The men sink into the anonymity they’ve craved in their ramble eastward. Turkish immigrants around them trudge westward, worlds passing at twilight, the visibility of each to the other dying at dusk. Session musicians come and go through the cavernous studio, a converted movie set from the silent era before the rise of the Reich where epic visions were filmed of sexy robots in Twenty-First Century Babels. The air fills with the chemical smell of old celluloid rotting in the vaults.
She’s never seen musical instruments that look like these. It’s as though they’ve materialized from the same silent science-fiction German movies whose rot the musicians breathe in and out as they play; the instruments appear more like time machines, or what she imagines a time machine might look like, transporting the traveller from the execution of a song back to its inception or forward to its completion - bending the music from the end or beginning back into the middle, and bending the music of years from now back to the music of years ago, to produce this music of the moment.
Steve Erickson, These Dreams of You, 220.
