A Sound Question

About this story:

This story constitutes the opening 3 parts of a speculative/British folk horror/literary/humour novel I'm writing. There are another 16 short chapters, as of writing – about 13,000 words in total so far and I'm coming up for air before I go on. I would be fascinated to read what you think. I will say at the outset that, if you had more of this, it would be apparent that it is written from 2 different perspectives: A first person interior view from the protagonist, and a third person omniscient view from an avuncular narrator, and it switches between the two.

Foretext

From: Curious Acoustic Artefacts of Albion and Belerion (1745)

It is an apparent and undeniable truth that some places in the world are both more awake and vociferous about it than others. It is also an irrefutable fact that the places that seem the most sleepy and quiet are aware of a different kind of consciousness altogether.

Chapter Zero

There are places where the land remembers things longer than people do. Cornwall is one of them. It doesn't hold grudges—that would require intent—but it does hold onto impressions, the way old stone holds onto damp. There is an awful lot of damp in Cornwall.

People arrive in places like Cornwall thinking they're running from something - the city, a spouse, an audacious attempt to sell Hyde Park to a Saudi property speculator. They're usually wrong. They're running toward something. The moor doesn't care which. The moor has been waiting either way.

Our DJ didn't know any of this as she stepped off the train in Penzance.

The bus station was right there: All points west—and a few, begrudgingly to the east—could be reached, which meant the town had perfected the geography of escape even if it hadn't managed much else.

Chapter One: Clash

Oh shit! Tonight is different.

Normally, these headphones are a cave. My cave. In here, it’s just the kick drum and the almost transparent outline of the last track’s outro, a fading phosphorescence rendered in tinny, filtered one and three beats. Out there… out there is the messy static.

Sometimes, like tonight, the static gets… No, not in my headphones, in my head.

Breathe. Just breathe through the next eight bars.

The air is almost liquid-thick. It’s not the smoke machine. The coconut oil would make it smell like a gorse bush inferno. There are a few vapers in, smogging their sweet pink scents through ridiculous beards. It’s not that either; it’s the expectation. They’re waiting. They’re a single, multi-limbed creature pulsating in the dark, and I’m supposed to be their shared nervous system. I’m supposed to know what it needs before it knows what it needs.

Okay. There. The downbeat. Bring in the new line. Gently, you’re dragging it, you’re holding back.

A quick clockwise turn on the jogs. Pull it forward a smidge.

A flicker of hesitation. A millisecond of doubt and it could all be over. Pull the mid, squash the synths into the claustrophobic bass of the low pass filter.

Steady. Nudge the jog again. Pull the bass on two, bring the bass up to flat on one. Allow a little flange on the remains of the drums. Before the kick drum on one, let the drums on two accompany the pads, then cut on the intro fill.

There’s an unexpected clash. A tiny, metallic shiver runs through the sound. My teeth ache.

Idiot.

You had this. You mapped it in your head. Key, tempo, energy curve, it was a perfect bridge. And now you’re fumbling the handoff. It’s a train derailing in slow motion and the tiniest bit of prep would have spotted those triplets in the intro. When they come in too hot, it tastes like licking the end of a battery.

They’re not booing. They’re not even stirring. But the energy… it’s gone flat. Like a soda bottle left open. I can taste the fizzle. I’m pouring sound into a sieve.

My digital crate — thousands of possible doors — and suddenly they’re all slammed shut. My thumb on the scroll wheel feels stupid, blind. A playlist. A stupid, arrogant, safe playlist is what a professional would use. And make it out with some degree of self-respect.

Is that why I feel like a child playing dress-up in mummy’s clothes?

The monitor screen blurs. BPM numbers swim. It’s not music anymore, it’s data. It’s maths I’m failing. The freckles on my knuckles are constellations I don’t know the name of.

Just find the thread. Find the thread you dropped. It’s here, in the bassline, just follow it…

But there’s another thread. The thread of them. The couple arguing by the bar whose bitterness is a sour yellow smear in the air. The guy riding the beat too hard, his aggression a jagged red pulse. The wallflower whose loneliness is a cold, thin blue mist. Or is that the vapers again? I’m drinking a polluted cocktail of all their moods. Empathy doesn’t feel like a gift right now; it’s a leak, and I’m sinking.

