Dead Silence

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; an aroma of burning coconut oil like a gorse bush fire. 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 close 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. But 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 is 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 lemonade 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 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 bass line, 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 on the outro, slam the fader. The new sound doesn’t just blend—it swarms. Grace notes surround and wrap around the phrasing, an arpeggio traps the root note and becomes a new motif; everything is in alignment.

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 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.

I’m back up in the booth after the owner bought me a drink at the end of my set. He must be pleased, he is famously as tight as a three-piece skiffle act. But also a bit of an old charmer, by which I mean one of those old hippies who never age in their own mind as much as it’s obvious they have to everyone else. It’s called latent self-image, I think. I saw it in The Matrix, so it must be true. Anyway, face like a bag full of spanners. Avoid.

I’m checking the gear, the CDJs, the mixer. I squint at the LEDs of the club’s PA and realise my expertise ran out when the signal left the desk. Everything seems normal but what happened with the sound was still weird. Could it be that the new sound guy is unsound? 

It’s not the first time something has gone weird in this place. That time when the minicab office started broadcasting over the booth monitors, or the CD glitch from a sticky finger that turned two and a half random bars of hip-hop into an unexpectedly sentimental paean to the word ‘fuck’. 

Tonight’s weird phase cancellation was a first and I can’t reproduce it. Perhaps I should lay off the heavy delay, sweep and transform FX combo for a while. Stacked filters turn feral in double-time.

I give in and walk home in blissful stereo isolation, wearing my TMA-2 cans, checking out a rock-heavy stream.

The streets are wet enough to be picturesque with the LEDs and neon smudged reflections marking a corridor of light back to the flat.

I open the door of my studio flat, slip off the ‘phones, and nothing.

Well, not quite nothing. There is an absence of sound, but it isn’t silence. 

As well as a front door, my flat is suddenly behind a noise gate. 

I can’t hear the extraneous sound that always pierces silence: a car passing on a wet street outside; the subliminal hums of the wiring in the walls and the kitchen strip light; the far-away swish and bang of the fire door on the landing; the wobbling subsonic wub of nu-jazz from an overpowered subwoofer located in the literal – and audio – basement. 

Even when I say ‘weird’ out loud, it sounds weird. There’s no sense of reverb or presence there. The peaks and troughs are evened out. It’s as lifeless as a mortuary fridge.

This flat is flat. It suddenly has nothing, except my heartbeat and that starts to race. My breath catches in panic mode and I feel a serration in my throat.

Breathe. In through the nose – a cool white cotton throw over my head – out through my mouth.

Deep breaths.

Air trapped by panicked, hitched breaths released patiently, which feels like shepherding a cow through a cat door. Once my breath is measured, I put the cans back on as inoculation. I spend the next few hours experimenting with taking the headphones off only to replace them when the absence engulfs me again. I try everything in the cans; chillwave, ambient, nature sounds. Then a lunge in the opposite direction; techno, industrial, hardcore punk. Every time the void of sound gets hungrier, every time I grow more tired. Worn away at my point of weakness until I leave my headphones on low and try to sleep.

I doze fitfully, unaware of what is happening outside my sound bubble. I get some patchy sleep, but not enough.

Light. An apparent quickening of the day as I lay on the sofa under a cotton throw, still dressed from the night before. 

The night before.

I sit up and take the cans off. I can hear my neighbours talking and laughing in the hallway - it’s a bit muffled and tilted towards a low pass filter, but the door is closed. Then more doors seem to close between me and my neighbours, each step an attenuation of sound. The ambience of the room too, temporarily restored then lost again. By the sound of the snatches of animated conversation, the neighbours are untouched by whatever this is. The punters last night couldn’t hear an absence of sound in the same way I could. This is a very local problem. 

I put the headphones back on against the sound cancelling world. I sink into a low mood, worrying about my hearing and have to have a word with myself. I can hear perfectly well in these cans. 

I cry to the wonderful clatter of Sunday Morning by The Bolshoi's Sunday School piano, tuned a quarter tone down to help its old strings cling on a little longer. The piano plays Chopsticks as intro and outro and its tone is of melancholy and exile. Its beautiful, arresting sadness always stops me in my tracks. Its effect this morning is profound. It reminds me of my childhood in Cornwall, the dour Methodist moorland chapel that, unlike the dour Methodist minister in charge, did not seem onboard with our Sunday morning presence there.

The last time I was in Cornwall was for Dad’s funeral. I kept myself in the genteel, ordered Copernican orbit of Truro and kept away from the wild west asteroid field at the far end of the county. I needed order and a crematorium overlays order on all human affairs.

Some time in my early twenties, the chapel finally had its way and managed to scare all the children and their parents away. It had sprung leaks and Dad bought it for a song - maybe as little as a hymn - with explicit conditions it could not be a pub, brewery, betting shop or general den of iniquity. It became his bolthole, spartan and cold, and he used it as a kind of audio lab.

He even gave me a key when he was not well  last year and then left me the chapel in his will, but I never actually made it there as an adult. They read the will in his beloved chapel. I was frightened I'd break down and lose it; I can’t even make it to the end of a goth song, what hope do I have of wrapping up the personal effects and property of my dead father?

I took off the cans again and there it was: brief respite of normality quickly bit-crushed into an enduring and profound absence. For something so subtractive, it feels like a presence, it’s the shadow of a ghost and it wraps around me.

To the left, the flat door opens in the hallway. Someone - or something - enters. My breath hitches. To my right, something clatters to the floor in the kitchen. Every synapse locks into the sounds because there are no others.

The flat door closes. The latch clicks, but the click is dead. Without a room around it. 

I make myself smaller, like a child who knows the house has gone dangerous: don’t make them angry, because it will hurt.

I move to the corner so I can see every other corner, the door to the hallway, the arch towards the kitchen. A shadow moves across the wall behind the tv and I tell myself it’s just my eyes playing tricks. I can already see my pulse thump in my vision, can hear the dark crimson thud in my chest, the jagged draw of air into my lungs. I am frozen again.

I wait for time to pass, time that I will not remember later, except as an absence of sensations; of smell, of touch, of sound, all the senses that add up to presence in the world.

I reach for my TMA-2s, but just as the cups touch my ears, the world violently reasserts itself. The ambience, the creak of floorboards above, the sound of car tyres on the wet street, it all rushes back in a single, deafening gasp as if someone opened the door again to let the world back in.

I feel a hand brush gently down my spine to the small of my back. The most unpleasant sensation being that it is not unpleasant. It swirls around me in sensations only, of shadows that cross my face, warmth on my neck, touches on my hips, a hand brushes across me, there is a breath in my ear and I am infected with silence while the world goes on without me. I am undone.

When I wake up, I am in an old Methodist chapel in Cornwall, a long way from anywhere of consequence. Shadows move across the far wall. They live in the silence and so must I.