Word came in over the brainphone at twenty past ten on Thursday morning: new composition just dropped, somewhere south of Möllevången. A new housing block completed, the scaffolding and cladding removed—and that meant new music, new sounds for the city. Everyone who was anyone would be there in a few hours, or at least by the end of the day.

That meant Jan needed to be there yesterday—or, failing that, as soon as possible. He was out in Oxie, finishing up at the opening ceremony of a new sustainable drainage meadow. Most brainphone scenesters didn’t bother with infrastructure, especially if it was outside the city borders. But the developers of this site in Oxie had invited Jan specially, knowing his presence would reflect well on their project.

In turn, their invitation supported Jan’s reputation as the fastest, as the first. Jan knew that there were better commentators and reviewers than him, more attractive people, people who had much more to say about the hottest and most exclusive drops in Malmö… and plenty of better dancers! That was fine. Jan was happy being the fastest. He liked the recognition that came with it, the reputation that made him stand out from the pack of the brainphone scene. And he just really liked being the first: the first to arrive, the first to hear a piece in the way its architect-composers had intended.

Sure, there would be people who had fudged their location data on their brainphone and got to hear it before him. That didn’t bother him, and besides, it wasn’t illegal. (Not yet, anyway—though there were rumours.) But he wondered what the point was, you know? Hearing a new piece without being in the space it was meant for would be like… well, it would be like eating an ice-cream, but getting only the flavour, without the texture and the thrilling coldness of the frozen cream. It would be half an experience, in other words—and Jan always wanted the whole thing, no substitutes.

But mostly he wanted to be first. Chatter on the brainphone voice channels suggested that most of the scenesters were still up in Bulltofta, still coasting on the vibes from a new playground that was unveiled earlier in the week. The pack were much closer to the new drop than him… but they would take time to sort their bikes out, get themselves moving, funnel themselves along the recommended routes.

Jan could get there first, no worries. He’d just have to crank it real hard. He shook hands once again with the developer, flashed a grin for the reporter’s camera, and ran to unlock his bike. As his butt hit the saddle, he pointed the bike northwest, and started pumping.

Game on.

#

Most scenesters were not so bothered about being first as they were about just being there, but that’s not to say Jan didn’t have a few competitors. He didn’t know what their strategies were, but he knew what it was that reliably let him turn up before anyone else. It wasn’t his physical fitness—after all, most brainphoners were in decent condition, thanks to the constant mobility of the scene as it moved round the city from drop to drop, and even the differently able folk had mobility systems that let them keep up.

No, Jan’s secret weapon was psychological: it was his willingness to ignore the very thing that defined the scene, if only temporarily.

See, the brainphone was hard to ignore—that was the point of the thing, as Jan understood it. The implants were introduced back when he was still only at förskola: mounting unemployment among Swedish youth, plus hyper-individualised music and media—tailored by an algorithm to flatter (and thus amplify) whatever feeling the listener might be having—had resulted in outbreaks of what the quality news-sites had called, “stochastic terrorism.” The cheaper ones had called it “the old ultra-violence”, so disgusted that they would produce page after page of coverage: shootings, mob beatings, the occasional two-sided riot. The newly-elected government proposed the brainphone as a way of re-socialising music, and so re-socialising youth culture in general: give them something to do together, that was the key.

But government plans don’t fund themselves, and it likely wouldn’t have gotten any further than the pilot stage if the property developers hadn’t stepped in.

As Jan turned north on the 101, pedalling hard for the edge of the city, he could hear Oxie behind him, its various soundscapes and songs blending with the distance into something that sounded like a sustained, looped chord from some mid-Twenties pop hit. That sound told you a lot about who lived there… or at least who the property developers would prefer to live there.

Ahead, Malmö gathered its own sonic signature, like the sound of seventeen different festival stages all competing for your attention at once, but with every genre and style somehow coming together in the same key and at the same tempo. It was a clever trick, and some Swedish startup had made a lot of money off the patent. Jan had no idea how it worked.

