Mirror-shades

by Owlor

Track 6.

Track 6.

I never planned this trip, one second I was preparing for the gig, the next something broke inside and I just dropped everything. Literary dropped. If my life was a film, the records would shatter, but they didn't. Vinyl don't shatter dramatically like shellac does. When vinyl breaks, it chips away quietly.

I did exactly ONE thing before I found myself on the ferry with a last-minute ticket I got in exchange for an autograph and I'm so thankful I did it.

“Astro$RF?” I asked to the pony towering over me at the pier.

“It's Crossfade nowadays,” Astro$RF replied and gave me a weak smile. “I just got your letter. At first I thought it was a prank, I mean, what where you planning to do if I didn't rush right down here to get you?”

“Waited until you came?” I tried to reply, but my voice felt very weak.

Astro$RF studied me from head to toe and tried to meet my eyes behind the mirrorshades; a slight shiver of my lower lip betrayed the emotions my sunglasses hid.

“You totally need some coffee,” came the analysis, and it was right.

---

It occurred to me that Crossfade's apartment could be mistaken for my own. What is it about DJ-ing that makes us attracted to obscure movie posters and crates as furniture? OH, that's right, poverty and lack of decent storage space.

Crossfade seemed a little apologetic about the state of the apartment, but I didn't care. If anything, I was relieved that the interior matched my state of mind, even tough my mind didn't have nearly as many empty pizza cartons...

---

Once I finished dumping all my anxieties on my old idol, Crossfade left for the kitchen and returned with two hot steaming cups. Coffee... black ambrosia, nectar of the alicorns! I, felt my strength return with each sip I took.

“So, how have you been?” I asked. “I'm sorry I never wrote.” Crossfade raised an eyebrow and looked vaguely amused.

“No probs, I figured you just didn't have time for us little ponies,” came the blunt reply.

“'Little ponies'? You're like the best DJ ever!” I exclaimed. Crossfade shook their head.

“I was a DJ, but you ruined my carrier.” A laugh, did I detect some bitterness?

“Now it's all about your dubstep, and I just couldn't get into it. There's just no order to the noise... Sure, the music I play can be pretty heavy, but at least it has SOUL. Your tracks are about the only ones I can stand.”

“You don't need to flatter me, I know they are terrible.”

“I'm being honest, your dubstep tracks are nothing like what the genre turned into. They should call the new stuff something else, like 'brostep', cus it's nothing but drunken bros skanking around.” I giggled at this.

“We really like naming genres, don't we? What used to be house turned to techno, and then the hardcore techno turned to Nu Style, and now dubstep, what's next, techno-hardcore-nu-dubstep?”

“Yeah, I've always thought of music as riding some sort of cosmic wave. We can try to name every new peak, but in the end, we're talking about something ever-changing as if it was something static, and that doesn't really work, y'know?”

“Right now, I feel washed up on the beach,” I quipped. My lower lip started to betray my emotions again.

“As a matter of fact...” Crossfade began, transparently trying to find something else to occupy my mind, “I did a remix on one of your first hits. It's not really done yet, but I was thinking, maybe you'd like yo hear it?”

---

Y'know, I think I was starting to become a dubstep fan. There was a certain playfulness in how the choppy beats alternated with short vocal samples taken from old funk records. The feeling was like the last ten years of dance music put in a blender and funnelled trough a broken didgeridoo.

I could recognize my song there, sure, but Crossfade had enhanced it, turned it into something completely different. I can't wait to play this on one of my shows, I caught myself thinking.

“It sorta peters out in the end, I'm afraid,” Crossfade said, leaning closer to me. It was getting kinda hot in there, damn libido. Relax, don't make the first move...

“You don't have to if you don't feel like it, but I was thinking, now that I have the great DJ Pon3 here, maybe I could get some tips...” Crossfade half-whispered and at the last syllable, their lips touched the tip of my ear.

It was mild enough that it could be excused with simple thoughtlessness if I had a problem with it, but it was unmistakeably The First Move. I turned around and gave my idol a big, long fancy kiss and the evening sorta developed naturally from there...

Author's Note:

Crossfade is intended to be a gender-ambigious character, but english doesnt have a good gender neutral third-person pronouns, so I had to twist my prose quite a bit to get around this fact.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, another inspiration for this plot point is actually Stephen Fry. He had quite a breakdown one and simply walked out of a performance and got on a boat. It's a testament to how beloved Stephen Fry is that even the most notorious gossip rags started to sound genuinely worried at the fact that he disappeared.

Vinyl's description of dubstep was partially inspired by how my dad described the bass in the song Nation of Wusses by Infected Mushroom as "sounding like a stooned didgeridoo". Infected Mushroom is a psytrance band rather than dubstep, but they sounded this freaky long before dubstep became a thing. Hmmm, vinyl scratch in Goa... file it under ideas I'll get to some day...