The sonora crew are not the only ones who hit the market early. The professional dealers and finders are scouting, too—seeing what might be worth a fat commission from some client upcountry, making note of underrated oddities which might still be around at the end of the day at a knockdown price. The strangest of people will sometimes pay the largest amounts for some particular relic of the past, for an object that reminds them of the Easy Years. It’s not a bad business, as businesses go, but it is only for the patient, for the thoughtful.

Vojna doesn’t mind the dealers. They remind her, in their solitariness and their quietude, of the father she has not seen in three, maybe four years. More to the point, they are not competition. The dealers of the city long ago came to an unwritten agreement: they would not attempt to bid upon or buy those items coveted by the sonora and the souni. This agreement was less a negotiation than an acceptance of the inevitable: they grew tired of paying for things which they would soon lose.

For the sonora will do whatever they must do in order to secure amplifiers and speakers from the Easy Years— more than any dealer is willing to do. Only the souni are willing to do as much.

Hence the Audio Auction, held once a week on the cracked-paving plaza in front of what was once the city’s opera hall. The auctioneers talk up the merits and condition of whatever kit has been newly liberated from the dust-blown basements and lofts of the city, but souni and sonora alike will bid regardless of condition. If something could be (or could once have been) part of a sound system, both tribes want it. The auction system means that rediscovered kit tends, over time, to be fairly evenly shared between the tribes. Some weeks the souni might have the upper hand, and hence the fuller handcart; other weeks it might be the turn of the sonora.

But the Auction begins closer to noon, in the big tent stretched out from the weathered statue in the plaza. Vojna’s early start was for the labyrinthine maze of the junkmarket that surrounds the Auction—and here, the competition is not the souni, but rather other sonora. Vojna and her crew glide through the streets and alleys of the junkmarket, their trained eyes scanning the piles and spreads of miscellanea, looking for instruments. Electric, acoustic, they don’t care: if it can be struck, stroked, switched or squeezed in such a way as to make a sound, they’re interested.

This morning felt to Vojna like it would be a washout. But as she and her crew drift toward the Auction, threading their way through the teeming gränder and gårder of Fågelbacken, one of her boys taps her elbow, glances first at her and then toward a spread of devices on an old tarpaulin ten meters ahead, before almost imperceptibly twitching an eyebrow.

Petr’s instincts are good. As the rest of the crew spread out along the gång, to prevent any alternative bidders presenting themselves, Vojna makes an offer on what only an aficionado would recognise as a small Eurorack module from the late Twenties.

The seller has a dilemma. Like any other seller in the city, he knows of the sonora, and so he knows that they will pay almost anything to get what they want. He also knows that, if they judge the price to have been too high, word will get around: people will take their business elsewhere, and his children will go hungry.

In the end, it is no dilemma: he bargains Vojna up to twice her original offer, which was almost insultingly low, and then hands over the module. He is no supporter of the sonora—what parent ever is?—but he recognises their role in the life of the city, just as he values his own.

#

A few hours north-east of the Auction, out in what were once the docklands of the city, Ngedi sits inside something that isn’t quite sure whether it’s a shack or a tent, but which confidently asserts its identity as a tea-stall on a sign written in four different languages, one of which is no longer spoken. It also bears the painted silhouette of a teapot, just to be sure—though most of the stall’s customers hear it long before they see it.

Ngeda makes tea from mint grown by a quiet old woman who lives somewhere out to the east of the city, in the edgelands. A couple of credits gets you a tiny clay cup, hot and refreshing, and some time to sit in the shade of the tarpaulins and sheets that Ngeda has rigged around the stall. For one credit more, you get little snacks, which Ngeda’s mother and father make from whatever they managed to find at the markets this morning.

Ngeda has done the junkmarket sweep and the Audio Auction many times, but not for a year or so now. As a younger man, he’d rolled out early and deep with members of his escutcheon, poked and peered through piles of dead people’s possessions in search of ghosts from the past, and the devices which might release them into the world to be heard once more. The souni collect what the original owners would have thought of as “media”, but which are to the souni something closer to musical relics, to material memories.

As a more senior souni in his escutcheon, his role is to hold together what has been built—though he Ngeda would probably not express it as such, or even think of it as a “role”. In Ngeda’s heart and head, what matters is the community for which his tea-stall is one of several sonic anchors. For Ngeda also makes music, collages of fragments collected and assembled by him and his siblings. The combinations they create would baffle a musicologist from the Easy Years: crackling loops of orchestral vinyl with shards of melismatic auto-tuned vocals, guitar with gamelan, marimba with black metal. Most of these terms are meaningless to the souni, who take each mosaic piece of sound on its own merit, and seek to place it in relation to all the others.

This patch of the old docklands is densely packed with tents and shacks and tee-pees and lean-tos and dug-outs. Beyond the dusty core of the city, which hasn’t changed much since the Easy Years, the edgelands feature all sorts of makeshift dwellings, cobbled together by the many migrants who have arrived here from all points south in the last few decades—but those of Ngeda’s neighbourhood are as permanent as their residents can make them.

