Roni Size Takes Drum and Bass 1,375 Feet Underground in a Welsh Slate Mine

Roni Size played 1,375 feet beneath a mountain this week. The location was Cwmorthin Slate Mine, near Capel Curig in Snowdonia, and the occasion was a record attempt staged with G-SHOCK: the world’s deepest underground rave.

The crowd was five people, drawn at random from more than 4,000 entrants. Go Below, the adventure company that runs trips into the mine, guided them down. Everyone else listened through G-SHOCK’s Mixcloud radio station, which carried the set back up to the surface.

Cwmorthin opened in 1810. Its slate went into the roofs of Britain’s expanding towns, and the complex was once regarded as the largest of its kind anywhere. That industrial history made the practical questions more interesting than the stunt framing. Slate, one of Go Below’s senior mine leaders explained on the way in, absorbs sound differently from other rock. The system would have needed to push past 140 decibels before it could plausibly move anything. Volume was capped at 85 dB.

Online speculation had imagined something closer to a free party in a tunnel. Permits, guides and the basic physics of a disused quarry ruled that out from the start.

A brand record attempt is a brand record attempt, and this one was organised as such. What it leaves behind is a strange and specific image: a sound built in basements and warehouses, played at a volume that could not trouble the walls around it.