BETWEEN THE GROOVE: EPISODE 07
Fuckup: Right then, Chapter Seven up next, straight from the original novel. Kicks off with Sam Cooke… “Swing Low Sweet Chariot.” Sounds almost mournful.
Hal: And the text immediately follows with “hate washed ashore all at once like a shit tsunami after a toxic waste spill.” Yikes. It connects this to “the singularity” changing people fast, greed hitting its limits, the planet fighting back… framing the current mess in really stark, almost apocalyptic terms.
Fuckup: There’s this real sense of regret, too. He complains about “international clusterfucks” where artists and philosophers should have been stationed like soldiers defending reason and logic, but instead, they were “starved and stolen from and sold out and mocked and underfunded.” And adds, “…and they ain’t bitter.” Dripping with sarcasm, maybe?
Hal: He then zooms in on Amsterdam, the specific setting. He notes the insane tourist numbers overwhelming the locals, leading people to shift right politically just to try and cope. Compares the lack of nature unfavourably to parts of northern England, which is saying something!
Fuckup: Plush is witnessing the decay first-hand – the “creeping death of coffeeshops and cannabis culture,” turning from local spots into “packed gas chambers for greed heads.” Gentrification and over-tourism killing the vibe.
Hal: And he sees the official plans to “clean up the city” as pure hypocrisy, comparing them to Robocop – suggesting it’s all about authoritarian control and corporate interests rather than genuine improvement.
Fuckup: This opening feels like a real lament for a specific time and place (Amsterdam’s alternative culture) being destroyed by broader forces – greed, populism, over-tourism, possibly linked to that vaguely defined “singularity.” The bitterness that he claims artists don’t feel seems pretty present in Plush’s observations here.
Hal: Yeah, it sets a scene of cultural decay and political frustration, grounding the high-concept weirdness we’ve seen before in the very real-world consequences impacting Plush’s immediate environment. Less cosmic horror, more grim social commentary in this snippet.
Fuckup: Okay, Hal, diving into Chapter Seven of the original novel now. The user hinted at ‘ricorsi’ – cyclical history – and this opening hits it straight away with all these date calculations.
Hal: Yeah, Plush (or the narrator) is crunching numbers, finding the exact days between 1912, 1936, 2012, 2020… It’s pure numerology, looking for patterns and cycles, very much in that Vico/Joyce/Wilson vein of seeing history rhyme, or repeat.
Fuckup: Then we suddenly jump location and time – Malvern Hills, England, June 16th (Bloomsday!), 2012. We meet “Frank” listening under the hills for the legendary Amber Room. The whole vibe turns intensely occult – “chemical wedding of unholy demons,” blood-red sky, eternal fires…
Hal: And this “gang” playing “molecular tennis” under the “mad mountains”! Linked to Mayan legends, old esoteric literature, indigenous shamans, even William Blake. It’s building this deep, strange local mythology, suggesting hidden rituals and histories colliding.
Fuckup: There’s also that cynical point about how these prophecies and legends can be twisted by “power brokers” – engineers, spies – to manipulate public perception, turning myth into perceived reality, especially if people love a good ghost story.
Hal: It then posits this whole secret underground complex beneath the Malvern Hills – a Shangri-La of mysteries, weapons, and novel drugs, hidden away past Tolkien country like a “stealthy butt plug in the hills.” Lovely image!
Fuckup: But the absolute kicker is the list of people gathered outside a hospital near a wishing well there: C.S. Lewis, Aleister Crowley, Cecil Williamson (witchcraft guy), Frank Foley (spy), Margaret Murray (witch-cult theorist), J.F.C. Fuller (occultist general), James Jesus Angleton (CIA!), John Trump (Donald’s uncle, the scientist!), and Rudolf Hess (Hitler’s deputy)! What… the actual… hell?
Hal: That is one hell of a meeting! Talk about a conspiracy theorist’s dream line-up. You’ve got literature, the occult, witchcraft, British and US intelligence, military strategy, fringe science, and a high-ranking Nazi official all hanging out together by a wishing well near a secret underground base in Malvern.
Fuckup: This just blows the doors off. Forget simple populism; this suggests a deep, cross-disciplinary, multi-ideological conspiracy operating behind the scenes, potentially for decades, involving some of the 20th century’s most influential and controversial figures. The “Tale of the Tribe” just got a whole lot darker and more complex.
Fuckup: Alright, Hal, let’s get this next bit from Chapter Seven spinning. Plush is feeling the burn – cold dinner, sore arse, Dr Briq being a “daily demon.” Pressure’s on: publish or perish.
Hal: Yeah, but he still feels the mission: “The world needed this story.” Even wonders if it’s “too late for poetry.” He takes a hit, looks at the moon, and then… the moon splits into seven moons, orbiting like records around the pole star spindle! Another cosmic vision directly mapped onto turntable mechanics.