Those residents have been drawn here—and held here—by the music made by Ngeda and his souni siblings. The older residents are old enough to remember some of theseemingly infinite music to which they had access, back in the Easy Years. Perhaps the fragmentary recordings with which Ngeda’s escutcheon prefer to work are fragments of those remembered musics; perhaps they just share some melodic or tonal similarity, something that rhymes with a resident’s past rather than repeating it verbatim. Perhaps they just sound good to tired people, far from wherever they once called home, struggling to get by.

Whatever its appeal, each souni neighbourhood is held together by the music of its escutcheon, and by the systems on which it is played. Thousands of photovoltaic fragments are braided across the roofs and spines of shacks and tents, rusted bicycles are chained to motors ripped out of old washing machines and rigged in reverse, inverters and transformers and other arcane devices are spliced together with twists of wire and scraps of tape. The souni bring to life the old things they buy, and they gather the ghosts that people have saved, or that they brought with them over land or sea, in hope that one day they might hear those songs and voices once again.

The souni conjure ghosts of the past, the sounds of the world before. They weave histories from those little fragments of story, make mosaics of music, and they build spaces where that music is always playing—not the same songs every day, exactly, but always the same vibe in the same place. There is a deep comfort in that continuity, out here, among people for whom almost all continuity and comfort was left behind long ago, in places they will never see again, and which they struggle to remember, more and more each day.

The music of the neighbourhood becomes a sort of imaginary homeland, a place of origin and communal memory which never existed, and which brings together people whose only common experience is that of being here, in the city. They come together, and they work together, and they hold together.

Ngeda is proud of what his escutcheon has built, and of what other souni neighbourhoods all over the city have built and held together: a little bit of stability, in an unstable world.

But now, here comes one who represents the very opposite of that.

#

Vojna strides up to the tea-stand, throws down a pair of redits. She smiles a pirate smile at Ngeda, whom she also recognises as an embodiment of everything she is not.

Sonora and souni are not enemies, exactly, though the heated stares on Auction days might give that impression. On the plaza, they are in contest for the bricks from which they will make their walls of sound… but off the plaza, avarice often gives way to something like admiration. Vojna’s feet can feel the bass notes rumbling out of a sub somewhere in Ngeda’s stall, she appreciates the detail of the vocal fragments in the midrange coming from the dozen mismatched but perfectly-calibrated speakers that she can see; she doesn’t care much for the crisp treble, but she understands and admires the engineering nous required to conjure it. This neighbourhood has a fine rig hidden away behind the scrap and tarpaulin walls of its narrow, maze-like streets.

Vojna’s only here to buy tea, however, and perhaps to satisfy a little curiosity. She finishes her tea, returns the little clay cup, grins again at the stall-holder. He bows his head slightly in reply, and as she walks away, she knows that behind her back he will be signalling for his siblings, making preparations.

Leaving Ngeda’s neighbourhood by the entrance on its northernmost side, Vojna strides toward a small marquee on a relatively undeveloped patch of the dusty docklands soil. Five or so years ago, there had been a neighbourhood not unlike Ngeda’s, right here: tight streets, tight community, shared sounds. But stability is not the natural order of things—and this,if anything, is the code of the sonora.

That earlier community broke up and drifted away. The people of the edgelands are good at reusing things, so little is left but space—just the broken shells of buildings from the Easy Years, plus clusters of bivouacs that belong to relatively recent arrivals to the city, and the occasional haphazard shack of a loner or exile. There are some people here, certainly, but they are not here densely, and they are not here together, in that hard-to-explain but nonetheless very obvious way that Ngeda’s neighbourhood is together. The people here just happen to have come to rest in the same patch of space. That space, and the other people in it, mean next to nothing. At least, they mean nothing yet.

To be sonora is a kind of belonging—and like that of the souni, their belonging is also closely connected to music. But it is not connected to the ghosts, to the musical memories that hold souni neighbourhoods together.

The sonora are called to music, but they are not called to familiarity and stability. Where the souni recruit new members by drawing young people into the orbits of the communities they help to hold together, the sonora recruit by staging their unannounced and unsettlingly loud parties in the relatively underpopulated parts of the city, and seeing who turns up.

Vojna came this way, as did they all: in her mid-teens, lying awake one hot summer night in the family teepee, she heard a pounding beat and a fierce melody in the distance. It was like the voice of a god—or so she might have claimed in an age when gods were both easier and harder to believe in. What it said to her, without words, was that everything she’d known in her life so far was not for her, nor she for it. It said that she didn’t belong—which merely confirmed what she had always felt—and that there were others who didn’t belong, and that they could belong together in their non-belonging, belong together in the moment, in the erasure of self that was the sound, the gig, the dance, the party.

