Somapolis: The City Speaks - Episode 11

The final episode of the audio dramas we've created to accompany the songs on our last album, Somapolis; in this reading, one of the Observers from Episode 1 returns to deliver her final report.

Somapolis, Sweet Billy Pilgrim's sixth album, could be a musical map of an imagined city or an X-ray of the chambers and corridors of a human heart, or possibly both at the same time. As we finished making the record, we realised that we weren't ready to say goodbye to the inhabitants of Somapolis just yet, so I wrote some monologues that might gently unfold the inner lives of those criminals, lovers and avenging angels into a broader emotional map, revealing where their stories came from; how all those stories intersect, and the shapes into which the city bends them.

A mother imagines a still-born daughter's life in reverse; a man runs for his life, chased by armed gangsters; a priest remembers a love and mourns a faith, both lost to time; a woman plots the perfect revenge; a couple bicker in their car before one last drug deal; a jazz musician improvises a new shape for his own madness; with all of this bookended by the Observers - Somapolis' own guardian angels - as they record all that they've seen and heard over the course of one neon-bleached night.

These performances are probably best enjoyed with some knowledge of the songs from Somapolis, but hopefully they stand alone too. They might even lead you back to the album that inspired them: it's not for me to tell you how to listen.

We'll be releasing these recordings in order over the coming weeks. We can even remind you of this if you'd like to sign up for our mailing list.

We hope you enjoy spending some extended time in Somapolis and we thank our talented friends for helping us become architects and town planners, as well as songwriters.

Episode 11: Skywriting (final report)

Directed by Barnaby Kay
Written by Tim Elsenburg
Music by Sweet Billy Pilgrim
Production and editing by Tim Elsenburg and Jana Carpenter

Reader: Jana Carpenter

A molten glass sun bubbles slowly up from the horizon, bending its light around the waists of skyscrapers and tower blocks, then pushing itself up slowly on their shoulders. We turn our faces towards it and close our eyes. It is warm fingers cradling a face; it is blood illumined through eyelids; it is a perfect light, filling a chest with joy; it is the happiest annihilation.

We look down at a hundred thousand faces joining us in this moment on intersections; outside coffee shops; walking in parks; leaning out of windows of stationary cars; standing on balconies and rooftops: a city paused by the punctuation of silhouetted birds preparing to inhabit the first sentence of the day for the upturned eyes of those trying to read it.

And with that, our watch ends. We prepare to retrace our journey across the city, hearts buoyant with sunshine and heavy with memory. 

The homeless man shrugs the dark away. He takes his responsibilities seriously. Pedestrians move warily around him and he starts to shape their uncertain staccato footfall into rhythmic phrases. A taxi answers a downward sweep of his right index finger with a horn blast, and helicopter timpani crescendoes at the command of his ascending, upturned left palm. Finally he beckons the sun itself - this threadbare, filthy Bernstein - each gesture amplified to reach the back row of his vast orchestra; arms now open, fingers wide to bring everything together for the thrilling climax of the piece: day break.

In the yard behind a wine merchants, blue and red lights self consciously spin, suddenly naked and mechanical before the retreating darkness. The city cops and the forensics team pause in their work around a bullet-riddled car to sip cold coffee and check their phones. Behind them, from a half-open passenger side door, two fingers tipped with blue nails point down at a thickening red-black oily pool in the dirt.

The artist, up early after his first sleepless night alone, shakes his head and smiles to himself as the sigh of the early morning traffic swallows his own. He imagines her looking up at the same still-born sun as she wakes, somewhere a world away, and grief pricks behind his nose making his eyes blur with tears. He blinks them back, turns away from the window and starts to clean his paint brushes in the kitchen sink.

At the entrance to the underpass, the boy stares down at the woman lying there. Is she drunk ? Asleep ? Nope. That’s blood around her head. The light is making it shiny. There’s the beginning of a smile on her lips and a phone in her hand. He pushes her shoulder with a ragged Converse. Hey. Hey. S’cuse me lady. HEY. Nothing, save for a slight roll of the head. There are voices echoing from the other end of the underpass. Bending down, he wrestles the phone from her fingers, pushes up from skinny haunches and runs.

A mother without a baby watches dust dance golden in a beam breaking through drawn curtains, her swollen eyes finally open enough to see it; her grief now a physical hum running through her blood like the traffic moving on the streets below her. Today she’ll rise, leave her bed, eat some food; maybe run a bath, in some vague echo of the sunlight stealing across the city.

He puts the cigarette between his lips and leaves it there, unlit. The priest is done with waiting for an answer. So many prayers sent up last night: a thousand Chinese lanterns flickering and alive in the dark, like so much litter underfoot by the light of the early morning. He retrieves the letter from his breast pocket, shakes it open between nicotine-stained fingers and starts to read it again, though he knows every word better than any Bible quotation. “Don’t come and look for me. You’ve made your choice. We’re all alone in the end.” He winces, realising that the answer he’s been waiting for has been folded up in his breast pocket, next to his heart, for thirty years. 

A woman in an elegant but anonymous long grey overcoat walks out of a low-rent midtown hotel and into the early light, smiling. In about an hour, he’ll wake up on his front, hog-tied and naked at the foot of the bed. On the floor in front of him will be that Zegna tie with the stain on it, along with the rest of his clothes. He’ll see a camera on the tripod at the end of the room and scream pointlessly into the ball-gag that will be making his jaw cramp. She taps the memory card in her pocket and whispers his name to herself for the last time, almost affectionately.

On a second-storey fire escape, the dead man uncoils himself from under three bags of garbage to find the light. He flexes muscles one by one; his body a subway map, pain riding muscles and nerves to stations marked red, yellow, purple. He opens the bag, still clasped to his chest, and shakes his head, disbelieving. He closes his eyes, sees her expression of surprise again, and imagines her sipping tea somewhere, telling a friend about their encounter. Perhaps he’ll pass her on the street again one day and she’ll smile, and they’ll share a moment without really knowing why.

Enough now. We push up, up; the city’s exposed circuits and human ribbons of code growing faint beneath us.

Each tiny spark a connection; a word, a punctuation mark, a musical note. Sentences, melodies, chords, counterpoint; all pool in our bellies fuelling our impatience to corrupt and combine base elements into something new that hands can express and a heart can understand.

I take his hand once again and - arms out, fingers entwined - we ascend; our bodies vaguely resentful of gravity’s indifference; our minds starting to ache for the anchor of the earth at last.

In an hour, we’ll turn our backs on all of this. We’ll lean into the wind, and start back towards the path: to warmth; to sleep, before the work begins again. But for now we need to wash the city away, and it’s only in the light that we are made clean.

Here’s the original song from Somapolis: