The Place Between Songs

Start of a Slipstream novel stolen from a chapter hidden in my bottom drawer since 2002.

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 nothing else.

1: 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 like a gorse bush wildfire. 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 cola 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 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 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.

2: 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.

3: The Unsound

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 the moment the signal left the desk. I’m no propeller-head, but everything seems normal and yet, what happened with the sound was still weird. Could it be that the new sound guy is unsound?

Or is it me? Maybe not – if there’s one thing I know, there would have been a lot of mansplaining fired my way if it had been noticed by anyone else but me. The EDM peeps are pretty picky - less so when they are high enough to dance at 4 am to the rumble of the rooftop air con.

And it’s not the first time something has gone weird in this place. I’ve heard it all: That time when the minicab office started broadcasting over the booth monitors; 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’; or when the MC left the stage to go to the bathroom and forgot to turn off his radio mic. It was OK - I was doing a mini mix of Enya, so there was already a lot of swishing going on.

Tonight’s weird phase cancellation was a first and now 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 my DJ friend Cola’s latest rock-heavy stream. We’ve been trying to get a back-to-back together but she keeps the schedule of a jet-lagged sloth.

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, it seems my flat suddenly sits 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 metaphorical – 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.

I remember that sound recordists snatch 15-30 seconds of ambience before and after their take, in case they need to patch what passes for silence in the recording. The ambience is simply not here.

This flat is flat. It suddenly has nothing, except my heartbeat and it has started to race.

My breath catches in panic mode and I hear a serration in my throat. Something like this happened before, not with the sound but with my breathing.

Calm down. Because saying ‘calm down’ always helps.

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

Once I have a measure of my breath, I put the cans back on as inoculation. I spend the next few hours experimenting with taking the TMA–2s 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, Cola’s Too Many Guitars set, 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 close between me and my neighbours, each step an attenuation of sound. The ambience of the room too, temporarily restored then lost again. The neighbours seemed untouched by whatever this is. The punters last night couldn’t hear what I couldn’t hear. This is a very local problem.

I put the headphones back on against the sound cancelling world. I cry to the wonderful clatter of Sunday Morning by The Bolshoi. The song is sad in the angry, sardonic and disrespectful way of youth, but it’s the messiness of a 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 of forced exile. Its beautiful, arresting sadness carried on tired strings always stops me in my tracks and its effect this morning is profound. It has always reminded 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 my Dad’s funeral. I hadn’t ventured to the wild west far end of the county and kept myself in the genteel, ordered orbit of Truro, specifically the crematorium a few miles out of town.

Technically speaking, Truro’s a city, but I like to call it a town because it annoys the residents. A girl’s got to have some sport.

Some time in my early twenties, the chapel finally had its way and managed, with the unconscious aid of the Methodist Church, to scare all the children and, crucially, their parents away. The building had sprung leaks and Dad bought it for a song - maybe as little as a hymn - with the explicit condition it could not be turned into 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 was onto something with the bolthole idea. He even gave me a key when he was not well and left it to me in his will, but I never made it there, there were a few formalities and I was afraid of losing it; I can’t even make it to the end of a goth tune, what hope do I have of wrapping up the personal effects and property of my dead father?

I removed the cans again and there it was: brief respite of normality bit-crushed into an enduring and profound absence. For something so subtractive, it feels like too much.

If only I could remember where the bolthole was. Online maps show very little detail in this part of Cornwall. Woongumpus or Bosullow Common? Carnyorth or Wheal Bal? They all sound like they came out of a Tolkien prayer book.

I say the words out loud, letting my mouth and tongue encompass their round forms like boiled sweets or chilled chocolate and ice cream.

Whichever way they are spoken, they emerge as grave, mumbled incantation. I wonder which disconsolate wail is closest? London feels like Mordor and the Mouth of Sauron rolled into one, and I need to leave. Now.