The Archive of Ivan Dragoyevich MP3
Read by Peter Noble
When I answered the phone all I heard was a succession of electronic noises:
VWUP - VWUP - KLANG!
I knew from the moment I heard those sounds that this was good news. “Callum, you genius! Tell me you’ve found something!”
I heard my friend laughing “Oh yes,” he enthused, “the entire archive. Even the lost tapes. I’m holding the original version of “Theme For The Ancient Ones” in my hand even as we speak.” There was silence down the line during which I just knew that the little bastard was triumphantly waving a reel of magnetic tape at his phone.
“There’s more, though” he continued, “I’ve not just found the missing archive. I think I’ve found … the Monster.”
“Stay right there,” I said, leaping into action, “Don’t you move until I get to exactly where you are.”
I hurled all my recording equipment into the back of the car and drove as fast as I could to meet Callum. If he’d really located the lost archive of the late, great Ivan Dragoyevich, and especially the Monster he built, than our many months of research were at an end.
It all started when we were scouring old record shops for curios and Callum discovered an album brilliantly titled “The Puppet Of The Dark Gods Strikes Back”. Dating from the Seventies, it ticked pretty much every box we had for kitsch retro appeal. How could we resist a triple-vinyl concept album concerning a man’s quest for both revenge and immortality. Where none of the tracks clocked in at under ten minutes. And they were all gloriously insane. The cover was a tall intimidating man dressed as medieval monk, his dark accusing eyes staring out of the photo. This was Ivan Dragoyevich.
Intrigued by this man we’d never heard of, we began searching for more information. From cult music forums we learnt he emerged at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the early sixties before being thrown out for what was described in an internal memo as “unprofessional ritualistic behaviour”. Further research revealed that he had attempted to record demonic voices by holding a séance in a BBC studio when he should have been recording the new theme tune to “Songs Of Praise”.
Following his sacking, he seemed to have built a reputation both as an obnoxious perfectionist and electronic music pioneer. We tracked down a former sound engineer who had worked with him briefly – no-one seemed to work with him for long – and he spoke of Ivan’s obsession with building from scratch what he termed the “perfect recording device to contain forever the sounds of the Universe”. This machine Callum dubbed “the Monster”.
I have to confess that we were even more enthused by our quest the more we learnt of Ivan’s dark side. Newspaper cuttings revealed that in the late seventies, Ivan’s reputation was fatally damaged when his estranged wife and only son were found dead and while two subsequent trials found him “not guilty” his music fell out of favour, and he lived the last few years an embittered recluse. Our naïve hopes of getting an interview faded when we read that in nineteen eighty-four he’d been found dead, apparently suicide. The body had been discovered next to what the pathologist’s report described as “a large recording machine of the deceased’s own construction”. If this was the Monster, it then seemed to disappear from the police investigation and off the face of the Earth.
Until now. In a tatty former police warehouse, in an aging industrial estate Callum had found it. When I finally met him he gloatingly led me to gaze upon the Monster.
It was magnificent, more than I’d hoped it would be. It was as if a large Stonehenge of filing cabinets had been hurled together into a single mass. Across its surface there were countless lights, levers and switches scattered at random. Bizarre hooks and rotating wheels filled the rest of the space and at the far right of the machine there was an imposing black speaker the size of a doorway.
As I stared in awe Callum sidled up next to me and handed me a giant reel of magnetic tape. He had selected a reel labelled “The Disobedient Are Punished” to be the first played through the Monster. We delicately spooled the tape into the machine and flicked what we were reasonably confident was the “play” switch.
KASCHTUM
(Flibble)
KASCHTUM
To our joy, sounds burst out the monster’s giant speaker. But then a depressing scurgle sound. In panic, we saw the tape was being chewed and mangled by the machine. Callum leapt at the tape to save it, then screamed “OWW Fuck…Fucking Hell” In his haste he’d badly cut the palm of his hand on one of the Monster’s many oddly located hooks. “Shit arsing shit” he cursed angrily – the wound was deep and his blood was now smeared all over his hand and where the Monster had been reading the magnetic tape. Hurriedly we patched him up and salvaged the tape. When we started again, though, the Monster seemed to co-operate perfectly.
We spent the next few hours recording the many soundscapes of the great Ivan onto my laptop and we began to consider whether we might be able to make serious money from this stuff. Modern electronic artists might want to pay handsomely for downloads of these early forays into electronic music.
“Especially if they have titles like this,” mused Callum holding up a reel entitled “You Have Been Found Wanting”
That one we just had to play, but when we first spooled it through the machine we figured we had done something wrong. The Monster was playing the tape, but no sound seemed to be coming out the speaker. I moved to restart the recording when Callum suddenly yelled “SSH!”
I froze.
“Listen” he continued, “Can you hear that?”
I strained to hear and, then – yes – there were voices on the tape. Quiet and mumbling.
