Got the Magic Power

Jamison has a theory about music. Several theories, actually — about resonance, about the multi-dimensional properties of sound when freed from ordinary recording limitations, about why the vinyl record he didn't touch played itself. He has been developing these theories for years, mostly alone, in service of a rock opera that is nearly finished and nearly good and nearly everything he needs it to be. Then he meets Meatball, who sings gospel like a man conducting a negotiation between heaven and earth, and Olive, who approaches her guitar the way a physicist approaches an experiment — and the three of them accidentally create something in a basement that leaves marks on the walls. Ralph Solvereign notices. Ralph notices everything. He has been in the music industry for a very long time, longer than the industry has existed in its current form, and what he does with artists is not quite what artists think he does with artists. He doesn't steal music. He harvests it — creativity as raw material, extracted at the source, fed into a crystal dimension that has been hungry for centuries. He is very good at this. He has an excellent studio, a resonance decoder, and the serene confidence of a man whose plan has been working for a very long time. The Bureau of Sonic Containment has been trying to stop him for most of that time and has not made significant progress. What Ralph doesn't account for is that Jamison has theories, and Olive has a guitar that does things guitars shouldn't do, and Meatball has a voice that turns out to be something the universe has a specific word for — Lightsinger — and that word has specific implications Ralph is not prepared for. The music industry has always eaten its artists. Got the Magic Power is about the artists who decide to eat back.