Warehouse Mirrors
In the half‑light of dawn, the world beyond the warehouse’s corrugated maw was a memory unworthy of recall. Within, the back room of Screem throbbed like a great mechanical heart, its pulse not in four‑to‑the‑floor house but in the gritty syncopations of funk, jazz funk, rare groove and moderate dash of hip hop. I stood behind the decks—two Technics SL‑1210s that gleamed under phosphorescent tubes, their platters home to hypnotic whirlpools of vinyl—and beside me, Baldy, my older partner in sonic crime, loomed like a half‑dismantled cathedral speaker, stocking up on Red Stripe with the professional voracity of a man rehearsing a ritual exorcism.
The air was dense with the vapours of spilled lager, sweat, and the fleeting perfume of ecstasy; the floor vibrated beneath a thousand staccato shuffles. Above, a mishmash of party lights roamed in erratic patterns, painting the naked brick walls in bruised magenta and sickly chartreuse. Smoke swirled in lazy columns, refracting the colours into shimmering veils that wove through the crowd like spectral dancers.
I cued Herbie Hancock’s ‘Hang Up Your Hang Ups’ on the left deck. Through the dead wax, the slip of the needle was a scalpel through dusk, laying open the ribcage of silence. The thrumming bassline hit like an awakening: a living thing that scuttled underfoot, seeking entry to spines and skulls. Voices around me became guitar accents, voices in my mind became horn stabs, conversations piano flutters. I lost myself in that fracture of time—the moment the beat drops and every physical body in the room surrenders its individual heartbeat to the collective throb.
Baldy was already three cans deep, and the empty tins lined up beside his mixer like tombstones. He swilled the next can with the grim determination of a bulldozer operator clearing a site: no finesse, all force. He leaned in with a “Whoom woom, woom!” as the bassline rolled on its upward lift; I glanced over to see his mouth stretch into a grin as he slapped the can down on the mixer’s edge. His bald pate shone like a beacon, proclaiming his rank as elder provocateur—an alchemist transmuting maltose into soundwaves.
I slipped Quincy Jones’s ‘Boogie Joe the Grinder’ onto the right deck. The room stuttered as the smooth intro and muted strings wafted outward, levitating the dancers in a jazz funk delirium. Overhead, the laser’s green pinpricks came alive, fracturing into prisms across sweaty forearms and tattooed shoulders. Someone in the crowd raised a cardboard sign: “Not House — Funk ’til Dawn!” A cheer rose, but it dissolved into the music, which was already stretching into the next phrase, the next dimension.
Behind me, I heard a sudden, grotesque bulge of sound—a human retch amplified through the PA like industrial feedback. I didn’t notice at first; the turntables hummed, and my mind was folded into the record, my fingers ghosting across the edge and starting a playful, muted scratch pattern for the next transition. My spirit was entangled with harmonies of the funk, my fingertips responding to pitches before my brain registered them.
The retching came again, more violent this time, like a machine trying to expel an unprocessable error. I turned to see Baldy doubled over the main speaker; the cans strewn at his feet in chaotic constellations. He vomited not mere stomach contents but a deluge that pooled at the speaker’s base and started to slither outward, dark and viscous. In that moment, the vomit itself seemed to take on a life of its own: sinewy tendrils creeping along the rubber matting, glistening under the strobes like oil‑slick rivers on a neon planet. But I was already gone, already riding the grooves of Quincy’s brass counterpoint, never noticing the world repainting itself behind my back.
Baldy straightened, face ashen. He raised a finger in salute—a salute of defeat and honour in equal measure—and stumbled back into the crowd. A few dancers recoiled from the advancing slick; some, intoxicated by both beer, bad drugs and beat, christened their shoes in the offering. Someone yelped, but no one stopped dancing: the funk was too potent, the bass too insistent. The vomit was subsumed into the ritual, another sacrificial element to be danced upon.