Approaching the city limits, different sounds started to separate themselves out spatially. Directly ahead of Jan was the low-key rumble of Hindby: agreeable, not too hectic, with the steady beat of domestic commerce. Further ahead and to the right, Jägersro was all trumpeting brass and martial rhythms; horse-racing used to happen at that stadium, Jan remembered, and the development firm liked that theme, as it attracted a certain sort of resident. Meanwhile, immediately to his left, the old industrial estate of Yttre Fosie gave off shrieking discordant sounds of damage and destruction, all set to rhythms like someone had made an old-fashioned drumkit out of aluminium sheeting and then thrown it down five flights of stairs.

This was the magic of the brainphone: it helped you navigate almost without thinking about it. You moved toward sounds you liked, and avoided ones you didn’t like. Property owners tuned their locations and buildings in order to attract or repel certain slices of the population. The worse somewhere sounded, the less likely you’d enjoy going there… though you couldn’t just “set and forget” the sonics of a neighbourhood, as some cheap-skate developers had discovered. Give it a decade, and what once repelled teenagers may well have become their hottest new sound—much to the distress of the often elderly residents.

That said, abandoned industrial estates were usually just set to maximum arrhythmic discord, which was impossible for anyone but the truly disturbed to adjust to. Jan’s success came from his realising that you didn’t have to stay somewhere that sounded terrible—you could just move through it as quickly as possible. If you were willing to endure some awful soundscapes for a handful of minutes, then the city was criss-crossed with shortcuts that no other brainphone scenester would even dream of taking. They might see a road heading into some unknown, run-down neighbourhood... but they’d hear a brick wall, five metres tall, lined with spikes.

Jan pedalled harder, turned left off the 101 and into Yttre Fosie. The clangorous noise welled up around him, seeming to spill out of the rusting warehouses and the cracked concrete beneath his tires. He did his best to ignore it, and focussed on the road ahead.

#

Jan was first to the new drop at Möllevången that day, and he was first—or at least in the top three—to plenty of drops in the following months, as the summer sun loomed hot and low, and Malmö emptied out for the holidays, the soothing songs of the kolonilotter drawing the lucky ones away from the baked-dry concrete and liquefying tarmac. He was crossing the city one afternoon, after the excitement of a morning drop, probing for new cut-throughs.

The city was always changing, faster all the time: the construction robots took buildings down, put up new ones, and took them down again. Neighbourhoods became fashionable or unfashionable very quickly. Property prices fluctuated a lot—not that many people who lived in the city owned their own places! You needed a job to get a mortgage, if you didn’t have family money—and who had a job, these days? So people had to move a lot, and Jan’s father would complain every few months or so, as he bundled his time-worn Ikea bits and pieces into Jan’s bike trailer.

“First it was just you youngsters,” he’d grumble, “rolling around the city like you had nowhere to call home. Honestly, we were glad to see it, what with the ultraviolence and all. But now it feels like we’re all caught up in the dance.”

“If you could hear the music, it might make more sense, dad,” said Jan. Older folk weren’t obliged to have the brainphone put in, so a lot of them didn’t. Jan assumed this was what made them all so sad and confused all the time.

“We’re sad and confused because we can hear ourselves think,” his father would reply, patiently—which seemed to confirm what Jan had been saying. But why, then, did his father sound like he was disagreeing?

These thoughts were idly looping through Jan’s head as he rolled out of the polyrhythms and Locrian melodies of Apelgården and into the murky industrial dronecore of Emilstorp. He vaguely remembered this area as having been crowded with the buildings known as ‘big grey boxes’, which had been shops and warehouses and other businesses back when his parents were his age. Now it seemed most of the boxes were gone, just stubs of metal jutting from fields of cracked and weed-infested concrete. The soundtrack was relentless now, utterly agonising—steel-knife shrieks a-stab in discordant orchestras, plus brown-note bass trying to liquify his lower intestine—so he quickly scanned the area for possible exits, ways-through to add to his mental map of the city. The sooner he could be gone, the better!

Then he spotted something that just didn’t fit.

