Random Sequence: Rococo Clamor (fiction)

[random phrases worked into a story]

Once again, Ivan was cursing the terribly thin walls of his apartment. His neighbor, a female acoustical reveler, was engaged in yet another paroxysm of rococo clamor -- a wrongheaded morass of unwelcome piping. She was an amplified flautist who alternated her mawkish compositions and airheaded orchestrations with earsplitting vocalizations. Tonight, the lyrics of her self-composed song -- a gabby quacking about a "star-crossed dove" or a "long lost love" or some such vapidity -- had sent Ivan into a pissed simmer. He'd already tried complaining to her, as well as to his useless landlord (a hairsplitting countess type who only wanted to know how he defined "loud" as opposed to "discernable"). His complaints were ignored, or met with lectures on the difference between discordant and consonant harmonics.

Ivan's only alternative was a technological one: he'd purchased a white-noise machine, whose sonorous whir drowned out most of the cacophony. But it still left him feeling helpless, like a pusillanimous surrender monkey. Fortuitously, though, it also gave him the mental space to plot his revenge, which would also be technological. Already, he was planning to turn his robust stereo speakers to face the wall he shared with his obstreperous neighbor. And he happened to have in his possession several albums by the dissonant Stravinsky, the metallic Rammstein, and the inimitable Yoko Ono....

[not to be continued]