I hit the crossfader, letting Quincy and Herbie collide in a fusion that bent syntax, what a godforsaken cacophony that was: the trumpet stabs jostled against scratchy electric piano chords, and the two records conversed in a strange dialect of sympathetic but non-syncopation. In that warp‑speed moment the crowd split into two masses—one drawn toward the speaker’s foul effluence like moths to a malevolent glow, the other spinning around me, arms raised, seeking catharsis in the ritual of rubber‑groove contact.
Baldy re‑emerged at the threshold of the back room, wiping his lips with the back of a trembling hand. His jeans were stained; the sheen of his scalp was now matte with grime and indignation. He staggered back to the decks as if returning from some other plane of existence. He placed a trembling hand on my shoulder, and I felt the tremor ripple through my own bones. Our eyes met in the mirror that glinted behind the turntables: his. mine. two souls linked by sweat, spirits, and the alchemy of music.
Without a word, he grabbed the next record: a UK press of ‘Black Water Gold (Pearl)’ by African Music Machine, and dropped the needle. The opening bars wafted like sugar‑cane smoke. He turned up the trim toward delirium levels. The horns unfolded, urgent, plaintive, insisting on sweetness even in the face of bitterness. The congas rattled against the deep pocket of the bass, and the crowd surged forward, closing the space between the vomit’s tide and the decks, as though compelled to congregate in the eye of the storm.
A line formed around the mixer—hands hovering, requesting requests. Baldy, sweating, wiped his brow with his sleeve. He selected records by feel, guided by memory more than vision, as if the grooves themselves whispered in his ear. I watched the rack of vinyl blur like spinning planets, each disc a world we’d conjure into being for its three‑minute lifespan.
Soon, the storm peaked. I cued up ‘JBs Latin’ by Spitting Image, and the room went ballistic—bodies contorting, heads swivelling, faces ecstatic. The vomit slick, now a glittering sheen under the stroboscopic glare, became a stage extension: a no‑man’s‑land where dancers slid and fell and leapt as if on ice. Someone skated across it, pirouetting, leaving dark footprints like those of a disappointed ballerina.
I felt possessed. My hands flew across the mixer’s knobs, cut the echo here, coaxed a high‑cut there, drawing new shapes from the collision of records. The two decks became extensions of my limbs, and I existed nowhere but in the crossfader’s fulcrum. I was the prism that split sound into colour; I was the amplifier that magnified silence into thunder—an epicentre of kinetic force caught in a hall of fractured reflections, every mirror an eardrum echoing back the fury I summoned. The walls were almost entirely glass: rectangular slabs set at angles so absurd they could have been smashed and haphazardly reassembled like the shards of an overlarge kaleidoscope. Each pane caught the rotary glow of the strobe, slicing the room into thousand‑fingered beams of light that ricocheted off mirrored surfaces and refracted into wild geometries. I saw the decks duplicating themselves—twin turntables, then quadruple, then a grid of eight or sixteen that stretched to infinity, arms spinning vinyl in unison, each needle a serrated calligraphy inscribing grooves of thunder onto the air.
My hands moved, but I existed in a hall of simultaneity: the left wrist cupping the mixer’s fader in one reflection, the right elbow propping my chin in another, an arm raised as if conducting a subterranean orchestra in yet another; an octopus of orchestration. My face fractured into a thousand martyrs: some grinning, some grimacing, some locked in a trance of exultant carnage. The crowd—mirrored back at me a hundredfold—became a churning organism of limbs and torsos, each body multiplied into an army of dancers seizing at the air like desperate, jubilant vessels of sound.
I hit the square ‘stop’ button on the deck. Silence snapped open, and the room swallowed the gap like a black hole. Then I let the groove bleed back in, vast and monstrous. It rolled forward in layered waves, each one captured and hurled back by the mirrors until the echoes recombined into a stroboscopic cacophony. I felt the noise fold into itself—thunder recycled into lightning—shards of emptiness colliding until they coalesced into a single, blinding flash of decibels.
The lights stuttered in response, illuminating the mirrors’ bevelled edges in quicksilver bursts. I watched the reflections intersect: a single hand moving the crossfader split into nineteen tiny, synchronised dancers, a solitary face conniving with its doppelgängers to orchestrate an act of aural vandalism. The entire room seemed to warp: the mirrored surfaces bulged outward, pressing in on themselves, creating the impression of a living, breathing resonance chamber.
