ONE NIGHT ON THE PLANET OF THE BARKING SPIDERS

"While you're here, would you mind farting into this microphone for me?"
It was a spring evening. 1991. Peter's friend Numpty had just turned up with his girlfriend. 
Now, Peter was a keen audio enthusiast who spent a lot of time making home recordings. In the past Numpty had been asked to talk, read poetry and even ad-lib lyrics into a microphone. He had never, however, been asked to fart. Still, Numpty was nothing if not obliging, and so he stood before the microphone as requested, and began to clench...
Over the next few hours, the two twenty-something males recorded their farts and burps. Amazingly, Numpty's girlfriend remained with them - except when she needed to leave the room for air, of course - and Peter's impressionable youngest sister even contributed.
Over the next couple of years, the recordings which they had made that fateful night grew in notoriety. They weren't particularly good recordings - badly mixed on a twin tape deck, very rough and ready - but it was the content that mattered. Certainly, Peter and Numpty's peers were largely very impressed and, while one or two of the girls pretended to be disgusted, most of them clearly weren't.
Time moved on.
By 1994 Peter had a new microphone. He wanted to see how it compared to the old one and it didn't take much cajoling before he was persuaded to stage a second long night of the ill wind. By this time Peter was engaged to be married and the woman to whom he was betrothed also joined in... although she probably then decided it had been a bad decision, as their engagement was called off shortly afterwards. Funny that.
Time marched on again.
Peter bought a minidisc recorder. You can guess what he did with that.
In time he got married to another, more tolerant woman, who Peter discovered talked in her sleep. Peter tried keeping a dictaphone next to the bed in order to record his wife's nocturnal ramblings, but for some reason she stopped doing it, so he ended up recording the first winds of the morning instead.
One night in 2001 - ten years on from that first long night of the ill wind - Peter invited some friends round for a party. By now Peter and his wife lived in a different part of the country, and his new friends were unaware of his audio legacy. Peter ended up playing his recordings. His new friends were terribly impressed - and slightly drunk. One of them grabbed the dictaphone, farted into it and, before long, they were all at it. They had to open a window. A few weeks later Peter played these recordings to two young lads, who were barely into their teens. The way their eyes gleamed showed Peter that those young boys were having an epiphany. The looks on their faces as they gazed up in awe will remain with Peter for ever. My work is done, he thought. Today I have passed on the baton to a younger generation.
And time continued to pass.
Despite how it sounds, over the years Peter had in fact achieved more than just record farts. Somehow he ended up doing a bit of audio work with a proper chart-topping 80s band and was even interviewed for a job in a recording studio by the sea. While he didn't get the job, it did spur him on to take his skills more seriously and develop them. The days of recording bottom burps were behind him.
As time passed, technology improved - by now it was possible to make quality digital recordings at home, to mix and manipulate them, all with a computer. Peter had been married for over a decade, and even had a couple of kids, but still dabbled with sounds when time allowed.
And then, one seemingly ordinary day in 2011, somebody pointed out that 20 years had passed since that first notorious recording. That got Peter thinking... about advances in technology... and of the possibilities which those advances offered...
It was late one Wednesday evening, early 2012. Peter's wife was watching drivel on the telly and Peter felt rather uncomfortable following a surfeit of beans at teatime. Suddenly he took a snap decision, grabbed his iPod and nipped up to the bathroom which, acoustically, was the best room in the house. Five minutes later and he had made four short, sharp recordings on his iPod. "Is this death?" he croaked, gasping for air and getting a Doctor Who quote in, even as he threw open the window to get some oxygen.
By 10.30 that evening those four recordings had been transferred to Peter's computer. Peter's wife had since gone to bed, but Peter worked into the night, his face lit only by the glare of the computer screen. He manipulated his new sounds, slowed them down, sped them up, bent them out of shape and mixed them in surround sound...
It was 2.30 in the morning before Peter went to bed. When he awoke the following morning he listened back to what he had recorded the night before. It's good, he thought, interesting enough, but there is more to be done. What if I trim the beginning off some of those sounds so that it is less obvious to the casual listener what those sounds are?
By Thursday evening the work was complete. Peter listened closely and was pleased with his work. This is audio art! he decided. It is art with a capital F! One day, thought Peter, I will sell this work to Charles Saatchi for hundreds of thousands of pounds, and Saatchi will broadcast these sounds in a darkened room in his London Gallery. One day, thought Peter, Damien Hurst will visit that gallery, listen to these sounds and weep at my feet as he realises how his work pales in comparison to this sonic masterpiece.
Peter's wife came in to the room. She heard what Peter was listening to and said, "Have you been recording your farts again?" She tutted and shook her head. "Grow up. The washing up needs doing and I need help putting the girls to bed!"
Or, thought Peter, I could just upload it to my Soundcloud page.
And so he did.
He suggests that you click on the following link and play it loud.
http://soundcloud.com/user4198011/04-one-night-on-the-planet-of