When I was eleven my mother asked me if the family should remodel our basement, converting it into a living room and bedrooms for both my sister and me. Heading into middle school, a time when children begin to blossom socially, I thought this was a great idea. The freedoms were readily apparent. I began taking interest in the local alternative radio station, which could now be listened to at offensive volumes while I played air guitar to Red Hot Chili Peppers. I was close to our commercial freezer where all the ice cream was kept so I could sneak goodies at any time of the night. Most importantly, I could learn exactly why a certain premium channel earned the moniker Skinemax. There could be no downsides to this endeavor. However, for the first month or two I found myself sleepless until two or three in the morning. This wasn't because the time slots for mature programming usually fell after midnight, but the mechanical clamor emitted from various parts of the basement left me restless.
A typical evening started with the rumble and violent churn of the furnace starting up, immediately disrupting my normal sleep pattern with metal parts clacking and banging in slack rhythm until the furnace began its standard mode of operation, producing heat to be circulated through the rest of the house. This process had a pulsating rhythm, the whir of the fans coupled with the constant drone of flames burning oil. The vents that emitted the warm air were upstairs though, leaving the need for a space heater in my room to offset the basement's cold climate. That machine, producing heat via electric coils and then shooting it out into my room by a serrated steel fan, had a cadence of its own, syncopated and choppy. If this were not jarring enough, on certain nights the vibration buzz of the dryer shaking against the floor while churning clothes layered itself atop the already raucous noise.
As I lay in bed, tired but still wide-eyed, I thought that maybe I could drown out the mix of appliance noise with my alarm clock radio. Being in a concrete basement the signal was weak so that I heard only the semblance of music, some vocals awash in static white noise.
With time this cacophony became soothing as I learned to listen to each individual noise in unison with the others. They became less dissonant as I trained my ears to listen for overlapping rhythms, the entrance and exit of each sound as the different devices warmed up and shut down, and the variation in pitch depending on how hard the bolts clanked against their metal casings.
I had almost forgotten about this part of my life completely until an album by the group Fuck Buttons came on my stereo.
