Borrow the Angle (Slipwave Recording)

RECOVERED RECORDING — VIDEOCAST + CAPTIONED LINES Performing credit: Slipwave Pictures: uncredited. Laid over the recording after the fact; not a record of any room the band played in. Recorded: not stated on the recording. The Archive has not established which of the band's sessions it belongs to, and has not been asked to. Current standing: No charter status. Circulates in the habitat-circuit stock; played rather than sung, and more often by musicians than by anyone else.

Transcriber's note: as with Odonata, the videocast carries its own text — ten lines, one to a section, each held over the pictures for the length of its section — and those ten are confirmed as the recording's captions. No lyric sheet has reached the Archive and nothing beyond the captions has been transcribed. The lines below are the captions in order, not the song.

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(captioned, in order)

At the basin where the giant wings turn

You draw a circle in the water

A pebble skips, the current listens

Borrow the angle, borrow the beat

Great dragonflies patrol the orchard

A pulse runs softly through the cattails

You make a pattern it can read

Only time and touch and listening

Catch the bright law under your feet

You lift your hand, the water sings

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On the pictures: a lake among pines in low sun, a dragonfly's wing filling the top of the frame at a scale no dragonfly has; a hand drawing a circle on still water with a stick; a pebble skipping; a dark-haired woman kneeling at the water's edge, drawing lines of light on its surface that the dragonflies cross; an orchard; cattails at dusk with a pulse of light running along them; the same woman at a standing stone, cupping water. Nobody in the pictures is named and nobody is anyone the record knows. The pictures are the maker's, and the Archive files them as the recording's carrier.

One reading, offered and not filed. The band took its name from the pitch drift a habitat's rotation leaks into an unshielded sound system, which its musicians learned to compensate for rather than cure — and compensating for a drift is borrowing its angle. The Novice the Xenomusicology branch placed with the band carried the branch's one question, what is music to you, and the branch's answer to how that question is asked is nearly the sixth line of this song: time and touch and listening, until the other party makes a pattern you can read. The fit is close enough to notice and is noticed here. It is not evidence of who wrote the song or when, and the first line's giant wings*, which some on the circuit read as a habitat's rotation seen from inside, the pictures read as a dragonfly's; the recording does not choose.*

Archivist's note (S., Survey Archive): I am asked, as I am always asked about this band, whose voice it is. The recording does not say and I will not. Two of its members are still posted and still playing, and the third has never corrected the record on any of the others; the question has an answer in the world and not in the stock, and this desk works from the stock.

See also: Slipwave, Xenomusicology, The Star Rangers Music Corps, Odonata: Raise Your Banners, Ballad of the Stars, Performers and Generated Work.