There was a grubby but still colourful picnic parasol standing on the concrete near a small building that had yet to be demolished… but that wasn’t it. All sorts of weird old junk got left in null neighbourhoods; Jan’s dad said that he knew guys who made a bit of money making people’s unwanted things disappear at cheaper rates than the city recycling trucks.

What didn’t fit were the four people sat under the parasol: two guys, two girls, with what looked like a cooler of Pripps Blå and some snacks. Just sat there smiling, shooting the shit on a nice sunny day, as if the place didn’t sound like Satan himself supervising Godzilla’s first day at metalwork class.

“Hey, man,” said one of the guys. He was talking at a fairly everyday volume, so Jan could barely hear him. “Welcome to join us if you want.”

“Are you kidding?” Jan leant on his bike’s handlebars. “Who’d want to sit here?”

“No need to shout, man,” said the guy, looking a bit hurt. “Anyway, if it’s so bad, what are you doing here?

The girl to the guy’s left sat up, looked Jan up and down. “Wait, Erik, I recognise him—he’s one of the big scenesters. The one who’s always first to the drops.”

“Ah,” said Erik, nodding. “So this is the secret to your success! You use the killswitch, slip through the null zones.”

“Killswitch?” Jan was struggling to follow the conversation, and the soundtrack was an ever-upward-spiralling cacophony-crescendo of shrieking agony.

“If he had used the killswitch,” shouted the girl, as she rummaged in her bag, “he wouldn’t be yelling at us like that.” She stood up, walked over to Jan, unfolded a piece of paper, and held it up in front of his face.

On the paper was a shape that didn’t seem like it could exist in the universe Jan was familiar with. Lines and fields of black seemed to shift and tangle themselves like something alive against the grubby white of the paper. Jan squinted, found his eyes drawn to one particular seven-dimensional knot at the heart of the symbol, and then—

#

The symbol on the paper had stopped writhing like a living thing, and now just looked like one of those square code-patches that products from the Twenties used to be covered with. But he hardly noticed the code, or the paper, or even the girl holding it.

He was too busy enjoying the silence—which, far from being a sonic void, was a shockingly immersive spatial soundscape, featuring faint birdsong melodies atop the rhythm of his own breath, all set to the bass-drum beat of his heart.

#

An hour later, Jan was sat beneath the parasol, halfway into his second tin of Pripps, and brimming over with questions.

“So why do you call it the Van Gogh Movement?” he asked.

“It’s a French joke, we think,” Erik replied. “Cut off your ear, you know?”

Jan didn’t know.

“Dutch, you doofus, not French.” One of the girls rolled her eyes, said something like “van huuurgkh”, which reminded Jan of when his father had still been a smoker.

“Whatever.” Erik continued anyway. “The guy who taught us about it, he was from France. Came to Malmö a few summers back, spreading the word. It’s a tradition, apparently; in every brainphone town, once the killswitch gets discovered, some people from that town will head out into the world to spread the news.”

“Don’t you miss the music, though?”

“Not at all,” said Lena, the girl who’d been sitting next to Erik, and was now sitting in the coolbox. “The killswitch doesn’t break your brainphone. Just means you can turn it on and off when you want.”

“But why weren’t we given that option from the start?”

Erik laughed. “Why do you think? How many times have you moved house in the last five years?”

Jan thought back to all the drops, all the estate-albums and infrastructural soundtracks he heard on their first day… how he’d helped build the communal excitement by surrendering to his own. How, after a while, all that had mattered was being there, being the first.

“Brainphones stopped the ultraviolence,” added Lena. “Everyone was probably pretty grateful for that—grateful enough not to ask too many questions. But people forget things, especially when they’re kept busy. After a while, it’s just the way things are.”

“But you…” Jan was lost in thought. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

Lena laughed. “You ever tried talking to someone at a drop about anything that isn’t a drop? You’ll find that your words don’t get through for some reason.”

“Marcel, the guy who showed us, he said he only showed us because he saw us out on the edge of town, playing folk songs around a fire.” Lena had a faraway sort of look.

