A Mysterious Sound
"It was like this invisible force was just everywhere!"
Hi,
Thanks for all your feedback to Hayden Donnell’s fantasy of communal living. “Camping in summer is really the only time I get to experience village life and I love it so much,” said Michelle. “You’ve infuriated me by writing the article that’s been in my head only much better than I would have done. I hate that,” said Josh. Read it all here. God I love you guys.
This week felt like a lil’ win. Spotify emailed asking if they could put Flightless Bird on a big billboard in the middle of Melbourne. I said, “Go for it.”
The only correct action for Melbournites to take was to give it the middle finger — or, as some would say, flip it the bird.
I liked how this week’s episode turned out: I got to sit down with one of my favourite documentary makers Erin Lee Carr (I Am Not a Monster, At The Heart of Gold, I Love You, Now Die, Mommy Dead and Dearest) and the subjects of her latest film, Tegan and Sara.
We talked all things catfishing — you can listen wherever you get your podcasts, or I’ll embed the Spotify link here. As they tend to say in this business, like and subscribe. Hayden’s in this one, too.
Today’s Webworm is a bit of a long read — maybe a good one for the weekend over your coffee or hard alcohol. It’ll morph into a Flightless Bird episode at some stage, but I wanted you to have it first.
It’s the story of Leroy, who’d finally bought his dream house.
But there was a problem. Leroy couldn’t see the problem, because it was invisible. He couldn’t touch the problem, because it was untouchable. But it was there, and it was constant.
And it slowly was slowly driving him crazy.
David.
A Mysterious Sound
It’s about 2pm on a very hot Los Angeles day, and I’m in this alleyway with a guy I met on Reddit.
We’ve been wandering around for awhile now, strolling past fences and barbed wire, looking up at the backs of the buildings we’re walking past. There’s the back of a real estate office, a massage place, and a liquor store.
“You know, behind us is this building and there’s this little lip above the building. It’s basically just a very thin wall. In fact, it’s technically fiber reinforced plastic, which they acronym to ‘FP’. I don’t know if that’s definitely the case, I would have to look on satellite to see what’s behind it…”
His words come out in a monotone delivery, but I can tell he’s excited.
The guy I’m with, I can’t use his real name because he wants to remain anonymous. He’s got a backpack full of gear over one shoulder, an open laptop in one hand, a phone the other. He’s pulling up a satellite view of the alley we’re in right now.
Which begs the question: What are we doing in this alley, and how did we get here?
Let’s rewind.
Chapter 1: Leroy.
This story starts with Leroy Clampitt. He’s a New Zealander who’s been living in Los Angeles for about a decade now. Last year, he found himself at an open home with his partner Taylor.
There was the main house out the front, but what delighted Leroy was the back house. It was exactly what he’d been looking for: a separate space to convert into a music studio.
Leroy’s a music producer, writing and producing with the likes of Justin Bieber and Madison Beer. If you’ve listened to Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Things I Wish You Said’ or ‘Emails I Can’t Send’ — that’s Leroy at work.
With that in mind — he’d found his perfect at-home studio space. The decision to buy now came down to the main house out front:
“The front house was scary by 99% of people’s standards. But for Taylor, it was the most exciting thing because it’s an old craftsman house, and instead of being renovated a billion times in between now and 120 years ago, no-one had really touched it apart from painting it white. So all of the original woodwork and stuff in there, the original floors and everything. She was just so excited.”
Because the front house was such a wreck, they managed to sneak in and buy it at a price they could afford. LA, like New Zealand, is not cheap. Taylor had her dream renovation project, and Leroy had the back house where he could set up a permanent studio.
“It was one of those life choices where if we go on this path now - that’s at least a year of work learning how to do [renovation] stuff, and not living in the house we just bought for a year. And we’d already been looking for a year and so we’re like, ‘Let’s just do it’, you know? I have definitely had some regrets at certain points in the process. It’s just… yeah.”
It’s just.. yeah.
Because there was a problem with the house they’d just sunk all their money into. They just didn’t know it yet.
“The studio used to be a two bedroom house, and so I took out a wall and did a bunch of work to make it into a studio. So it was six months planning, executing, doing a bunch of work.
It was this kind of sacred thing, where it was like ‘When I set up my studio, I want to be a clean start. I don’t want to just set up a few things in there and try anything out yet. I want to wait till I'm ready, move everything in there and put it together how I want it.’
So I never tested any sound in there until we had spent all the money and done all the work.”
