ribs recordings

Audio recording extracts a sonorous surface from a segment of the past and gives it an untimely existence. It rends that surface from the lived present of bodies and states of affairs, maintaining it as a pure reserve that can be actualized in the present but does not belong to it.

Christopher Cox (2018: 57)

Reico, the narrator of Izumi Suzuki’s short story ‘Hey! It’s A Love Psychedelic!’ ([1982] 2023), suddenly finds herself reliving alternative versions of her life and cultural milieu with increasing incoherence and unease, yet unsure why.

Her disjointed narrative is interspersed with the musings of a character referred to as the time criminal, who plays with Reico’s timeline as  “just a little harmless fun” (59). What ultimately haunts Reico – whose sense of reality is becoming so tampered with that even the spelling of her name changes to Reyco – is the returning certainty that she is in the wrong world. The time-criminal’s half-hearted regurgitations and imitations of Reico’s cultural insignias invoke a future in which time-space is no more than commodity, measured in ephemeral pop iconography. As Suzuki prophesied through the voice of Reico, ‘“Maybe it was pretty normal to see the world that way: products over poetry.”’ (Suzuki 1982: 54).

Suzuki’s narration throughout the story is led almost entirely by an overwhelming abundance of pop culture references. The pattern that emerges lays out the year (initially 1971) through a plethora of trends – both fashion and music – only to gradually confuse their placement in time, before the timeline is switched again.

The effect on the contemporary reader parallels the travel-sick disorientation felt by Reico, but with an additional smokescreen of displacement: the temporal markers Suzuki employs have now lost the quality of being shared cultural knowledge. The disorientation transferred onto the reader is consequently manifold; not only does one observe Reico’s steadily increasing distress at the defamiliarised emblems of her time – disorganising her mental index of personal memory and musical trivia into disarray – but one must also reckon with their own unfamiliarity with some of the references, understanding them as indicators of a past era. Decades later, the experience of reading the story inadvertently parodies that of its protagonist’s elapsing of time, forcing one to confront their own generational dislocation from its setting. The first instance of this cultural time-stamping occurs with Reico passively judging the fellow customers of a cafe:

A hangout for trendy chicks. And look at them. That hair. All of them with the same big curls swooping away from the face. The same shimmery blue eyeshadow, a solid stripe maybe half an inch wide. Half of them in polos and the other half in T-shirts, but both camps falling squarely within Hamatora fashion. (…) Suddenly, Reico felt like she couldn’t breathe. She felt nauseous. (…) Six or seven years back, they all had shaggy mullets. Maybe three years before that, they all went for straight hair, parted right down the middle like ghosts. Back then, Reico had her hair shaved down to around three- quarters of an inch. Dyed slime green. The Jaguars came on: “I Want to See You Again.” 1967. Focus on the song, Reico told herself. (Suzuki [1982] 2023: 54)

Evidently overwhelmed with the relentless production of fashion trends and their brief lifespan, Reico grounds herself with a song. Tired of ‘products over poetry’ (54), music appears to possess a more anchoring quality, extracting her from the inundated state that recalling the changing nature of aesthetics generates. In this sense, a hierarchy of pop culture begins to unfold – with that surrounding self-image deemed vacuous and unbearably ephemeral, whilst music is increasingly relied upon to relocate Reico in time, prefacing the profound upset it evokes when it too becomes displaced.

Reflecting the iterative reproduction of trends such as the ‘Hamatora fashion’ that Reico looks down upon, subtle grammatical and spelling alterations also signal the reproduction of her identity. Following the first change in time system inaugurated by the time-criminal, the spelling of the name Reico unaccountably switches to Reyco. This enacts a fractalisation of her identity, as the reader comes to understand that this is a self-similar iteration of the same character. Nonetheless, this Reyco retains the same set of cultural references as the Reico of the other time system, antedating the sudden realisation that the record playing was not meant to have come out for another decade:

As soon as Joel came back, the Stray Cats started to play. Reyco jumped into the air. “No way! No way!!”
“What’s wrong?”
“This record,” I gasped. “It doesn’t come out until 1981.”

