Elements of this novel have been percolating for over a decade on and off, it’s been through more mutations and variations than Coronavirus at an anti-vaccine protest. The 2020 pandemic impinged on the editing process and the structure of Deep Scratch, during lockdown for example, the DJ focused on re-learning to beat juggle and scratch.
The art of turntablism and prose share adjacencies, crafting routines is like plotting a story in some sense. Two themes running throughout this composition and editing process are rotation and decentralization, mixing across scale and medium from linguistic phonemes to musical notes, chapters to albums. Deep Scratch is the result of a long experiment: a DJ crafting textual tales versus a writer of textual tales crafting DJ routines, with a drummer stuck in the muddle.
Sacrificing go-ahead plot and chronology for an experimental improvisational approach. Hang on in there. This novel is a work of fiction, any resemblance to entities either living or dead is purely coincidental (although often meaningfully synchronistic) that said, the author and the DJ would like to remind the reader to peek out the window and ask: am I living in a science fiction novel?
–Steve Fly.
Amsterdam, 21st December 2020.
DEEP SCRATCH 