Free The True Story of Butterfish by Nick Earls

theoretical, like particle physics, or those equations that cross blackboards with a spray of sigmas in their wakes. I had no future planned, yet. I had a bunch of Norwegians to coax through the white-knuckle ride of their first major international album, and I thought that would do for now.

On Friday I played a fierce half-hour of Space Invaders and then worked on a Splades song that I had been ignoring. I added bits, and then subtracted twice as much. D-verb, a Hammond-organ kind of keyboards sound. I had pulled off enough of the bells and whistles by late morning that I found myself recording an acoustic guitar track for its rawness rather than any other contribution it might make. I imagined a bar in a backwoods town, the drummer working the snare with brushes, and a guitar that had been carried across the country without much care. I recorded it to pick up every squeak of the fingering, and then wondered what Reason or Sample Tank might have for me when I went looking for the drums. I wanted leathery-faced old-guy brushwork that came with a battered hat and no teeth, and a sense of unshakeable rhythm that got built into the hands in the thirties.
    No, wrong sound. Clever but wrong. My mind was on my father’s old blues records – very old blues records – and that wasn’t the way to take this. There was an element of it in the song, but just an element, and it was lurking in the background and meant to stay there. I threw most of Gunnar and Øivind’s work back in, but tried to be selective about it. They had a sound, and I should go with that.
    â€˜What do you want? What do you want?’ How many times had I asked them that in Svolvær? Plenty. We needed an album they could live with until the last interview in the last country. We needed a couple of potential hits to keep the music-company people in London happy, but we needed to avoid quirkiness, since there’s no maths quite as certain as quirky plus Scandin avian equals one-hit wonder. We needed to keep their sound intact but bring it across towards the international mainstream.
    I was enjoying the puzzle that presented me, and not minding at all being the grizzled veteran of the business, the one who had been through the mill and had all his excitement worked out of him, only to see it replaced by anecdotes he no longer had the grace to tell. And I didn’t let Gunnar and Øivind know it, but they would eventually look on this as the best time – the last time they made a record almost for its own sake, full of promise and without the weight of expectations. Expectations existed, of course, but they had been calibrated in London and kept out of the heads of the Splades for now.
    I brought up Øivind’s guitar part, which played all over my half-baked work of the morning.
    Then movement caught my eye next door, through the bushes. I realised it was mid-afternoon and school was over for the week. I heard the sound of a body entering the pool in a clean dive, and some strokes being swum. Annaliese got out at the end near me, topless. She picked up a towel and patted herself dry. She was almost facing me, but she seemed to be looking off into the trees behind my studio, though not at anything in particular. She was wearing only a black bikini bottom, and standing in the one place where she would be almost completely visible. Then she spread the towel out across a banana lounge – I could just see the end of it – and she disappeared from view. All but her feet and calves, as she lay face down in the baking sun. The rest of her was gone.
    The green lines marking the volume of Øivind’s guitar had tipped up into orange and then fallen away. The track had ended, and the only sound came from the airconditioning unit in the wall behind me. I told myself I couldn’t have seen what I had just seen, couldn’t have watched.
    I wondered if it would be best to re-record the bass, once everything else was