A one-off G-SHOCK Sessions set in a slate mine, with the rock wired into the mix. The recording is up now.
Cwmorthin is a slate mine in North Wales, and on October 15 Roni Size played a set 1,375 feet down inside it. G-SHOCK paid for it as one of its G-SHOCK Sessions shows, a ballot picked who got in, and the claim is that it was the deepest rave ever held underground. That part is not confirmed yet. Somebody independent still has to check. There was no door. The only way to the room was about two hours of waterlogged passages, ravines, scrambles, zip lines and abseils with Go Below's mine leaders, and the decks and the recording kit went down on people's backs. No walk-ups. The Welsh national anthem went up in the chamber before the first track. Then Size played, with DJ Nav from G-SHOCK Radio in support. The part producers will care about is what they did with the rock. Vibration transducers pushed the music into the slate. Geophones and hydrophones picked up what came back through stone, water and mud, and that signal went into the mix. The sound team had been down earlier to measure how the mine responds, so the set was built for the room rather than dropped into it. What I want to know, and none of the write-ups say, is what the mountain actually did to the low end. Slate is dense, the chamber is wet, and a kick fed into that and picked back up by a geophone is not coming back the way it went in. Whether that read as a resonance, a smear under the bass or something they had to carve out, nobody has said. The recording should tell. Headphones, and listen for what sits under the kick. Size, before going down: "By the time we're 1,375 feet underground, everyone there will already have shared an adventure... It's the most underground of underground raves ever." The reason a watch brand paid for a drum and bass set in a mine is the new MUDMAN, the GDG-B100, which the people down there got to wear before it goes on sale. Go Below holds the lease on the mine and ran the trip. The full set is on G-SHOCK Radio's Mixcloud.