“What are you talkin’ about? This is ‘Runaway Boys,’ by the Stray Cats.” (…) “Time’s all mixed up!”
I started to cry—just like a teenage girl. (92)

Parallel to the disturbance invoked by the untimely release of the album, the perspective changes seamlessly from the third person ‘Reyco jumped’ to the first person ‘I gasped’ – iterating the transference that occurs soon after when Joel, Reico’s lover, puts his arms around her.

“I remember now … How long have you…?” “The whole time.”
“That musta been heavy.”
“Yeah, kinda.” (…)

“Damn.” Joel dropped his shoulders.
“You want to go ask people what’s going on, don’t you? There’s no point. You can’t go around telling people the world isn’t what it’s supposed to be. Nobody’s gonna listen.” (93)

As if tuning into the same memory reserve, Joel is jolted into remembering that their time is broken by touching Reico. Likewise, the reader is jolted into a different narrative perspective (the first person) by Reico’s affective shock. The result is something like a domino-effect, wherein the astute awareness of disorientation is transmitted fluidly between character and reader, regardless of the decade or century. This transmission gives form not only to the contagious element of Reico’s double memory, which she passes to Joel as if a virus of some kind, but also to the role of music to the story. As Simon Reynold’s states in his seminal book Retromania (2011), ‘the fixation on music as an aid to remembering, or as a form of memory preservative, is revealing. Collection and recollection are entwined’ (117). What Reynolds crucially articulates here is the entanglement of the collectible object (the album) as inextricable from the act of recalling; an interdependent symbiosis of object and memory. Inasmuch as the object needs to be memorialised so as to become embedded in collective cultural consciousness, memory in turn becomes ‘rhythmed’ by the object – evidenced by Reico’s sonically-induced revelation.

The rhythming of memory, or more broadly, the social consciousness, is the subject of Henri Lefebrve’s book Rhythmanalysis (1992). Lefebrve proposes that ‘Rhythm is founded on the experience and knowledge [connais-sance] of the body (…) Alliance supposes harmony between different rhythms; conflict supposes arrhythmia: a divergence in time, in space, in the use of energies.’ (67). The very synthesis of rhythm and body premises affect theory, whereby the environment impresses itself upon the nervous system of the subject. For this reason, Lefebrve’s assertion that we are all subject to the polyrhythmia of a social body is useful in understanding the role of music in memory within Suzuki’s writing as a force of affective rhythming. It is the songs and artists that Reico associates with her original cultural milieu that provide a source of comfort, but are equally indicative of just how out of sync she is with the time systems through which she finds herself propelled. To Reico, music comes to represent an arrhythmia. Akin to the glitch in The Matrix (1999), or the totem in Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010) – Dom Cobb’s spinning top that will ultimately reveal to him whether he is in the dream or reality – the out-of-time album is to Reico the main form of alert that she is in a flimsy facsimile of her time system. Through the spinning top-album, Suzuki highlights the totemic nature of pop culture. Ironically, the time-criminal’s attempts to assimilate realness succeed only in derealising.

Ultimately, the song functions as a synecdoche for the culture of its time-system, so that its recombining incurs a profound ontological fracturing. In unsticking songs from their cultural reserve, Suzuki creates fractal worlds severed from any one specific time or location. For the reader, this means that – although the cultural landscape of ‘Hey! It’s a Love Psychedelic’ finds itself steeped in the referential framework of the sixties and seventies – its dislocation remains timeless by the very fact that it continues to dislocate. The object of the song emulsifies the intersection of culture and time, unveiling temporal arrhythmia, and, conversely, acting as a tool with which to navigate the vicissitudes of fractal worlds. In turn, ‘Hey! It’s A Love Psychedelic!’ underscores the song’s function as a cultural synecdoche: the part (a specific element) that encapsulates the larger cultural experience (the whole), possessing the power to both synthesise and disrupt.

Works cited:

Cox, Christopher. 2018. Sonic Flux: Sound, Art and Metaphysics. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press)

Lefebvre, Henri [1992]. 2004. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Trans. by Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London: Continuum Books).

Reynolds, Simon. 2011. Retromania.
Faber and Faber, Inc. (New York)

Suzuki, Izumi. 2023. Hit Parade of Tears. trans. by [Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph and Helen O’Horan] (London: Verso)
— [1982] 2023. ‘Hey! It’s a Love Psychedelic’. (London: Verso)