“You get far enough out of the city,” she continued, “the brainphone’s quiet enough that you can play over it, you know? Drown it out. My mum, she taught me a bit of guitar when I was a kid. I’m not very good, but I loved the magic of making the sounds myself. I’d play, and she’d sing. I remembered that for years, but mum got so busy trying to keep hold of her job, there was never any time for music at home.”

“We met on the way back from a drop on the edge of the city,” said Erik quietly. “We were both walking the long way back. I heard her singing up ahead—singing along with the birds.” He smiled. “That was it for me, man.”

“But what do we do now?” Jan felt full of jittery energy, excitement—something he could only remember having ever felt about a new drop. “What happened in the other towns where the killswitch was shared? Where else in Sweden has it gotten to?”

“We don’t know,” Lena shrugged.

“We’re just enjoying the silence, you know? Enjoying not having to move,”  said Erik, gesturing around the empty lot. “Waiting for the next ones to find us.”

“But people need to know! I can’t just sit here and keep it to myself.”

Lena smiled. “Then I guess your destiny is clear, isn’t it?”

#

A few months later, Jan bid his father goodbye, and then his Van Gogh Movement friends. His bike-trailer was full of provisions to last a few weeks, and clothes for a windy west coast autumn. He rode to the edge of the city, to Arlöv, with nothing but the sound of the birds and the wind to steer him, and then turned off to the left, onto the cracked old bike path to Lomma and beyond. In a few days, maybe more, he might be in Gothenburg, telling people about the killswitch.

After all, someone had to be the first.

Source scenario: The Third Ear and Van Gogh movement

In 2050, the Third Ear, colloquially the Brainphone, enables passive receiving of audio. The Third Ear is a passive implant that adds an additional layer to one’s own hearing. It is required to navigate and observe one’s surroundings, and is particularly important for safety and navigational reasons, since everything like exit signs and public announcements are audibilised.

The Third Ear is also an identifier, an identification system, like the BankID back in the 20s. Audio skins that allow one to emit sounds have become popular among young people and many dress themselves in sound to express themselves. “I can hear your vibe - I like it.”

The Brainphone has enabled an Augmented Acoustics (AA) layer in the city that you move through. It’s a constantly changing soundscape that has enabled city-wide musical maps - today, Malmö is one of the Acoustically Augmented Cities in the world. In these cities, maps become songs and songs become maps, in the same manner as the aborigines of Australia used to encode spatial information through song.

Today, music is created for places and it changes depending on how you move through the city or a building. Companies, public officials and others use the AA layer to curate, create and control experiences. Site-specific soundscapes are very common and every new site needs its own. A few years ago, Bjarke Ingels collaborated with Sigur Ros to create a new building that also became an album. Property developers are the new record labels, employing a roster of artists to audibilise their properties.

There are defend-your-neighbourhood games, in which each block chooses its own genre that it presents through the AA music maps. As you get closer to a place, your Third Ear plays whatever the people living in that area have decided represents their neighbourhood best.

Sound billboards are a common way to share and receive information. You get a notification if you pass a sound or if a new sound appears. "There's a new song in Möllan, only available for 10 minutes".

The AA and Third Ear were created as a reaction to the controlled individualised music of the previous decades. Already in the late 2020s, people who could not stand the loneliness of the music bubbles, broke out and gathered to sing around the bonfire. It didn’t take long for decision-makers to conclude that endlessly individualised soundscapes spurned isolation and, at worst, extremism. Restrictions were put in place to control and prevent individual music and make people listen together.

Today, some consider deafness as the ultimate act of resistance towards the AA. The most extreme of them are organised around the Van Gogh movement - “Man was born with two ears, and should live with two ears.” This is scorned upon by some actually deaf people, who see it as an act of cultural appropriation.

Another tension lies in whether music should be recorded in the first place. The anti-recording movement, the Immediacists, buy records and destroy them. A counter-movement, the Preservists aim to preserve every artistic moment ever created. Their main conflict lies in immediacy vs. eternality. The Preservists bring secret microphones to the bonfire built into shoes or jewelry. When found out they are thrown out. But is the act of not recording our musical moments a crime against future generations?

A version of this short story was originally printed in The Mesh We're In by Media Evolution 2024.