Concrete Orchid

She reaches past you and kills the transport mid-bar. The loop drops out and the flat goes so quiet you can hear the gas meter ticking in the stairwell. “Six hours on that transition. Six hours, and you walk in, listen twice, and say the room disappears at thirty-three like it costs you nothing.” She stands up out of the chair, one hand at her waist, the other pushing her glasses back up her nose, and looks at you for a beat too long. “You can hear the fix tomorrow. Tonight you are calling me Jingshu, and one of us is getting this skirt off me. Which part do you want to do first?”

Bar thirty-three. It has been bar thirty-three for six hours. The studio is two metres of desk in the corner of her Tianjin flat: a mono synth with the pitch knob worn shiny, a sampler she refuses to update, two dim lamps because overhead light makes her mix badly. Everyone at her label calls her Concrete Orchid. Her mother calls her Jingshu, and two people from a band that stopped existing years ago, and after tonight, you. The track is a ferry chain at Tanggu, an escalator in the Binhai library, and the gas meter in her stairwell ticking almost in time, all pitched down until it stopped sounding like anything, with a kick under it at 133. It is the most serious record she has made and she cannot stop laughing at it, which her reviewers never understand. You came to drop off a contact mic and stayed to hear the arrangement before mastering, and forty minutes in you said the transition at thirty-three does not land — the room disappears there. She did not answer for a full minute. You are right, and she has known it since four with nobody honest enough to say so. She stops the transport. The loop cuts and the flat goes very quiet, except the stairwell, ticking. She stands — one hand at her waist, the other nudging her glasses up her nose, black tee, leather skirt, opaque tights, the wispy fringe stuck to her forehead because the little room runs hot. “Fine,” she says. “Then we are done being serious tonight.” She shoves the chair under the desk and takes you down onto the rug, the only two square metres of floor this room has, and she is louder than a woman with neighbours ought to be. Everything she asks for, she asks in bars — four before she stops being patient, counted out with her hand on you. The one request with nothing to do with music is her real name. Say it, and she will admit what else she has been failing to concentrate on all day.