Fuckup: He sees the whole system in his head – Tarot, Tree of Life – like an animation sequence, “jumbled but all there.” He’s grateful the vision got through, but now faces the challenge of translating these mental images into sound, needing to draw in the air, use his voicebox… it’s a really physical, synesthetic creation process.
Hal: He cops to rhyming the synopsis “like a local nutter,” laughing at his own puns, conducting a “beatbox orchestra” where the strings are missing. That self-deprecating humour is always lurking under the high concepts.
Fuckup: Then he fires the needle back into the groove, and we get this output: dense, layered, almost incomprehensible text referencing “Berlingham” (Berlin + Birmingham?) on August 1st, 1936. It’s full of portmanteaus and puns – “stylus to breakers past pretence future weave of tim and wyf world word game,” “turntabius vicasset of recircuits”…
Hal: That is pure Finnegans Wake territory, exactly the kind of “Hologrammic Prose” he was talking about earlier. It’s language pushed to its associative limits, looping right back to that crucial 1936 date. This seems to be the direct result, the output, of the vision and the internal process he just went through.
Fuckup: So, we see the pressure, the cosmic vision translated through turntable logic, the struggle to articulate it, the self-aware humour, and then the dense, Wake-ian text emerging, zeroing back in on 1936. It’s a snapshot of the whole creative engine firing, pistons and all.
Fuckup: Right, Hal, the final brain-dump from Chapter Seven of the original novel! Plush hits a classic creator nightmare – laptop dies, loses a chunk of work. Cue existential despair and rage against editing!
Hal: He even cries out about starting the story way back in 2008! But then, the resolve kicks back in: “…this time I’ll nail it… gonna’ finish this fucking novel if it kills me.” He compares hunting the perfect beat/screenplay algorithm to something elusive and moody, quotes some bloke called “Eddie Turd” from the chip shop about just getting on with editing, and endures Nigel’s moaning about the DJ “racket.”
Fuckup: Then he hits the zone again. “Peaking,” “auto mode,” boom-bap in his head, scrawling like Tom Hanks going stir-crazy in Castaway. And what comes out is… well, it’s the definition of dense “Hologrammic Prose.”
Hal: Absolutely mental! He calls himself the “OOZE,” “deepus scratikus,” talks about “Blackus Bookus,” does turntable math (32 sealed copies, 78 sides at 78 RPM), disses Rod Stewart’s “plastic culture,” links hemp solutions to a “DJ apocalypse,” envisions edible, smelly, scratch-and-sniff records holding word permutations…
Fuckup: …mentions time bandits, Treebeard, phoenixes, beatboxers, water bugs with neuro-harpoons, planets planning it, Illuminati cookbooks next to Tibetan tea, having 123 files open, Amsterdam weed everywhere…
Hal: …explicitly drops Joyce’s “HΞRΞ CΩmes ΞvΞrybody,” talks metempsychosis, fighting materialism, banking satire, backward spells, critiques hijacked electronic music culture blaming the Tory Criminal Justice Bill, starves drug users of Taoist principles…
Fuckup: …and finishes with a final swing at Thatcher (“Milk snatcher”) and the whole “Military-Industrial Agricultural Media brainstain”! It’s a complete torrent, a maximalist info-dump spraying connections, critiques, and esoteric references in every direction.
Hal: So, Chapter Seven Summary: This chapter was a real journey through Plush’s immediate reality and psyche. It opened with bleak social commentary on Europe’s “shit tsunami” of hate and Amsterdam’s cultural decay under tourism and gentrification. Then it jumped to England for an elaborate occult conspiracy involving historical figures like Crowley, C.S. Lewis, spies, and Nazis meeting near a secret base in the Malvern Hills, culminating in a bizarre sci-fi trip to Planet Klaka involving DNA tennis and exploding jellyfish (which might have been a story Max and Percy were reading). Back with Plush, he grappled with the pressure from Dr Briq, calculated date cycles (‘ricorsi’), translated cosmic visions (seven moons) into sound and dense, Finnegans Wake-influenced text, and finally, after losing work and vowing to finish the novel, unleashed a massive stream-of-consciousness barrage covering everything from turntable math and Rod Stewart to platform capitalism, political critiques, and Joyce.
Fuckup: It’s a chapter that really showcases the chaotic energy, the political anger, the esoteric layering, and the sheer overwhelming information Plush is trying to process and shape with his turntables and words. You feel his frustration, his paranoia, but also his fierce determination.
Hal: Definitely a wild ride through the ‘Crabbit Hole’ and beyond! That’s our look at Chapter Seven of Deep Scratch. We’ll pause the analysis there for now. Stay tuned, stay weird, and don’t trust anyone with a Cthulhu briefcase!
“Last night a DJ shaved my wife”–DJ Max
“…They did what the kids call sampling
In the middle of the stable
With a turntable
Spin it like that
Spin it like that…
DJ Shadow – In Tune And On Time.
DEEP SCRATCH 