Mantle is asked who their preferred interviewer would be, between Katie O, Jackie B, and Lars V, and Mantle shrugs their skeletal shoulders so slowly, like mountains ascending during tectonic cataclysmic events, as if to leave this earth, only to return, to the frame, a breath of relief. Only a handful want the job. Their presence, Mantle’s presence, is intimidating. But those who know them well say they are very nice.
In less than one year, Mantle has soared, from a months-long neck, neck, and neck Billboard race between Lil Grenade Launcher and Maya Kaya, to a lead of astronomical disparity that all other musicians who once thought themselves worthy of fame have now (probably) committed some form of ritual suicide.
Mantle once declared in an interview with Noisey’s Gal Halpern that they have no influences, no clear sources of inspiration, and no history of engaging with any art form ever. Halpern told Mantle she did not believe them, laughing her uncomfortable way through the accusation. Mantle simply stared, black pupils unencumbered by the shuttering of eyelids, until she decided to move on to another question.
Mantle, in a green room, is handed a nail file, as some (but not all) of their fingernails are long to the point of improperness. Mantle holds the nail file up to the light, and then places it on a coffee table, next to three design books and two magazines about the music industry. There are also celebrity gossip magazines scattered about. It is a large, you could even say excessive, coffee table. Mantle’s face is on some of those celebrity magazines. Mantle’s unlikely face, twisted mouth, rotten jagged teeth, and all.
Sorg Sorgensen wrote a biography about Mantle that claimed all kinds of things. Mantle did not know about it at the time of publication. When asked about it, Mantle claimed they’d never heard of Sorg Sorgensen. When asked about the validity of the claims in the book, about Mantle’s extreme upbringing, Mantle said that they did not know what the book claimed. When some details were described to the then 30-year-old (we think?) noise musician, now the best-selling musical recording artist of all time (a fact, regardless of what a biographer may or may not write), for example, the detail in the book of how when Mantle was six years old they were nearly killed by a particularly giant bald-eagle and suffered severe facial lacerations, hence the scars and the lower lip configured to permanently reveal a selection of jawline and teeth normally hidden on most people, and particularly ghastly looking in Mantle’s case, Mantle denied the truth of that and all other anecdotes described in the book. Mantle was not in any way (at least visibly) bothered by these claims. But they were quick to deny any validity to them. Sorg Sorgensen had been labeled a fraud. Sorg Sorgensen was the fourth author to publish an unauthorized biography of Mantle. Mantle’s lawyers encouraged them to sue. Mantle did not sue, or read any of these books.
Jackie B is chosen to interview Mantle for Scuzz magazine. Scuzz used to be considered niche. They are now staggeringly mainstream. But they have credibility. Because they interviewed Mantle before the big days. Among other things. Jackie B has never met Mantle. She is a newbie at Scuzz, but well-regarded as an interviewer, so she gets the gig. The interview is scheduled before Mantle’s show at The Chain Reaction, right here in L.A., first day of the massive tour. Jackie B suggests to her editors that the interview should happen after the show. Her editors, namely Ronnie McGee, laugh off the suggestions. “Oh, you don’t just interview Mantle after one of his shows.” Jackie makes a mental note of McGee’s misgendering of the six-foot six amalgam of bone and greyish-white leather skin that is Mantle. “And why not?” she asks in a tone sharper than she would have liked, if she had better control.
“His shows take a lot out of him.”
There have been several occasions where ambulances have been called to Mantle shows, mostly for a person or persons in the audience. Only seven people (eight if you count one who’s been in a coma for three years) have died at Mantle shows.
