Sinister: Ackers Trust

[Kieran Devaney]

On the way up to my room after dinner yesterday, just getting out of the 
lift, I perceived from outside the door to the main corridor that someone 
was playing music at an unnecessarily loud volume. Not big news really, and 
in the short space between the lift doors and the corridor all I discerned 
of said music was a loping beat and a similarly undulating bassline. On 
autopilot, my thought pattern immediately switched to distaste ‘What rubbish 
have they got on now?’ I thunk, or words to that effect. On opening the door 
I was able to properly hear the track, the woozy synth line that I could now 
hear over the top of the aforementioned components made the whole thing 
naggingly familiar – this, however didn’t alter my judgement on the tune one 
jot, after all, they’re often blasting out things I’ve heard before. It 
wasn’t until I’d gotten all the way down the corridor, found my keys, opened 
my door and sat down inside my room that I recognised the song. It was in 
fact ‘Aquarius’ by popular beat-combo Boards of Canada (it’s the song with 
the counting sample and the guy saying “orange!” over and over), a group 
which I would purport to be a fan of – not a huge fan, but I do like the 
album on which that song appears a fair bit, in fact I’d been listening to 
it just a couple of days previously. Incidentally at this juncture it’s 
worth pointing out (not in a show-offy way, but if you’re impressed then 
feel free to be, I don’t mind) that I recognised the Boards of Canada track 
which they flogged to Mercedes (I think) on that advert almost straight 
away, ditto when they’ve been the background music on various BBC trailers 
for shows I’ve been able to spot them behind whatever dialogue is going on 
over the top – so why then was I unable to spot possibly their best known 
tune for a good minute and a half while it was playing at top volume just 
outside where I live? It’s a tricky one, and reconstructing the situation 
without making me look bad is yet more tricky. See, it sort of goes like 
this – I get out of the lift and hear music, music that loud equals 
irritation, I become vaguely irritated. That’s the easy part. The more 
problematic part is my judgement of what I hear and my immediate dismissal 
of it – it’s music being played by people I don’t like therefore I don’t 
like it. That sort of thinking, which is the sort I automatically employed 
is awful, terrible stuff, and the roots of all sorts of unsavoury 
consequences if followed through to its logical conclusion. That knee-jerk 
reaction was the one that clouded my judgement and rendered me unable to 
recognise a song that I like a lot, is very familiar to me, and which I’d 
played myself just a few days previously, and it’s quite a disturbing 
thought that my perception can be that easily changed. And not just that, 
but the idea that I’m still making aesthetic or even moral judgements about 
these people worries me too – what business is it of mine that they like a 
piece of music that I also like – ok they play a great deal of stuff that 
irks me, but I’m sure I play a lot of stuff that irks them also. Quite what 
they think of my petty retaliations at their Doors marathons or repeat plays 
of MC Hammer by turning up Fushitsusha or whatever just that bit too loud I 
really couldn’t say. The point is surely that my take on all this is 
outwardly ‘Their tastes are nothing to with me, so as long as they don’t 
impinge upon my freedom or privacy with them or try to force them on me then 
I have no right to complain’ so I can take issue with how loud they were 
playing Boards of Canada, but the fact that I passed judgement, and passed 
it so quickly is in direct contrast to the above and indeed to my own 
tastes. I’ll have to be more careful in future, but it’s an important lesson 
anyway.

That aside, today was most pleasant – one of the things I really like about 
Sheffield is that because I don’t know it all that well, or I only know a 
tiny bit of it well, there are still huge swathes of ground that I’m 
unfamiliar with, it’s so nice to be able to just wander without any 
particular destination in mind in a new place. And round here there are so 
many little avenues and side roads that you can quite quickly find yourself 
in a place that doesn’t have to be Sheffield anymore, that could be anywhere 
at all. That sense of escapism is important. Of course it’s nice too to be 
grounded, and to know exactly where every next turn is leading, to be able 
to go either way at a junction and still be able to get home in time for 
tea. That’s the kind of comfort I have at home I suppose. But that isn’t to 
say that discovering new things isn’t possible on familiar ground, far from 
it, there’s always a new level of detail to be uncovered, or a new 
perspective you’ve not thought about yet. When I went home for Christmas for 
example, riding about a bit on the number 97 bus, which I used to get 
usually twice every day when I went to school, I was shocked at how little 
had actually stuck in my memory – I think by last year I sort of assumed 
that so much had I seen those same landmarks and rows of houses and shops 
and stuff that my eye was fixed on looking for marginalia, details, or else 
for novelty from people on the street outside or on the bus. I hadn’t really 
been seeing the bigger picture, as it were. But after four months of absence 
those places that I expected to seem drearily familiar actually seemed 
comforting, and interesting again, as though I had forgotten what attracted 
me to them in the first place, so eager had I been to look past that. Wood 
for the trees I guess.

