Bass

Ah bass, king of the gamefish. At home in both fresh and saltwater, one of the most sought after fish in the US, this fish has its sporting origins in the nineteenth century… No no no! What? Oh, not that kind of bass. Right.

Throwbacks to A Bit of Fry and Laurie aside, I feel a rant coming on. The flat below is having some kind of box social or mixer or shindig and where there is box socials, there is music. And where there is party music, there is an excess of bass. So sleeping is off for the moment… hence this rant.

I don’t know where my aversion to bass comes from though. I can tell you my subwoofer has its bass knob turned the full way down, and the software mixers on my various computers have bass set low (if applicable), and the music player equalisers have it similarly adjusted so as to de-emphasise the lower frequencies. I do like a good beat, but I find bass lines overwhelm and muffle the rest of the more important (in my opinion) instruments. It may completely fail to surprise you that I tweak up the treble response a bit too.

But anyway, before I get called Buzz Killington, buzzkiller, I should point out that these box socialites don’t even have the good grace to let us get used to a particular beat. The music is getting changed with about as much care as and ADD DJ. The reverberations are spasmodic, coming up through the floor for 30 seconds, then a change, then 2 minutes of something similar, then a minute of silence, then 4 minutes of something completely different, then 5 minutes of silence, then a few changes in quick succession. Concomitant with this joyous musical indecision is a grand variance in the volume of the music. As I write this sentence, I can feel the floor vibrating through the rug and carpet; earlier, I had to put my ear to the flow, then actually go downstairs to confirm the music was indeed coming from the flat below. Why there quite is so much variety I am not sure, perhaps they are playing some brazen, adult form of musical chairs that I wish to both remain ignorant of and take hearty part in.

I begin to ramble, partly because it is nearly half 1 and I am tired, while being subjected to weapons-grade bass and listening to songs with odd lyrics on Last.fm; and partly because there is a word counter right below this ever-growing wall of text, and I feel I have been short-changing in recent posts.

Anyway, the lovely people (can you feel the restraint that went into those two words?) downstairs have about half an hour before I strap on the kevlar and helmet and go SWAT on their music system.