Focus. On the mechanics. The fader. The crossfader curve you set. The filter. Turn the filter, smooth the edge, yes–

A voice, my own, but thin and far away: You’re performing. This is a performance. And you are performing being in control.

The tattoo on my thigh itches. The blackwork, the frequencies bleeding into organic lines. Chaos into art. That’s the promise. But this isn’t art. This is… maintenance. And I’m a terrible mechanic.

One perfect transition. That’s all I need. One moment where the sound doesn’t just mix but transforms, where the room gasps without knowing why. One moment to prove that the static in my skull can make something beautiful instead of just noise.

But what if the static is all I am?

Next track. Now. Don’t think, just go. The door is closing, go—

I drop it. Not on the one. On the and. It’s off. It’s all wrong.

A hot wave of shame, bright and citrus-sharp, floods my chest. The headphones press harder, a vice. My sanctuary is now a panic room.

Fine. Okay. Fine. So this is a stumble. A public, silent stumble. They might not name it, but they feel it. The creature has sensed a tremor in its spine.

Breathe. Again.

This isn’t about salvaging perfection. It’s about recovery. It’s about making the stumble part of the dance. Find a track with grit, with distortion, and lean. Lean into the mistake. Lean into its deliberate sound. Make the jagged edge the point.

It’s not what I wanted to give them. It’s not the gentle wave I’d planned. It’s something else. Something harder.

Maybe that’s more honest.

My hand moves. Less thought, more instinct. I feel a perfect transition into a tune I can feel the edges of, I close my eyes and reach for its name. I search for a track by feels; a semitone shift that breaks free and rides to its own drop. I’m looking for a  texture in an alphanumerical world. I can’t search for something that feels like the grit in my throat. Words fail me, where feelings fade in and out. Listening to the cue, looping four bar-ready to roll.

I cut the bass and melody on the outro, slam the fader. The new sound doesn’t blend—it collides.

And for a second, the static in my head… syncs up with the noise on the floor. The creature roars. Not in pain. In recognition.

It’s not pretty. But it’s alive. And so, for now, am I.

My hand is still on the fader when I feel it. Not the music. Something underneath the music. A phase shift that moves against the sound rather than with it, peaks leaning into troughs, presence leaning into absence.

Either that or I’m wearing dance-music-cancelling headphones.

Some old fart would pay good money for those.

Chapter Two: Not Quite There

The club was called Bombardiers, which told you everything you needed to know about its ambition and nothing useful about its character. The name suggested a tired seafront pub in a knackered seaside resort that was founded on a toxic promise of army garrison spending and Victorian capitalism. Any pub born from such circumstances would end in sticky carpets, a fruit machine and the persistent ability to fail every challenge the twentieth century could set for it. The reality of Bombardiers was all of that writ large over three floors in an outer suburb of London. A repurposed warehouse next door to a long-closed army barracks on the wrong end of a street that was either up-and-coming or going nowhere, depending on which estate agent you asked and whether you were buying or selling.

On this particular Thursday night, Bombardiers was absolutely rammed.

The crowd on the main floor had reached a critical mass where individual humans stop being individuals and become something else: a single, heat-generating, bass-responsive organism with several hundred opinions about queue management and one shared, instinctive understanding of a good drop. They didn't know they had become this organism. They thought they were just dancing.

Up in the booth, elevated above the organism by approximately four feet of reinforced plywood and a great deal of mutual pretence, DJ Cake was finishing her set.

From the outside, she looked entirely in control.

This. This was the point.

She was small and precise behind the decks, her violet hair catching the strobe in irregular flashes of bruised ultraviolet. The t-shirt she was wearing said GATEAU across the chest in letters that had been washed so many times they'd gone slightly philosophical. Her headphones were enormous, which on anyone else might have looked absurd but, on her, looked like a natural extension of her skull. She moved with the economical, unhurried confidence of someone who had made this look effortless for long enough that she'd almost forgotten it wasn't.

Almost.

In the last forty minutes, she had pulled off a recovery so technically perfect that not one person in the building had noticed there had been anything to recover from. This was either a triumph of craft or a tragedy of invisibility, depending on how you looked at it.

Cake, to be fair, was not looking at it at all. She was pressing two fingers to the side of her headphone cup with the focused, distant expression of a person who has just heard something that wasn't quite there.

And that, as it will soon be shown, was an accurate assessment of the situation.