Right now, Saint Imogen Plume is two minutes into 190 bpm and still standing
In a wet Glasgow railway arch, a 71-year-old in feathers and bicycle chain is playing hardcore at a speed that makes the brickwork hum, and the stool beside her deck is untouched.
The stool is still where the promoter put it. Left of the decks, a folded tartan blanket on top. Two minutes into the set, Saint Imogen Plume has not looked at it once.
At 190 beats per minute a kick drum lands every 0.32 seconds. Hers has the tail chopped short, so it hits like a door dropped flat on concrete. Overhead a train crosses the arch on its way out of the city. The rumble sits under the kick for four bars and then loses the argument.
Her opener is a 12-inch with the pitch fader pushed to +8. A sampled choir has been squeezed until it sounds like a kettle with ambitions. Over it she runs a cassette loop of a tram bell through a spring reverb. The tape is worn soft, so the bell wobbles slightly and every wobble lands a little late. I would not fix it. Nobody should.
Then the armour. Pheasant, goose and a few black cockerel feathers are stitched over a vest of bicycle chain. She builds a new one every winter in a back room in Govan. Every time she nods, the chain on her left shoulder taps the edge of the mixer. It ticks in the gaps between the hi-hats like a free extra cymbal. Whoever tuned that did it by accident, and it sits close to a B-flat.
She blends by ear, with no sync button and no screen. Eight-second overlaps, hands flat on the pitch faders, the second record leaned in a hair at a time. Forty minutes from now the drift between the two decks will still be under 0.2 bpm. I have watched people with laptops fail to manage that in a quiet room.
The crowd is about three hundred, in wet jackets, and they are steaming. The arch drips from the ceiling in four places and everyone has stopped caring where. A man in a green cagoule holds a full pint at shoulder height through a double-time breakdown and does not spill a drop.
Someone beside me asks how long she can keep this up. The promoter, who has worked with her for six years, says he has never seen her sit down. Not at soundcheck, not at the bar, not on the night bus home. He put the stool out anyway, as a courtesy.
Eleven minutes in, the second chorus of the kettle choir drops and the room goes up like a flare. The stool now has someone's coat on it. It is the most use it will get tonight.