Right now, I’m sitting with Leroy just outside the studio he’s talking about.
He’s taking me through the day he’d finally finished setting everything up.
“Moving in was literally the day I’d been waiting for five years. It was going to be the best day of my life, moving into this beautiful space.”
Then Leroy turned on a keyboard. And he heard a noise. A digital, glitchy noise running underneath.
“And I was like, that’s weird. It must be bad power out here or something. And I sent a video to Aaron.”
Leroy’s friend Aaron is sitting across from us — he’s a musician and just all around tech guru who’d been helping him set up.
“And Aaron just got back and he was like, ‘Oh no’.”
Chapter 2 - A Mysterious Sound
At this stage, Aaron chimes in. The sound Leroy had heard — Aaron had heard it before.
“I used to have a studio four or five years ago in this big building. And I had the exact same issue. I set up a full portable rig, asking the building manager to turn the power off in the building, and to temporarily turn the Wi-Fi off, trying to figure it out. And I never got to the end result of figuring out what it was.
I hadn't heard the sound since then. It had been like five years. And then Leroy sent me this recording and all these horrific memories came back.”
That noise? That sort of digital glitchy mess? It was in everything.
“It was like this invisible force was just everywhere. You feel helpless because at that point we had no clue how to start getting around it. It was just in everything. Every mic. You plugged in every instrument, you plugged in speakers, it was just on everything. And it’s like — your entire livelihood depends on it.”
Leroy started plugging and unplugging each element of his studio to see if the noise would stop.
He logged everything, writing it down in a list. I’m reading some of it now — all things a music producer has, I guess: a TEAC A3440 tape machine, JBL Monitors, a Roland Juno-60 synthesiser, 1176 Compressors, wooden headphone attenuators, a Neumann U87 large diaphragm condenser microphone:
For each plugging and unplugging he recorded the result.
The sound never went away.
“You deal with noise all the time in the studio and sometimes it’s like ‘move something in a different direction’ or ‘click a different button’ and it goes away or it changes enough.
But the noise that we were hearing, it came in different frequency ranges, so it wasn’t something you could notch out.
It was also random — like it comes in constantly, but in random, different locations and different times. So it was pretty clear from the start that it was a new issue that would be a long journey.”
And like all journeys, they had to start somewhere. And that was Aaron wandering around the house, and the neighborhood, with a pair of headphones and a microphone.
“I went out walking up and down the streets trying to see if the sound was getting louder or quieter. I got a laptop, a microphone, and a little audio interface just to go fully portable. To get away from the house to see if it’s house wiring, or something really isolated right.”
To anyone looking, Aaron probably looked like he was partaking in the most embarrassing of professions: that of a podcaster.
“The only conclusion was that it didn't go away. No matter where I walked, apart from walking further down the street. So we had this feeling of, ‘It’s something big, and it’s coming from a certain direction.
“It had been a full day of setting the studio up. When I left, it was like 10 or 11 at night and I got to the end of Leroy’s street and I sent him a photo. There was a little light pole at the end of the street and on top of the post was a little cell tower, just in disguise. And we were like, ‘Okay, maybe this has got something to do with it?’”
Could the sound be explained by this tiny cell tower on a pole? It was now 11.30pm, and it all seemed too hard and too complicated to think about.
Leroy had had enough.
“It was just like a long day of plugging in a bunch of shit and testing stuff all the while being like, ‘Why am I even doing this?’ Like, ‘I can't work in here at all. I can’t use my speakers. I can’t use any of the microphones. I need to record the artists I work with’.”
Leroy told Aaron to go home. He was spent.
“I think I needed to have a mental breakdown on my own for a second. A bit of mourning.”
The good news Leroy didn’t know yet? It had nothing to do with that little cell tower on the pole.
The bad news? His problem was much, much bigger.
The next day, after a bit of googling, it became pretty obvious to Leroy and Aaron that the little thing on the power pole wasn’t strong enough to be causing the kind of interference they were hearing. It was back to square one.
More walking around the neighborhood looking like a podcaster.
Even worse, a group of podcasters — Aaron had roped his girlfriend in, and Taylor and Leroy had also joined the hunt.
“And it was really interesting because it became pretty clear there was this pretty directional line from where my studio is — and then there's an alleyway. And there was kind of a line, like… you could draw it.”
A line of this sound pointing from Leroy’s house to the alleyway. Or more specifically, from the alleyway to Leroy's house.
Which is how I found myself in that alley with that guy off Reddit.