The office: a journey in percussion

The internet has a worming effect on your body and mind, burrowing in between them and creating gaps or channels where you thought there was harmony. Your mind moves at a million miles an hour; it tries to make the body void and null. Nowhere have I more acutely felt this than in my part time job with a company which exists solely to play Google, and make its clients more prominent in cyberspace.

Sitting down and staring at one thing for such a long period of time is unnatural. The dull thrum of your nerves pulsing into the swivel chair, the self-prohibited desire to get up and run around or at least laugh at loud a lot, forms a kind of bass-kick somewhere in your body. Fingers absentmindedly flicker and snap. Mouths open and close silently. The pace and length of the strides from the kitchen to the desk to the toilet quicken and slacken.

Far from this activity dulling or diminishing the body's natural energy - it simply short circuits it. The energy and movement which might power a human body is harnessed to one spot, given a very short leash, and HAS to be rechannelled - into spasmodic eructations on your phone, trips to the toilet, another cup of tea. The office becomes a music and a dance. A duet between body and computer, a dialogue of energy between collective and individual; a flurry of tap-tap-tapping keys and click-click-clicking heels, with the snare and slide of a chair across the carpet.

This short-circuiting of my energy usually leads me, with that internet conditioned click-it-and-see impulse, to YouTube, and music. Whilst I previously thought that my listening choices were a little freedom amidst the invisible office straitjacket, I've realised that music does more than that for me.

I tend to listen to similar songs when I'm working; and I think that the music I choose does what my body wishes it was doing. The music is movement - in sound rather than action. It dances for me, for all of us and our short-circuited energy. I wonder whether the songs I choose chart this daily journey, of body and mind slowly splitting, admitting (or not) to a common beat and re-emerging in time for the end of the day.

A typical morning starts somewhere like here. There's a sense of unity, or openness. Words and rhythm are in a half-blended haze, something optimistic and straight forward, the heat and awareness of the outside enters the office and rules it for the first half an hour.

Then that soulful sunniness sits down, settles and things become more insistent - that beat becomes more regulated, just as the office has clicked into gear and is clap clap clapping through. Meanwhile, the individual, like the voice of Pharoahe, kicks away from that rhythm, unconsciously or not. The harmony of the first half hour dissipates as body and mind split.

And then the mind kind of takes over. The beat quietens down as the office subdues, caffeine buzzes trickle away, and like an unstoppable stream, the random synapses of the over-stimulated mind kicks in, clicking between two screens, or 23 open tabs across 4 windows, emails, scorecards, Google results. A collection of divergent references and unfinished thoughts, like Def here skipping from disco to techno to soul and back. (This video reminds me of an internet-era Beckett's Not I: a disembodied mouth that can't do anything but let the thoughts pour out unstoppably, constantly distracted and shifting. The rhythm, the chaotic monotony of being online.)

But inevitably, this surge fades away into a dulled almost-silence, just the hums of the piano (or, in my world offline, the computers). Confronted with the mind at a dead-end, and a body switching off. At this point, an attempt to jump out of the lull by imagining or identifying yourself with a class, a drama, or a struggle, that will make you feel authentically real, or turn the dull feeling into an identifiable story. But this is self-dramatizing and little more.

It's after lunch and there's still several hours to go. Blood pumps around the stomach and the office is slumped, echoes of the morning (like Burial's traces of the night before) reverberating gently and muggily around the desks. That post-eating haze, as workers finally all arrive back from their breaks, begins to wear off and the first beats of the afternoon settle in. A metronomic pulse overlayed with tiny offshoots and tributaries, as some sink further into the monotony, and others pick up and propel themselves into meetings or tea breaks.

By this point, the montony has become kind of fun. So consistent and strong that you can build off it. My wayward mind has started finding ways to do what I like without paying too much attention to the work I have to complete. I begin to care less about the overall thrum and more about how I can fit new rhythms and ideas into that steadiness, without being caught out.

And by this point, we're less than an hour before the end of the day, and I can feel it. I can't quite pay attention to the beat of the overall office anymore, because a fidgety feeling takes over, itching in and around, resisting any steady rhythm. I go get a glass of water. I sit up, I sit down. I have a chat with a colleague. Everyone begins to splinter, recovering tiny gestures, motifs, and overlaying them on the general office monotony.

This persists, revs, and releases itself, deliriously scattershot onto the streets outside, meeting a thousand others, and cycling home.