MOST GUYS LIKE US would have formed a band, but Carter was always more interested in the studio. He wasn’t a poseur or a show-off; people who say that never knew him. In the weeks after we met at college, I taught him how to use my equipment and we made some breakbeats together. He loved it and immediately began buying gear—stuff I’d been making do without, like good monitors and a copy of Pro Tools that didn’t come on an unlabeled disk bought from a Chinese guy outside a supermarket. Then he got in touch with some music students and persuaded them, by sheer charisma, to be our unpaid session men. They followed orders while we fooled around, trying to make them sound like Africa ’70 or the J.B.’s.
It’s hard to overstate how much of a change this was for me. I was used to being alone. Suddenly I was surrounded by people, at the center of chaotic all-night recording sessions which sometimes turned into parties, as girlfriends and would-be girlfriends and other hangers-on turned up, attracted by the pheromone musk of music. One sign of things to come was Carter’s limited tolerance for computers. He hated clicking mice and tapping screens. Soon he was scouring auction sites for old equipment, anything with sliders he could push, knobs and dials he could twist. He spent a lot of money on a nineteen-eighties drum machine and a bass synthesizer, legendary pieces of equipment that most people only knew as software emulators. For a while we immersed ourselves in electro and squelchy Acid sounds, imagining ourselves kings of the block party, superstar emperors of the rave.
Until then I’d never given much thought to the difference between the digital sounds I’d grown up with and their analog ancestors, sounds made by variations in the electrical charge flowing through actual physical circuits. Electricity is not digital. It does not come in discrete packets, but floods the air and flows through conductors and shoots from the hands of mad scientists in silent movies. If it is futuristic at all, it is a past version of the future, temperamental, unstable, half-alive. When you start to fool around with old synthesizers, building sounds by setting up waves in banks of oscillators, it’s more like a chemistry experiment than the strange Adderall obsessiveness of the digital studio. Carter and I began to consider ourselves connoisseurs of analog echo effects. We were unimpressed by the packages on the internet, so I found some schematics and together we built a primitive spring reverb, which made excellent wobbles and clangings that we used to excess on every track we made. Soon we were trying to reproduce effects we’d heard on music made at Lee Perry’s Black Ark studio in Jamaica. That year Perry was our idol, our god. He would make use of anything that came to hand. He’d buried microphones under a palm tree and pounded the earth to make a rhythm. We did the same thing, using a pine tree (this was the Northeast) with indifferent results. He once installed a sand floor in the studio and built a hollow drum riser out of wood and glass, filling it with water. This was supposed to change the sound of the drum kit. We built our own construction and part-flooded the school’s new music studio.
We worshipped music like Perry’s but we knew we didn’t own it, a fact we tried to ignore as far as possible, masking our disabling caucasity with a sort of professorial knowledge: who played congas on the B-side, the precise definition of collie. The actual black kids at our school, of whom there were very few, seemed to us unsatisfactorily preppy or Christian or were basketball jocks doing business degrees, devirginating sorority girls and talking loudly in the commons about their personal brand. It seemed unfair. We were the ones who wanted to be at a soundclash in Kingston. We knew what John Coltrane was searching for when he overblew his tenor in the middle section of A Love Supreme. There was a Nigerian called Ade who we liked because his short dreads made him look vaguely like a Jamaican singer called Hugh Mundell, who’d been shot dead at the age of twenty-one. Ade smoked a lot of Carter’s weed while fielding questions about police brutality, but there was no getting around the fact that he wore suede loafers and a Patek Philippe watch. His old man was an oil trader in Lagos.
Before long we would look back on our college Rasta phase with shame. Carter, who briefly owned a red-gold-and-green beanie hat, lived in fear that pictures of him wearing it would turn up on Facebook. We really did feel that our love of the music bought us something, some right to blackness, but by the time we got to New York, we’d learned not to talk about it. We didn’t want to be mistaken for the kind of suburban white boys who post pictures of themselves holding malt liquor bottles and throwing gang signs.
In our senior year Carter and I shared an off-campus apartment. An uncertain and threatening future was visible on my horizon. I could barely pay my half of the rent, even with a job in the college development office and another making wraps and sandwiches at a local deli. My debt was big enough for me to be dreaming about it, icebergs and teetering bookcases looming in my sleep. When Carter “bounced,” I knew I would bounce too, back to my dad’s place in New Jersey. I wasn’t sure I could handle lying awake in my teenage bedroom, listening for dead people in the hallway. I’d been hoarding sleeping pills, in case I needed a quick exit.