Above me, ceiling‑mounted lights recoiled as though stung by the racket, shrinking their beams into narrow needles that stabbed the glass walls. The reverberations ricocheted again, mapping the shape of sound onto the architecture: ripples of bass caressed the corners, skittered along the mirrored floor, and thundered back up the walls in a surround‑sound spectre show. My reflection flickered next to Baldy’s—him drenched in Red Stripe sweat; head bowed in a convulsive prayer to the mixer’s gods—our twin forms locked in the ritual crucible of the decks.
The mirrors remembered every moment, every pause, every violent gesture—and multiplied them, so that the silence before the drop became an aeon and the drop itself a cataclysm that shattered time. I pumped my fist into the reflective void; the gesture fractured into innumerable fists, each one punching through the glass of expectation, releasing an avalanche of phosphor‑charged noise. The thunder I had magnified roared back at me, refracted through a hall of echoing selves, until I could no longer tell whether I had made the sound, or the sound had made me.
In that mirrored frenzy, I too became a worshipper of sound, but as catalyst and medium, between the silent pulse and the momentous crescendo that swelled into an earthquake of deep funk. And when the final echo finally hushed, the mirrors sighed in unison—thousands of glass lips parting to exhale the last residue of thunder—leaving me alone at the decks, the epicentre of an apocalypse of sound reflected into eternity.
Baldy leaned in close, shouting above the din. “Play it, bay!” he roared, slapping me on the back. His breath reeked of stale lager and something sour. I grinned; eyes wild. I knew the moment he meant. Here it came … ‘House of Bamboo’ by the longest artist name ever … Ray Ellington And His Group with Bobby Richards And His Orchestra. The first twang of twisted funk guitar slid out, hooky and warm. The dancefloor liquefied. The dancers melted into a sea of undulating limbs, surrendering to the primeval groove that ‘House of Bamboo’ summoned: pounding rhythm weaving a tapestry older than modernity, deeper than irony. In the rainbow arcs of laser light, they moved like forest spirits, liberated from every day except this one; yet a few confused punters—not accepting of the diversion of ‘House of Bamboo’—slinked off back to the house room. In that space, Baldy and I were high priests of the vinyl church, our altar the mixer, our offering the records.
He drained another half‑can of Red Stripe—his final stand—and smashed the empty against the speaker’s grille. The can dented. He roared in triumph and staggered back, arms outstretched, as if embracing the gods of funk themselves. For a moment, he looked like a fallen sun, and I could see in his grin that he had achieved something beyond mere intoxication: transcendence through absurdity.
We played until the dawn’s pale fingers pried the warehouse door open. We played until the last breath of smoke dissipated. We played until even the puddle of vomit became a subdued relic, trampled into a mere slip of memory. When at last we let the music die, as always, via Kool and The Gang’s ‘Summer Madness’, the crowd exhaled in relief and disbelief, as though roused from a shared fever dream.
Baldy and I stood side by side, the decks silent beneath our hands. He clapped me on the shoulder. The morning light pooled around us, tender and accusatory. Our uniforms were stained, our eardrums ringing with echoes of everything we’d summoned. In the hush, I caught my reflection in the mirror: wide‑eyed, sweaty, entirely alive.
“And that, bay,” Baldy said with a crooked smile, “is how you preach the funk in a house rave.”
I nodded, unable to speak, for my tongue was still tasting the aftershocks of Congolese congas and Jamaican lager. In that moment, I knew we were bound together—the elder and the younger, funk alchemists in the back room—woven into the warp and weft of that surreal dawn. And even now, years on, when I close my eyes and hear the faint swish of a needle in dead wax, I can feel us there again, defying genre, defying gravity, defying sense, as the world outside still slept in its house, and the funk still burned.
This article is an extract from the forthcoming book The Dark Nineties: Falling Out of Love with Hip Hop by Adam de Paor-Evans, published by Squagle House, 2026.