Jackie B reads this information in the pamphlet that has been prepared for her by a Scuzz intern named Claye. Jackie B does not and could not know that Claye has Crohn’s and wears a colostomy bag to work, as Claye had managed to keep this detail about herself secret from everyone other than her parents and her younger sister until recently, when she started to open up more about these things. She tells Jackie B this about herself as Jackie B reads her pamphlet. Claye tells Jackie B that listening to Mantle has changed her life, has encouraged her to open up more. Jackie B does not have Crohn’s, but does have a tendency to develop severe bronchitis and has crippling anxiety about sex as a result of a traumatic assault when she was in high school. Jackie B and Claye both, separately, wonder about Mantle’s passed traumas. Maybe there are none of which to speak. But neither Jackie B nor Claye believe this to be likely.
Jackie B reads through archives of reviews and interviews with Mantle. She has yet to admit to any of her editors or publishers or other professional acquaintances that she has never listened to a single minute of Mantle’s quote unquote music despite the fact that Mantle’s quote unquote music is on extreme rotation at every radio station in the country, even the country stations. Jackie B has yet to admit that she has yet to listen to a single track of Mantle’s music because she is scared. Scared she will be perceived as a fraud, fired, blacklisted. She has yet to listen to the music because she is scared of the music. She’s heard it’s a lot.
Mantle is unlike other musicians of their status in that Mantle only has one home. Most musicians of Mantle’s status (there are none, at the moment. Mantle’s status is higher than any other, at least in terms of sales or word-of-mouth popularity) have two homes. Or three. Or more. Mantle’s home is in Los Angeles, and Mantle decides they will walk to the upcoming show, the night of.
Scuzz decides to go for the immersive and asks (suggests? encourages? mandates?) Jackie B to spend the day in Mantle’s Lincoln Heights apartment before the actual interview. Jackie B says yes, and expresses some genuine excitement.
When she was little, around six but maybe seven, Jackie B had a stranger sneak up behind her and cut her blonde ponytail off with gardening shears. Charges were pressed. The perpetrator of the crime appeared to the naked eye to be, how might they put it, marginal? Marginalized? In terms of income and mental stability? He turned out to be the son of the owner of the Squickle Relish company, the heir to a relish fortune. Jackie B always wears her blonde hair in a tightly bound bun.
In Sorg Sorgensen’s unauthorized biography, he writes that Mantle is the son of a ballerina and metallurgist, both of whom died after becoming trapped in their panic bunker during a raging forest fire. There is no evidence to support this information anywhere in the known universe. It appears to be made up, but all things are made up by something, which is what Mantle said when asked about this biographical detail. No one takes Sorgensen’s biography seriously, or any of the others, but people like to find and enjoy tidbits where they can; fragments, whisps, hints of the origins of things, even in the realm of the almost certainly fictional.
Jackie B surprises herself with how many hours of old interviews she watches to prepare, almost as if she cannot stop, but she still does not listen to the music. She is stunned at the sound of Mantle’s voice in these interviews, a voice which never makes it into the music. It isn’t the kind of music that requires or benefits from vocals. Their voice is reminiscent of a whisper, but not an intentional whisper, more like the whisper of a throat once slashed by a whirring chainsaw blade that broke while severing the lifespan of a dying redwood, and managed to just barely keep their vocal cords viable, after months of intensive care and surgeries and rehab. It is the sound of furious struggle to make breath into words. Every word is a chore. Mantle sounds like someone that would rather not speak, not out of pretention, but self-preservation.
Scuzz informs Jackie B that the one-day stay in Mantle’s Lincoln Heights, 1st floor, 770 sq ft apartment, a one-plus-den with one bath, with little in the way of natural light, in a building with peeling yellow walls and unknown liquid crystalizing along the outer stucco in a rust-stained rictus, a building where there have been murders, before and during Mantle’s residency, will in fact be a three-day and two-night stay. Ronnie McGee and Scuzz feel it will add a sense of ominous authenticity to the whole exercise. They are marketing geniuses and always get things right. Jackie B is bright eyed and not in a position to feel anything but super stoked about the prospect, at least not outwardly speaking. She wants to ask questions about things like sleeping arrangements. Her editor will have to call her back.