To try and work out what they saying Callum began increasing the volume . But while the background HISSS of the tape grew louder, the voices seemed to remain frustratingly incomprehensible.
The volume was now beyond any setting we had used before and the large, black speaker seemed to loudly reproduced every crackle on the tape. We seemed on the very brink of understanding what was being said,
Then I saw Callum’s face freeze, he looked at me and whispered, “Oh God, I think there’s something in there…”
BRAKAKADAM!
A loud electronic crash burst from the speaker. With the volume now so high, the sudden noise was deafening. It tore through the room, and I leapt startled. A split second later I got my bearings back and noticed to my horror that Callum was gone.
I raced to the Monster, calling out Callum’s name. The voices were back coming through the speaker and, suddenly terrified, I turned off the power.
The Monster throbbed, and the sound died. I was left in an all-consuming silence.
“Callum?” I shouted hesitantly, “Callum, are you there?”
Nothing.
“For fucks sake, Callum – Don’t do this.”
Nothing.
No, not nothing. I could faintly here sobbing.
I slowly turned around, the noise wasn’t coming from the Monster. It was coming from the back of the room, where we’d been piling up the reels of tapes. But now, among those reels, I could see there was something new.
It seemed to be a large, tangled clump of magnetic tape. I looked on and began to realise it wasn’t just a clump, it had some sort of recognisable shape. I started walking towards it, convinced that the shape resembled – a man? Too small for that, maybe a child. I stared and began to make out more of the shape the chewed tape was forming – I imagined I could see that it resembled the form of someone sitting, hunched against the back wall.
I began moving closer. This was no fancy of mine – this WAS the shape of a child. I could make out ever more detail now – two legs, a head buried in the hunched figure’s crossed arms. More than that the shoulders on this child-form were convulsing in time with the sobbing noises.
“Are you ok?” I instinctively asked.
The crying suddenly stopped. I held my breath. Would the child’s head – a head of screwed-up tape – lift up and look at me? I suddenly felt overwhelmed by a fear as to what would happen if its face did stare into mine. Slowly though, I realised that wasn’t what was happening. Instead the tape was unravelling. The child was rapidly losing form as the tape seemed to unwind and untangle itself. I watched as it now began spooling itself across the room. And towards the Monster.
BADUM
BASCHUM
BADUM
BASCHUM
The Monster had somehow started operating again. The lights flickered across its surface, pulsating in time to a steady beat of electronic noise. Reels of tape on the machine seemed to be spinning at ever increasing speeds. I felt the throb grow more powerful, more insistent. Then a very sudden, urgent fear grabbed me. I sensed something was coming.
Terrified I got out my cigarette lighter, and leapt towards the Monster. The tape proved highly flammable – soon much of the exterior of the machine was burning – melting through the plastic and igniting materials within the Monster itself.
I began adding the archive to the flames. Whatever it was that Ivan Dragoyevich had put on those recordings was not going to be played again. As the fire grew stronger, thick black toxic smoke poured out the machine. I began coughing and realising the danger I was in, I ran out the warehouse. Vomited and then fainted.
I awoke in a hospital bed a day later and learnt that the building and everything in it had been gutted by fire. Of my friend Callum there was still no trace but as no body had been found it was felt that he was probably in shock and would soon turn up. The police seemed at first convinced I’d done something terrible so I told them a version of events that would please a rationalist mind, an accidental fire as we handled aging electronics. With this, and the lack of any damning evidence, they seemed to quickly get bored with the case and within twenty four hours of waking I was discharged from the hospital. I consoled myself with the thought that whatever it was that we’d encountered in the Monster I had somehow managed to stop.
As I collected my things, I noticed that my phone had a message waiting for me from another friend. Anxious to hear an element of the normal world, I began listening to it. “Hi Greg,” It began “Mike here. Just calling to say that everyone on the Cult Music forum is going wild over those music files you posted yesterday.”
My heart froze. We hadn’t posted anything online.
“But I’m going to tell you now that last one was a sick joke for you two to play on us – no way was that final track recorded back in the seventies. All that screaming and crying on the recording, well – I recognise Callum’s voice. Very funny - I don’t think. When I next see the two of you, you both owe me a pint over that little scam.”
A terrible sense of dread came over me. Maybe I had misheard Mike. I pressed a button to replay the message, but what I heard the second time made me realise the story of Ivan Dragoveyich’s Monster was just beginning.
In the background of the message, I could hear someone else in the room yelling, “hey, turn up the volume, I can’t hear the voices.”
© Alan Graham, 2013
Alan Graham studied "Creative Writing" and "Economics" at UEA and is still unsure which discipline relies on make-believe the most. He currently lives and works in London.
Peter Noble trained at LAMDA and the Royal Academy of Music. He is a narrator for RNIB Talking Books, and is now doing an MA in Creative Non-Fiction at UEA. He attended 18 different schools in seven different countries, on four continents, so there’s a lot of material.
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