APRIL 2021

            For the best viewing experience, please make sure you view DoaRE with headphones.  If possible, try and find a quiet space without too much sunlight as you’ll be watching a black screen.  I thank your eyes for following seven minutes of text and your ears for following this sound ‘projection’ into our rat’s mind.
   It’s hard not to miss the underground, the space of bodies and darkness.  I have always treated a ‘session’ as a form of detox.  I know I’m not alone in thinking this way.  I believe we all miss live music.  Times may be strange but Voice Memos are easy access (if you back everything up!).  Every sound you hear is from a recording I have made on my phone.  They are remnants of pre-Covid DJ and live sets in London and Glasgow, taken between 2019 and 2020 (I make at least five recordings a night if I know I’ll later want to refer to that siiiiiick transition or tackle the all-important how on earth did they mix those tracks so well??!?!).  These sounds were then mixed in with recordings of random experiments on my Prophet 08 that heretofore served the sole purpose of occupying space on my phone.  I have been determined to mix the two worlds (i.e. spacescape) together for a while now, so along came DoaRE.

What about the spacescape?  When we put in our earplugs in any space with loud music (and I hope we all do) we’re cutting out frequencies and getting a somewhat muffled result.  I’d imagine a rat hearing any such sounds through the brilliant sound systems of the UK and beyond must also hear something that feels a little

                      | b l o c k e d |

                                                                      distant

                                            h a z y

or it makes them scuttle far, far away, I’m not sure.  The spacescape could indicate that the rat is having a seriously cool dream, tapping into memories of past raves, flashes of the crowd as they dash underneath a floorboard, invisible.  Conjuring flashbacks, just as I have done through these phone recordings.

What does it all mean, though?

Nothing here is too literal.  If the ‘rat is synonymous with the raver’ and a rat died under the floors of a nightclub in London, this does not mean a raver has died ... necessarily.  Depends on our definition of death.  We could think of it as an ego death, in which case this may be the reason behind the astral projection of sorts.  But I leave this open to your interpretation.  There’s no strong message here; I just wanted to hypothesise how a rat would rave, if they have raved before, if they had the chance to rave with us.  I invite you to think about this at the next one.

Enjoy in good health.