Jackie B watches tapes of an early show from many years back, when Mantle was still considered a cult phenomenon. She watches on mute, or her iPad. She is taken by this immense yet somehow diminutive frame of a person or being or whatever, operating keyboard and laptop, and a few devices unfamiliar to her, with such resounding intensity, that every press of key or button sends them into what can only be described as extreme rapturous shudders. The audience slowly comes to move in sequence with the grim carcass on stage. They are in throes.
Jackie B doesn’t know this, but after that particular show, Mantle developed flesh eating disease on their right leg and was hospitalized for two weeks and nearly had to say goodbye to the toxified limb. They now walk with a visible limp and will forever, or until death, or until they no longer walk, whichever comes first. Jackie B has never seen Mantle walk and does not know about the limp. But she will soon.
Jackie B has clear instructions; no time spent in the apartment is to be recorded or even remarked upon in any kind of public forum. This stay is to acclimatize her to this most significant of artists, to put her in the right zone to conduct the interview, and nothing more. Authenticity. Jackie B tries not to worry…
She regrets not bringing a scarf. She laments the last hug of afternoon sun before Mantle welcomes her in, covered in their customary oversized black robes, squinting like a creature of the dark unable to tolerate sun, hiding their face until the bubbly-looking interview girl is inside, past the dim front foyer with the flickering halogens, into the gloom of apartment. Jackie B feels, immediately upon stepping foot into the apartment, that she really should have brought at least a scarf and maybe a jacket and maybe ear muffs. She can see her breath.
Mantle does not make offers. They escort her into the main room where there is no furniture. There is a keyboard on the ground and several amps and a laptop and some pedals and other music-adjacent type machines of which Jackie B couldn’t name if it were Final Jeopardy and Alex Trebek was still alive and well and pointing a loaded pistol at her abdomen. Mantle sits on the ground and does things on the computer. Jackie B shivers. Mantle doesn’t wait long before removing their black robe, a move that at first startles Jackie B, who doesn’t want to consider what might be happening, something like sexual harassment, or worse, but they hand her the robe without incident. It takes her a minute to take it, and longer to adjust into it. She wrestles with the giant caves of fabric, taking five full minutes to pull her head through. It is heavy and warm and she can still see her breath but less so. Maybe that’s just her imagination. Maybe it all is, imagination. The room is dark and grey and musky and blue, and the slivers of afternoon sun can’t brighten it.
Jackie B finds herself staring at Mantle’s naked body, naked except for tiny white underwear. Their ribs and uneven spinal bones are plainly visible, surrounding skin lined with scars that she thinks maybe could have come from the lash of a box jellyfish, because she remembers during her years obsessed with venomous aquatic creatures of Australia that she took particular interest in the beauty of the stinging pattern of the box jellyfish, one of Australia’s deadliest animals. She asks if the scars are from a box jellyfish, her first words to Mantle since entering the apartment, first words since “Hi, I’m Jackie B!” which she said on the stoop, but Mantle has noise cancelling headphones in and doesn’t hear her. She also notes the pallor of their skin, grey, like the room itself, not pale exactly, but that’s probably what most people would call it. So pale it can’t quite be human, can it? She never, during the whole stay, or for a time after, feels she can describe Mantle’s face. Not because Mantle doesn’t have a face (they do), but because she is too afraid to look straight at it.
When Jackie B eventually uncrosses her cramping legs and goes to the bathroom (and unknowingly gets a small dribble of pee on the black robe. She will never know this occurred and as significant events in the universe are ranked by importance, this places low), she is afforded the opportunity on her way back to look into the small den, which appears to have been converted into a recording studio. There’s minimal equipment, foam-insulated walls, and a staggering collection of metal objects, bricks, hammers, trash, poles, rust, leather, discarded things found in alleys and trash bins, in dumpsters, in L.A.’s abandoned corners. Much noise is made in here, she gathers. Much noise she cannot hear.