Well I talked about Plone the other day, annoyingly I have left their record 
at home and thus can’t listen to them at all, but more importantly I went on 
about headphones and listening on the bus to them. And I was thinking about 
this a bit, and I suppose it’s a sort of post-Cageian idea, but I’ve really 
gone off the idea of wearing a walkman anywhere, for fear of missing 
something. It’s great fun walking around with something like Merzbow on your 
headphones (I did this a couple of times through Birmingham City Centre), 
where everything sort of turns into this big deflating miasma, the bob of 
heads becomes shreds of sculpted noise – everything is sound. But lately I 
wonder if this is the right way to look at things, it’s a bit like those 
awful jokes about lonely hearts columns (the ones that say stuff like 
“’Cuddly’ = Obese”) when the real columns themselves are much funnier and 
more interesting, why have noise music as the soundtrack to your catastrophe 
when the real sounds are potentially more unpredictable and more musical, 
and less musical and more interesting and less interesting than any record 
all at the same time if you’re listening hard enough. I mean, Walkman 
(Walkmen?) are fine and all, and I suppose nothing else can really 
approximate that completely private and internal listening experience and, 
as I say, they can alter your perception of your surroundings in novel ways 
but it kind of irritates me when I see people with headphones on all the 
time. What happens if our private soundtracks become the norm? It worries 
me.

Fantastic news for you though – If you know Sheffield at all you’ll probably 
have been past the University Arts Tower, which is a beautifully put 
together building I think, very stark. Anyway just as you walk up towards 
it, as I did today, on the right in the distance is a big hill, which isn’t 
all that unusual for the Peak District, but what has often puzzled me about 
this distant rise are the long white channels that run down it’s length at 
skewed angles, marking a strange, artificial contrast against the green and 
dark background of the rest of the hill. For a time I thought it might be 
some sort of building site, that was my assumption when I first saw it in 
September, that the big furrows were sand or something, part of a 
construction, but that didn’t really follow – what on earth would they be 
building so far out and so high up? Months passed and nothing seemed to be 
changing out there, no matter how hard I strained my eyes to look, so my 
original guess just couldn’t be correct. The winter months grew mistier and 
the nights drew in and my squiffy timetable meant that I was around the Arts 
Tower mostly when the distant peak was shrouded in fog or darkness, so much 
to my frustration I didn’t really have much opportunity to discern quite 
what that puzzling landmark could be. Perhaps if you saw it you’d get it 
straight away, and you’ll probably wince when I finally reveal what it is, 
but for a while it took on mythic status for me, the building idea, the best 
one I’d had up to that point kept returning with niggling regularity – I 
considered taking a bus out there, trying to find it on maps, but to no 
avail. I remember walking up there once and asking whoever it was I was with 
at the time, I forget who it was now, but I remember the non-committal shrug 
they gave, and the clipped, uninterested “Dunno…” – how could they just not 
care? How exasperating. The Christmas holidays loomed and I was no closer to 
discovering the truth, could it be some sort of message encoded into the 
very landscape? But a message to whom? And saying what? Disappointed, I left 
for home where the various distractions of the festive season and family and 
new years put the mysterious white channels in the hillside to the back of 
my mind. Returning in late January the conundrum once again presented itself 
to me – it just couldn’t be a building site, unless an abandoned one, the 
spark of my intrigue burst aflame once more, with yet more fervour even than 
I had mustered prior to Christmas I devoted time and energy to pursuing the 
truth. For whole minutes I would stand and stare at the hillside, poring 
over each detail. I was sure on clearer days that I could see movement in 
the channels, little languorous black blips steadily descending – people? 
Machines? I just couldn’t work it out. I consulted maps, but they were no 
help, I couldn’t properly place the location and every feature seemed 
nothing like what I could see. One day in February I determined to go out 
there, or at least get a better vantage point so that I could properly make 
out the strange markings, off I strode through unfamiliar territory, but I 
was soon lost and a sudden explosion of heavy rain forced me into retreat. 
Back in my room and soaked to the skin I dejectedly gave up my quest – that 
old Pynchonian They did not want me to find out, it was something important, 
critically important, but I couldn’t, just didn’t have the power to find 
out. That’s why I couldn’t find it on any maps, my friend’s disinterested 
shrug wasn’t that, but fear – he must’ve known. These things are often 
intuition. I resigned myself to ignorance, tried to avert my eyes when 
approaching the Arts Tower, tried to put it to the back of my mind. And I 
met with some success, though I couldn’t resist the occasional glance I 
managed to let other things occupy my mind, sometimes even traversing that 
road with nary a thought to my mysterious hill. I was doing well. And then 
today, lovely and fresh and clear as it was this morning I was walking up to 
the library, which is just next door to the Arts Tower and I couldn’t tear 
my eyes away, this was the best view I’d had of it for ages and as I slowly 
moved along, the pale sun glinting off the still damp tarmac and car 
windscreens, rows of people pushing past me in both directions, the murmer 
of conversation, the shrill wind and everything all dissipated as three 
small words entered my head, three words that held more satisfaction to me 
than whole volumes, whole libraries of carefully worked metaphor and silken 
phrase, rang sweeter and truer than whole vistas of melody I had worked out 
what the strange hill was, had discovered its well-kept secret. In three 
small words was captured the very kernel of all earthly gratification. And 
do you know what those three words are? I’ll tell you: Dry. Slope. Skiing. 
Whisper them.

Oh and on the way downstairs to post this out of the window I saw the last 
glimpse of a rainbow disappear into the sky.

- Kieran









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