks and flappers. Of course there was ecstasy, marijuana, alcohol. D.A.R.E shirts worn ironically. And dancing until sunrise or someone in a real uniform told them to go.

This show was in a small warehouse that was decked out to look like a 60’s bachelor pad on a pirate ship or something, a mishmash of retro styles. Shag carpets and bachelor/exotica album covers on the walls, bean bag chairs and Bob Marely glowing in the black light hangings. Metal washtubs filled with ice and bottled water lined the side wall. Everything was glow in the dark. Neon beer signs from the 80’s. Halloween pumpkin string lights shaped like jack-o-lanterns, although this was in the middle of the summer.

The lighting on the main dance floor was swinging spot lights and lasers that swept across the floor. Fog machines spit puffs of vapor every couple minutes which sank the whole warehouse into a haze, which the red and green laser rays scattered. The place smelled of marijuana and tobacco and the floor was wet with water and beer. We thought we arrived late but turned out we were early after I talked to one of the beefy bouncers with a shaved head.

Chris was standing off to the side of the stage, watching the DJ. He would play later. There were a few people dancing and Chris was moving to the music, clearly loving it.

We left and went to a bar to grab some food and a few drinks. When we came back a couple hours later the scene had intensified. We showed the bouncers our wristbands and pushed past the small groups smoking in the back. Somehow the music was even louder than earlier. The crowd cheered when SwareSircut took the stage. He put on headphones and opened up his laptop and checked all blinking equipment around him. The crowd danced harder. The sweat inked their clothes and minds. A thunder like synth line slapped the audience and they frenzied. I went to grab waters for my catatonic friends and there was a line of people waiting to buy his cd’s, vinyl and t-shirts.

I had a back stage pass and so for a while I watched him just off stage where I could see what he was doing. At his station he had a touch screen, this was years before smartphones and pads and and all that. And on the screen were various colored nodes and connections between them, no words or menus. He would move them around the touch screen and draw connections between the nodes, tapping on the nodes or rotating them. All these motions would change the timber of a sound, or turn a drum sample on or off or add harmonics to a synth line.

A ring of males three deep stood in front of the DJ booth, nodding their heads and pumping their fists, while behind them girls in tattered workout clothes and blinking leds spiraled.

After the show we hung out in the green room and he said, “This is all I care about. It’s all I can do really. And so I have to find a way to keep doing it. I mean what do I do really besides make music? I sit around, watch movies and play video games, write code. Every once in a while I have a few pints with friends while avoiding places where people know me. But that’s about it, I don’t really exist except as ‘SwareSircut’.”

This was just as he was becoming big. Getting more radio play, regularly dj’ing large festivals.

* * *

In college I was in his dorm room. He had this setup: a keyboard on a swivel arm next to his bed. He explained that it was connected to the computer. Before he went to sleep he would turn it on. “I’ve been experimenting with writing music with lucid dreaming. I remember some things, but I know there’s stuff I’m missing as well. This contraption allows me to immediately record what I’ve been playing in my dream.”

“How’s the lucid dreaming going?”

“Okay. I’m also attempting to enter into meditative states and then write music.”

“What’s that like?”

“It feels weird. Sometimes I come out of meditation and I listen to the music and I don’t remember doing any of it.”

“You’re crazy.”

“I’d be crazy not to. Plus I’m really awesome when I’m not really there, y’know?”

* * *

There’s a room full of servers. Once a week enters to maintenance it. A large IT firm monitors everything. The record company says only that he no longer does public appearances. Any additional work needed is hired out.

Some of the proceeds from music sales go back into maintaining the servers and hiring programmers.

It’s all generated with the software he wrote. Not everything is released, what is released is chosen by a subset of dedicated fans to be released. There are layers, evolutionary programming. There have been compositional programs around for a long time. But his is the most complex we know if. Block one says: A professor of computer science at MIT will hire a person of his/her choosing not at MIT to maintain, improve and add on to the original algorithms.

“This software analyzes my entire library. It finds a lot of interesting patterns. My fans, through my website, will sift and vote on the best ones for release.”

There is no place, there are only distributed processes. In fact, although nobody knows this, his last EP was done entirely with this setup in place, he didn’t touch anything. We made a few tweaks after, but he was satisfied. He’s dead, or at least his body is dead. But the music continues. Does he live after death? I don’t know, but I think he would say ‘yes’.

I think of the girls, heads thrown back, spinning with their glowing chemicals in hand, and glowing on chemicals. I think of the rows of servers humming away in a locked room somewhere.

One of our last conversations as we were going over details for the management of the IT team, he stopped and looked at me intently. He was gaunt and tired. He asked, “Have you ever been on ecstasy?”

“No, isn’t that supposed to be bad for you now?”

“Yes, it is very bad if you continually use it. I’ve used it a few times.”

“Okay, I’ve never done it myself.”

“Sure. So, you take a pill, drink some water to get it down. And you wait. You sit there and one minute you know where you are and what is happening and who’s who. Then you don’t feel any of that anymore. Amongst other things, one of the effects of ecstasy is dissociative. So you feel that at once you’re more connected to the world and yet that you don’t really exist. Or you feel everyone and everything is actually the same thing. It’s very freeing, you don’t exist anymore as a nexus of cares, wants and worries.”

“What are you saying, are you saying you believe that?”

“Well it’s more a state of mind, a feeling and way of looking at the world, than a belief. I don’t always. Like everyone I have my petty worries and narcissism. But I think its as true as saying we’re separate beings. I don’t think it is wrong to identify ourselves with other beings or with every being.”

“That’s just the effects of the drug, quieting the part of the brain that grounds you.”

“Well maybe that part of the brain needs quieting to see. Our bodies and minds are built to survive and propagate a set of genes and believe in the self. We all experience the world through chemicals and electricity, why are different chemicals necessarily wrong, just because they’re chemicals?”

I had no ready answer to that. I received a vinyl record in the mail today written and produced entirely after the death of the body. It sounds like him.