Sorg Sorensen wrote that one of Mantle’s famous tracks, one of the most difficult to listen to, one of the most critically acclaimed, was recorded in Antarctica, on the windiest, stormiest day of the decade on the frozen continent.
Jackie B had intended to suggest she and Mantle go for dinner in Koreatown, to a place she loves where they serve an eclectic mix of modern Korean, Japanese, and Peruvian food, but since entering the space which Mantle inhabits, she now understands this to be an unavailable suggestion. She won’t bother. She orders Thai food through UberEATS, which she can easily expense. She orders more than enough for both of them, and makes it clear to Mantle that they should feel free to partake, but Mantle declines to eat anything. She eats while standing as they continue to do things with sounds on a computer that only they can hear.
Jackie B noted moments in the tapes, in past interviews, moments which felt to her like something profound or significant was being reflected upon. Like the time Kip Cars asked Mantle if they were religious, to which Mantle said, “If I am religious, I hope I am going to hell. But I don’t think I am, so unfortunately I must stay here for the time being.” In an interview with Gillian Killian of Wired, when asked about where inspiration comes from, Mantle simply said, “I have no choice.” When asked to elaborate, they shrugged, and then became visibly frightened, as if being watched by some entity from beyond this plane. When asked by Joyce O’Keeffe of Bon Appetit what Mantle liked to eat, they said, “I am nourished by sound alone.” When O’Keeffe claimed she didn’t buy that, Mantle said, “Most food would be wasted on me, would do serious damage to me, on the inside. Like a bird eating glass.” O’Keeffe spent the remainder of the interview wondering why they, a food publication, had booked time with this person. It was on her mind and all over her face, you could tell. She remarked on that interview, later, in her own interview with Oprah, saying, “Fame is a slut.”
Jackie B is offered Mantle’s bed, a plain single mattress on the bedroom floor. She declines. Mantle doesn’t exactly insist, but reminds Jackie B they do not have an alternative, only bare floor. Jackie B smiles and says “I’ve slept on worse!” and goes to bed at 9 P.M. with a white towel over her robed body as an extra blanket. By midnight, still unable to sleep, she sheepishly nudges Mantle and, with some shame and embarrassment, asks if the offer is still available. Mantle doesn’t hesitate; they take up Jackie’s space on the floor, and Jackie molds herself into the contours of the mattress. It is more comfortable than she expected. She breathes into herself.
In the morning, Jackie B is startled awake by cacophonous, miserable hammering; crashing, twisting, gnawing metal sounds. Glass breaking. Unpleasantness all around. The sound studio may be insulated but it has no door, it’s just a little den after all. It’s still mostly dark out. She sees her breath in the bleak dawn light. She is reminded of camping as a child in Yellowstone when a grizzly waded in rain puddles outside their tent, in the early spring morning. The grizzly stuck its nose through the tent door, which had been left open by her urinating father, who was nowhere to be seen, its brown soaked fur stinking, dripping, emanating steam. She saw the grizzly’s breath, in utter silence, frozen solid, as she sees it now. Ungodly loudness that she should cover her ears to protect against violates her sense of reason, but she does not cover them. She does not protect. She listens. The noise shouldn’t be bearable, but somehow it is.
There is no coffee maker, but she chooses not to leave. She goes uncaffeinated for the first time in three years, when she had the flu and saw her dead grandmother sitting on her legs, scrubbing at her ghostly eyeballs with sandpaper, during the height of her fever.
Midway through the day, Mantle hands Jackie headphones. It is time for her to hear. Her eyes go wide as Mantle plugs them into the computer and presses the spacebar.
Birds fly off the trees outside the little window, in unison. They won’t come back any time soon.
The room is steeped in grey. She listens. The headphones cancel outer sound. Mantle can’t hear it, but of course knows what she is hearing.
