In Chapter 2: Claudia has friends, and Helena is… well… Helena.
Claudia unpacks her guitar in her spatially-challenged apartment and negotiates the tight space between her bed, kitchen counter, computer desk and mountains of musical equipment to allow her to hook up her home studio get-up.
It takes her about an hour to reach the desired effect for the particular song she's been working on, because her preferred method involves wiring her guitar into two amps simultaneously, using mics to capture the sound from the amps (rather than using a simple direct input/DI to the desk).
Claudia, for all her digital savviness, is almost old-school with her sound-capturing preference: she believes there is a quality that air adds to sound waves (seeing as it's air that makes them viable to begin with), so she likes to have air between the thing that makes the noise and the thing captures it.
And while her preference sounds a lot better in playback, it makes for a cumbersome setup in such a tiny space: once two guitars are out of their cases, and two amps are put into position, and four mics have been set up in front of them (on stands), and the mics are wired back into her little mixing desk… the position she needs to adopt in order to actually play is uncomfortable – at best.
She slumps on the floor, careful not to bang her Guild on anything. "I need a bigger space," she whispers and then pushes herself up slightly, because sitting atop the mic cables kinda hurts, actually.
She touches the strings of the acoustic guitar in her lap, and it sighs twice: once with its traditional folky tinge of metal strings, and again (but at the same time) with an unusual reverbed distortion from an impressive Mesa Boogie amp. It is that twinned sigh that recharges her spirit, and she gets herself up, and in spite of the severe space limitations, she starts recording a new song.
A bright red light blinking over her desk distracts her from attempting to digitally manipulate a bit of echo into a note.
"Oh, crap," she mutters as she looks at the clock on the screen of her computer, and turns the volume on her speakers way down.
The red light continues to blare at her angrily.
"Shit, shit, shit…" she fumbles with the knobs on the mixing desk and starts saving her work on the computer indiscriminately. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Calder," she speaks up, "I didn't notice the time…" she's distracted with paving a way across the tight jungle of wires to the door that's no more than six feet away, but might as well be a mile.
When she gets to the door and swings it open with a cascading waterfall of apologies, she's surprised by the gaunt figure that awaits for her on the other side of it.
"You sang it last week, didn't you?" the tall, almost ghostly pale young man asks with a warm smile.
She squeals in true delight and jumps on him with a hug. "Of course I did, you moody lump!" her words are muffled by the heavy jacket he is wearing.
He returns her hug and they stand in her doorway for long minutes.
"Looks like you've been busy," he says as he looks over her shoulder into the small room.
She lets go of him and lands back on her feet, then turns around. "Yeah," she nods. "Two new songs this week," she gestures for him to get in. "I can make you your smelly tea?"
"That'll be cool," he answers and steps carefully into the now-even-tighter space.
Claudia wriggles around him, while reaching for the Chai tea bags, and then the fridge for soy milk, and then the cupboard for a clean mug, and then the portable hob for the kettle.
When she finishes she stands in front of him again and tucks her hands in the front pockets of her tight jeans. "How awesome that you're back," she can barely contain her excitement at the early return of her friend.
He bobs his head, exuding discomfort as they stand awkwardly in front of each other, a bit too close for comfort.
"Where are my manners," she chides herself expressively and lurches to her bed, pushing the cables and connectors on it to one corner, and putting her Stratocaster away. Once enough space is created on the single bed, she motions Steve to sit down.
"You really need a bigger apartment, Claud," he says after he sits down.
"Tell me about it," she huffs when she sits next to him. "I mean it, Steve-o. Tell me all about it."
"About how much you need a bigger room to live in?"
"No, silly!" she swipes his knee. "Tell me about the operation. And how come you have the complexion of a jelly fish. Who were you stinging, anyway? Vampires? Did you not get any sun over the past six months at all?"
He chuckles and she smiles in return. "You know I can't tell you much," he starts apologetically, "but I can definitely confirm that is wasn't vampires."
She eyes him sceptically.