She had slipped out of her parents’ teepee, that night. Years later, she has not returned—not yet, at any rate. Her parents miss her, but it is understood in the city that some children will be sonora, some children will be souni, and most children will be neither. It is also understood that children must be given the chance to become what they are called to be.

In a city with close horizons, a parent can at least offer this—though it is not easy, especially for the parents of sonora, who can do little beyond hope that their child is happy, and that they may come back some day.

Beneath the marquee, sweating and stripped to the waist, an ancient soldering iron in one hand and a screwdriver in the other, Vojna nods at Petr. He flips a switch, turns a dial, thumps the side of a cracked plastic case—and the sound-system they have built roars into life. A ragged cheer goes up from the other sonora in the marquee, who soon begin to squabble over who will be first to have their instrument jacked into the rig.

#

To the south of Vojna and her crew, Ngeda watches from the edge of his neighbourhood, his arms crossed, his face unreadable. There will be a few sleepless nights, now— two or three, most likely, but a successful party that pulls enough people from around the city can last for a week or more, especially in the dry, slow days of late summer.

The stability of his community is about to be put to the test. He turns away, heads back to his stall, and helps his siblings with their preparations.

It would be easy to see souni and sonora as enemies, as two sides of a conflict. Back in the core of the city, that assumption retains some currency—but souni neighbourhoods are already starting to cohere around the edges, and nowhere is immune to the possibility of a sonora party.

Both movements are based on belonging. The same applies to the old neighbourhoods of the core, diminishing now with age… but theirs is a belonging born of an era when people knew what year it was, when nationality meant something more than a faded word on a dogeared document, when the future was a product you could buy. Souni and sonora alike reserve some amount of pity for these last relics of the Easy Years, even as they patiently await their inevitable exit, which will mean the freeing up of the core of the city—an extension of the eternal dance.

In the cities further north, meanwhile, the last scientists and philosophers debate the dynamics of change and renewal, develop hypothetical models on paper, in silicon. They know that they must change—indeed, they knew so long ago, and their paymasters refused to listen—but they are too late, now, to change the way they see the world.

If they were not too late, they might look at the city, see the souni and the sonora, and see in them an answer. Only one answer, not the answer—and definitely not a solution—but an answer, nonetheless. And that answer gathers three truths together.

First truth: some people will always seek continuity, safety, familiarity. The souni instinctively bind together groups of these people; the agent of that binding is memory, a glue made from the ghosts of music past.

Second truth: some people will always seek disruption, risk, the strange. The sonara instinctively find spaces of stagnation, stir them up, convening new collisions; the agent of that stirring is novelty, a tool made from dreams of an unquantifiable futurity.

From the massed people of the city, these two principles emerged without any prompting, without any precedent. They leapt across linguistic and cultural gaps, fuelled by the restless energy of youth, sustained and shaped by the yearning of the human heart to find those with whom it might beat in sync. Order from chaos, chaos from order… the wheel spins on.

Third truth: some souni grow restless and become sonora; some sonora grow tired and become souni.

To either tribe, this is blasphemy, of course. But the music will always play, for as long as there’s ears to hear it.

SOURCE SCENARIO: MALMÖSTANIA

It’s 2050 in the Öresund region. Global crises linked to extreme weather, heat, floods, rainfall and the like, followed by one another have wreaked havoc around the world. The Nordic region has been spared the worst but the effects of war and displacement have put a burden on the societies and led to the trembling of centralised governance. The city that most call Malmöstania (or Malmöania, there is no agreement of an official name) has seen the arrival of thousands of new people. Eventually, the population and housing situation became too complex to be handled centrally, so it is managed by each neighbourhood.

Most people struggle to get their basic needs met, living in tents without electricity. Music is not a product, not something worth money, but part of people’s everyday lives. Many lack technologies for recording and distributing music, but they sing lullabies to their children at bedtime. Everyday life is very loud and noisy, stillness and calmness are reserved for the most privileged. There is a nostalgic longing for the emotional and harmonic qualities of music.

There are roughly two oppositional factions in the music scene in Malmöstania: the sounis, who are traditionalists who use music as a propaganda tool and have access to old-tech like recorded music, and sonoras who consider themselves visionary anarchists who use sound and vibration to create belonging. The music of the sounis is allowed by the weak government and is played in public places. They are creators, and so are the sonoras. But the sounds of the sonaras are hidden, always moving around, a rave party or a sound appearing somewhere only to be dissolved in the next moment.

As many go about their daily lives in Malm.stania, they come across the sounis and their music trying to build music into the social fabric of society and use it as a unifying political force. And occasionally, they are taken by surprise by the sonaras with their intention to let sound and vibration flow freely. The sonaras create special, unique and radical experiences, like underground raves, that connect people serendipitously rather than around “one big concept”.

Nature is slowly gaining ground inside the city perhaps because there are no municipal staff maintaining the streets and buildings. Grass is cropping up through cracked tarmac and the sound of birdsong sometimes takes over the evening soundscape of the city. Imagine being free as a bird, with music as the wind that carries you.