Ilsa Brekke
Notified Session Bassist
Knows Which Take
She can tell you which take it was. That is the part nobody can use.
Overview
Ilsa Brekke tells time in bars. The bus to work is sixty-four, at a walking tempo.
She is thirty-seven and plays upright bass in Neon Graves. In 2166, at nineteen, she joined the Sound Register as member 14,206. That year she played a session date. Three takes, eight bars, forty credits, paid on the day. She remembers which take they kept.
In 2184 Relief licensed forty years of session masters into its generative catalogue. Her eight bars are now somewhere inside 1.4 million generated tracks. The catalogue's launch slogan was Never Book a Session Again.
The Register was paid for the archive. It posted her a Notice of Satisfaction under the Conclusive Receipt. One page. It confirms she has been compensated. It has a ruled box for the figure, and the box is empty. It is accurate. She disputes none of it.
She can tell you which take it was. That is the part nobody can use.
The Two Pages
She keeps the Notice folded with the 2166 date sheet: studio, date, three takes, four names, forty credits. One page has force and no number. The other has a number and no force. She shows the Notice first. The joke does not work the other way round.
She has pencilled her own estimate into the empty box, like most members. It has no effect. She thinks it looks better.
The countersignature that closed her claim took eleven seconds. She calls it about four bars, at the tempo they cut the date.
When the Register asked for the other three names, she said, "There were four of us. You are getting one." A name given to the Register becomes a second Notice.
Appearance
Rosin dust on a dark sleeve. One hand on the neck of a bass taller than she is. Her left wrist was rebuilt by the Register's clinic in 2179, and her dues are current. She thanks them for the wrist in the same flat voice she uses about the Notice.
Voice
Low and metrical. She says the take number before anything about the take. When she is angry, her pauses get shorter but stay even.
She once paid Hollis Sarr two credits to read the Notice aloud on Sump Row. He read it twice. It ended the same way both times.
Two streets away, Ynez Barquero leases her own voice at a figure printed on the page. Ilsa read that lease. She would give a year of dates for a page with a box she was allowed to fill.
The Bass
The bass predates 2147, so the Salt Ledger would take it. A Ledger runner has visited twice. His figure beat eighteen years of playing. She declined both times without discussing terms.
She says it is the one thing she owns that nobody has been paid for on her behalf. Then she says she knows how that sounds, and tunes the E string.
The Hall holds evenings on the Labor Question. Ilsa leaves at the interval. She has a date at eight.
Connections
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