the underground birdcage

Brisbane’s underground opened up unexpectedly and swallowed us whole. Like two fishes we went down, happy to be coveted. Brisbane sprawls on the surface of several hills, sunny and pleased with itself, the city centre sprouting like rockets deteriorates into sleeping suburbs at its very walls, a castle hemmed in by shanties: who knew there was anything underground, mysterious, culturally exploratory at all?

It’s above ground, it turns out, like a 70s pool. Perched above a suburban railway station in a decayed birdcage shelter like a lean-to, stripped inside, its tin roof bared and its internal walls mostly gone. This might have once have been the house of the shopkeeper who founded the burger bar downstairs, barred and bolted at street level: as we ducked under the sagging verandah to come up we read: Award-Winning Coffee! PLUS: Bacon & Egg Rolls.

The milk bar was closed, it being late on Good Friday, everything was closed in fact, everyone gone. Miles of car dealerships gleamed up and down the highway. The railway station was empty and cool-lit. Huge billboards loomed. We went up a rickety flight of stairs and into the unlit living room of a couple who host these gigs intermittently, whose devotion to experimental music lies thick like dust over every surface in sight. They had stacks of tapes on a milk-crate table, I’d not heard of even one of the bands. We sat down on a velvety car seat and a milk crate filled with comics. Outside, the verandah was hedged with netting and the lights from the dealership opposite swam. People smoked various plants. Eventually two bands played. One was the Loop Orchestra, which morphed out of Severed Heads, and whose members have been assiduously pursuing the random mismatching of tape loops since 1979. They took a long time to set up. Their equipment was heavy. Their sound was intoxicating and strange. Compelling re-occuring beats splurted from old splices in the tape. One man wore dozens of loops round his wrist like loose dark bracelets, slipping them off when he wanted to change and refit. A young audience member scrolled his phone throughout the set. Another, in his fifties, sat on the floor like a child being told the best stories and when his attention wandered he picked up an old flyer off the floor and held it up close to his eyes to read.

A girl with plaits attached to her hat turned her head next to me and gazed glassily past. Her smile was vague and convulsive. The man in the Bauhaus t-shirt who kept bending over some detailed arrangement behind the stacks of jars in the cluttered kitchen corner turned out to be the drummer for the second band. He told me their name but I forgot it. It was clever. His drums were built out of scrap. I was perfectly comfortable in my warm car seat, I took many dark photos, my mind just sank away. Everything was dark and people’s shadows cut the reading light delineating the stage. With care it was possible to pick a way along the verandah which felt like at every moment it would dissolve into the highway and disappear in a smear of rapidly swept past headlight. The light from the head, and the light from the heart. The moon climbed impaired and creamy through the dark netting and lighted the shining untouched vehicles displayed forever, from last century, from a comatose time when people thought it was ok to mine whole mountains hollow and smelt their insides into trash. So many different kinds of sleep. Our audience stirred when one set closed and another opened and applause was low to the ground, enthusiastic. Up the back it was possible to buy t-shirts, so I did: five dollars, screen-printed, awkward cut-out letters claiming boldly and purply Real Bad Music. A rack of tapes and records and cds ranged from five dollars to twenty; four twenty-dollar notes unfurled in the tall jar into which I dropped my coins. People came up the back stairs at intervals and slipped in between the shadows watching and swaying. House plants trailed from tins hung from the tongue and groove walls and from the tiny thicket outside, garden plants reached in. The imperfect floor had a board missing here and there and had been repaired with layers of steel shop signs and advertising placards. My favourite said, in white on grey, “…your business the exposure it deserves.”