"I spent a lot of time in tunnels," he relents eventually.
Her eyebrows shoot upwards in anticipation.
He exhales and thinks through information he would be able to share with her without putting anyone at too much risk. "It was a very underground weapons and human trafficking ring," he says quietly, "so there was not a lot of fresh air and sun, even though it was down in Arizona. Could have been Alaska, for all I know."
Claudia senses the danger of her best friend's job and it makes her feel lucky he's there with her, but also makes her afraid for him. She clasps the thumb of her left hand in her right palm and squeezes it tightly. "I worry about you when you're on these crazy ass missions," she says.
He gives her shoulder a reassuring squeeze, which does little to break the long, tense silence.
They continue sitting silently next to each other in the crammed space for ten more minutes.
"That kettle's never gonna boil," he comments.
"It won't," she shrugs. "The hot plate never gets hot enough."
"Come on," he gets up and pushes a mic stand out of the way. "I'm taking you out."
A smile blooms across her lips and she whizzes around the small space, switching all manners of electrics off. "Let's go."
"Where, on earth, do you dig them up from?" Helena leans back into the high-backed ergonomic swivel, facing the sofa she's learned to love as her second bed by now, where her boss, Irene Frederic is sitting.
When you look at her, Irene is one of the least likely people to own a record label, which is probably why Helena took to her almost instantly. With her woolen suits, twee blouses and 50s style glasses; with her enigmatic air and body guards built like brick outhouses, she is probably more suited to be running a secret government organisation than she is to be running a record label.
But she is phenomenally good at her job. Helena always appreciated – admired even – the musical inventiveness that spiraled from Warehouse Records artists. So when she decided it was time to hang her coat of technical innovation in favour of technical mastery of her aforementioned innovations, it wasn't hard to narrow down the wish list of prospective employers.
"That, Helena, may be part of the problem," the solemn lady answers mysteriously.
Helena slumps in her chair, thinking carefully about how she wants to bring up the level of talent she was contending with in the studio. Three months ago, upon being hired, she was tasked with creating a sampler for the label. But the artists she's been working with are more hot air than hot stuff, and she doesn't want to complain, but, as they say in her homeland, there is only so much lipstick you can put on a pig. "It's a struggle," she winds up exhaling in defeat. "The people seem to be more interested in having their faces plastered on online memes than they are in the art. In the work."
Irene rolls her shoulders and looks at Helena from over the rim of her purple glasses. "If they are hungry enough for success, sometimes it is a matter of marrying them with the right substance," she suggests a pragmatic solution. "You know as well as I do how rare it is to find a complete package."
The dark haired engineer sighs deeply. "I despair sometimes," she leans her head into her palm, closes her eyes and rubs them gently with her forefinger and thumb.
Irene huffs a short laugh. "If it were easy everyone would do it."
Helena exhales a hearty laugh, "True words if ever true words were –" she looks up to meet Mrs. Frederic's eyes to find out she had already left the control room, "– spoken," she finishes her quip with a whisper. She raises her eyebrows in slight disbelief, attempting to consider how a woman of Irene's stature could vanish without stirring so much as a wisp of air.
The mind of the genius engineer that she is begins trawling through her extensive knowledge of sleight of hand and modern magic. It attempts to find an explanation to Irene's ability to appear and disappear at will.
She shakes her head lightly, to stop herself wasting valuable resources in fathoming this conundrum, because she is tasked with fixing the musical monstrosity on her spool. So instead of unraveling the mystery that is Irene Frederic, she turns her chair around and pours over the mixing desk, experimenting with the amount of makeup she applies to a farm animal.
After two hours of what Helena classes 'extreme post production', she listens to the end result once; then a second time; then a third. As she listens, she holds her gaze mid-air, the tips of her fingers hovering over the sliders as if she is readying herself to play an instrument.
She's pleased with the end result, at least to the point she's happy to commit this to a CD output, and it is ready to move on to mastering. But that will have to wait for another day because she cannot possibly listen to this track one more time today.