In an interview with Jamila Homes of Pitchfork, Mantle was asked when exactly they came out as non-binary, and what made them make that decision at the time. Mantle made a face with a furrowed brow. They rubbed their bald head, a head that looked as if it had never housed one follicle of hair. Mantle’s face bore the struggle of confusion. They did not understand the question.
Jackie B listens to Mantle’s entire discography without pause, sixteen hours of straight noise, some of it impossibly famous, some of it b-sided and under all radars, unavailable to anyone but her in this moment. Jackie B does not think to eat or dream. She moves only twice, both times to use the bathroom, both times bringing the computer and headphones with her.
It’s late and black, middle of the dark morning, when both Mantle and Jackie B retire for sleep. Mantle sleeps in the corner, and Jackie B takes her own corner, not on the mattress, not covered by a blanket. Mantle tells her to take the bed. She refuses. She says, “It’s your bed.”
The third day, Mantle doesn’t work. They sit, maybe meditative, unclear to Jackie B how deliberate this state is. She is very hungry and decides to leave the apartment to get cereal and milk from the Arco gas station four minutes down the road. The sun burns her eyes and lights her face. The warmth is unwelcome. People stare. She wants Honey Nut Cheerios but they don’t have Honey Nut Cheerios, only the knockoff Sweetened-O’s, which she settles for. The clerk’s nametag says Maurice and he has a half-grey, half-black pencil-thin goatee and is standoffish, which Jackie B realizes is not out of disdain or ire, but out of fear. She can smell it. Only on her walk back does she register that she is still wearing Mantle’s heavy black robe. She sniffs her armpits.
Back inside she sees her breath again. Mantle lies on the floor. Is it meditation, or prayer?
Jackie B gets a call. The show, which is in two days, has been moved from The Chain Reaction to The Staples Center, which means ten times as many tickets are being issued. They have already gone on sale and they have already sold out. This stunt was always going to go this way. She should have known. The interview will be conducted after the show. She gets her wish. Scheduling sometimes does win out. She is told to dress nice. They will be going out after.
She doesn’t remember going home. Things have gelled into a blur, and the present is gone.
Jackie B, home for one day before the show, which will kick off a world-wide tour, sits staring off into space until it’s time for sleep, during which she has horrible nightmares. She wakes up in the night and downloads all of Mantle’s available music and listens in the dark. It helps with the aftershock of the nightmares. She eventually sleeps without fear.
Mantle’s very first live performance was in front of sixteen people at a venue called Wheelbound, in a bike-shop basement in Boise, Idaho, which is not where Mantle is from, but was the first venue that agreed to host them, in which they performed with one small keyboard in the middle of a child-sized half-pipe. Three people in the audience vomited and one had a seizure. Another, a seventeen-year-old girl with a red buzzcut and red mascara, fell down the stairs later in the evening, during the headliner, and suffered a compound break of the femur. After her red-streaked tears ran semi-dry, she lit a lighter while being taken away in the ambulance, and held it up, swaying, as the morphine took hold.
Jackie B takes a limo to the Staples Center with Ronnie McGee and an assortment of other colleagues, because Scuzz magazine knows how to arrive in style. McGee wears sunglasses and has his hair in a ponytail, which Jackie B stares at, while imagining garden shears. She drinks champagne in a private box from high up, with coworkers, record execs, media people, some athletes, stars. Taylor Swift is there. The show takes an unreasonable amount of time to start and there is no opening act. When the lights start to dim, Jackie’s urge not to be around these people grows until she can’t bear it, and she abandons her flute on the ledge of a Ficus planter, ignoring Ronnie McGee’s confused cries after her as she leaves the box, takes the stairs, past the flood of fans still in the tangential tunnels of the arena, and uses her press pass to allow security to grant her access to the floor, where she squishes between perspiring sacks of flesh and black cloth, smoke, ecstasy, chains, boots, smells of many kinds, both recklessly dirty and overly clean, as an ambient hum that sounds like gale winds fills the auditorium. This sound has been encroaching for some time. It is only detectable now, but she knows it’s always been there. She elbows her way as close to the stage as she can, and cranes her neck.
Sorg Sorgenson, at the present moment, is not at the show. He is in his home city of Copenhagen, dining at Noma, where he is served a dish containing the rare Helsing berry, to which neither he nor the restaurant staff know he is severely allergic. Sorg Sorgensen breathes in the aroma of the wondrous dish. The smell alone is magic. He is transported. He takes his first bite as, 5608 miles west, Mantle takes the stage.
Mantle wears a white dress. It is not necessarily a wedding dress, in that it does not bear the look of a dress that would be interpreted as having the primary use of ornamenting a bride, but it does appear to be a dress that could be worn by a bride of modern tastes, should that bride choose to deviate from what someone might call convention. The stage is set, keyboard and laptop and wall of amps. Any audience member not wearing ear plugs is about to suffer. Jackie B does not wear earplugs. The thought hadn’t occurred to her. Mantle bows, and strikes the first key, and their body responds to the pulverizing weight of the decibel level, of the thing called noise music but the thing that is so much more than that, erupting out of the towers of speakers, out of the crust of the earth. Mantle reacts to the sounds of their creation with violent tremors, as does much of the audience.
Mantle is asked regularly in interviews if their wiry frame is ever hurt from the constant involuntary thrashing their live music elicits. “Always,” they say.
During the 97 minutes that Mantle is on stage, no visible injury from an outside source befalls them. But, the dress, once white, begins to turn red in spots. Most observer-listeners are too enraptured to notice or care or understand. Jackie B notices. As Mantle aches through the performance, the blood soaks through, until the entire garment is dark red. Jackie B imagines blood leaking from Mantle’s ripped-open scars, from their skin peeled apart by the very force of the music, from every pore of their body, from deep within.
Mantle’s blood soaks the dress so thoroughly it no longer appears red at all. It has become black. The weight of it begins to cause rips in the fabric. The dripping black garment, similar enough to Mantle’s day-to-day robe, becomes tatters over the passing of time. Jackie B, essentially deaf, in a moment of terrified all-consuming clarity, wonders how she will conduct an interview in this state, hers or theirs. The volume is an annihilating weight, a compactor, closing in, crushing her ear drums to dust. She beats her head, hoping for a sound. Soon, all is auditory hollow wind, even as Mantle thrashes on stage, thrashes more violently than ever before. Some audience members fall on top of each other. Some scream. All are ecstatic.
When she was a teenager, a boy Jackie B liked, Bryan Santos, got hit by a car while skateboarding across a busy intersection, skateboarding across the intersection to her, to meet her. She remembered the sound of the metal trucks of the skateboard colliding with the steel of the hood, the cracking of glass. The sounds of crunching, breaking, of things not supposed to happen. She rushed into the intersection, to meet her young love, who lay dazed, bleeding from the head and arm. She held his hand, waiting for the ambulance, unable to hear anything but the echoes of collision, and eventually sirens. She rushes the stage but can’t because the crush of bodies is too thick, so she taps a shoulder much taller than her, and points up, and though it’s not really that kind of show, and the cocktail dress she foolishly wears will become ripped to scraps, she is thrust atop the sea of the crowd, on shoulders and heads, feeling as if on a wave, as Mantle kneels, pouring sweat, barely able to hang on, fingertips on the white and black keys, and Jackie B is thrown in directions she can’t control, and she sees in her mind the glorious union for which she hopes and needs, because the person on stage needs it, needs her, needs help, medical or spiritual or otherwise. She is thrust. Fingers fall off the keys. She believes, maybe, she can make out the crowd’s roar. She reaches out, to try to touch Mantle, but she’s too far away. Mantle lies face down on the stage, and the crowd screams with catharsis and jubilation, and Mantle, from the ground, face down, reaches out too, which Jackie B believes, knows, is for her. She reaches, but she cannot reach.
2025