clubcopy.ca Cumberland

A timber DJ booth with a corrugated roof inside a slate cavern at Cwmorthin. Teal climbing helmets fill the crowd, hands are raised, and G-SHOCK Sessions is projected on the rock.
Deep Sleep, Cwmorthin slate mine, 15 October 2026. G-SHOCK press photograph. The file reached the desk with no photographer credit.

PICTURES

Deep Sleep

On 15 October 2026 Roni Size played a timber booth 1,375 feet under a Welsh slate mine. The world-record claim went out as a submission.

format
Feature
volume
10
date
Oct 17, 2026
author
CJ Archer
places
Eryri, Cwmorthin, Bristol
artists
Roni Size
words
1,547 words · 7 min
photo
Photo: G-SHOCK (press)

The photographs arrived on Friday, the day after the rope.

In the first one, somebody has built a shed where a shed has no business being. Timber posts, a curve of corrugated roof, a run of bare bulbs, a speaker cabinet on the left, and a black banner that reads G-SHOCK RADIO and G-SHOCK SESSIONS, with the Japanese under each line and a watch drawn big enough to wear as a shield. Behind the banner a man in a helmet is bent over the decks. The red light throws him orange. The wall past the shed is raw slate, and across it, cut off by the curve of the rock, the projection says G-SHOCK SESSIO. In front of the shed the hands are up. Every head still has a climbing helmet on, most of them the same teal, headlamps clipped to the brim. A grey sleeve, a tattoo across the back of the hand. A woman in a black top under her helmet. A brown jacket with both arms in the air. Thin blue lasers leave the left side of the booth and die in the dark.

That is Deep Sleep, the chamber at the bottom of Cwmorthin slate mine, 1,375 feet under the mountains of Eryri, on Thursday 15 October 2026. Roni Size played a one-off G-SHOCK Sessions set there. G-SHOCK Radio’s DJ Nav was on before him. Go Below, the leaseholder, took the crowd down. These are the pictures of what the ballot turned into.

Roni Size at the decks in a blue climbing helmet with the headlamp still clipped on, headphones over a black beanie, right hand on the jog wheel, blue lasers and red light.
Roni Size in the shed. Same roof, same helmet. G-SHOCK press photograph. No photographer credit in the file.

The second frame is the shed from the player’s side. Size has the headlamp pushed up on a pale blue helmet, headphones over a black beanie, locs on a mottled shirt, and his right hand is a blur on the jog wheel. The corrugated roof is the same one. The light has split: a blue fan off to his left, a red wash across his shoulder. The mountain is the ceiling.

A person in a long red cagoule, green cap and headlamp, standing in rain on a broken-slate path between quarry walls above Cwmorthin.
Above the mine, before the rope. Rain, a red cagoule, a headlamp already on. G-SHOCK press photograph. No photographer credit in the file.

The walk before the rope

The third frame is still in the weather. Rain shows as white stitches. The path is broken slate, grass on the tops of the walls, a spoil heap filling the top of the picture. A red cagoule to the shins, hands in the pockets, a green cap, sunglasses, a headlamp already switched on, a black pack. The press pack sent this with the underground frames as the way in. The face is under a hood and a pair of glasses, so this desk will not hang a name on it. What the picture does show is the walk you do before anyone clips you to a rope.

From there, the release lists the route without dressing it up. Miners’ stairways, cold flooded passages, underground ravines, loose slate, vertical drops, scrambles, zip lines, abseils, about two hours, and then the shed. The decks, the sound, the lighting and the recording gear came in on people’s backs. The rave showed up after the last descent. There was no walk-up queue.

Eighty-five decibels, and a headcount that will not sit still

Finlay Harrison went down for DMY and filed on the 17th. A Go Below mine leader named Nick told his group that the slate would need more than 140 decibels before it had any chance of shifting, and that the night was capped at 85. The hands in the first photograph are up inside that limit. This was a rig that had been carried, and then told to keep its voice down. Harrison also reported a team of 18 moving sound, lights, cameras and batteries through the workings for 48 hours, in and back out for the next load. The press note, dated London, 16 October, and sent over by Stella Briem at Moments Live, puts the same labour in one sentence and leaves the headcount out.

The headcount is where the reports split. WalesOnline’s gallery that afternoon said 39 people attended, and one caption called them ballot winners. Harrison wrote that five competition winners were drawn from more than 4,000 entries, and that journalists and the hauling crew were down there with them. The release will not settle it. Attendance, it says, was small, strictly ticketed, and capped at a level Go Below could safely take. Medical and fitness declarations. Certified PPE. Externally qualified Mine Leaders the whole way. A certified Mines Engineer had already inspected the chamber. Sound and vibration were monitored against agreed parameters. Harrison’s version of the hospitality is chilled soft drinks and no alcohol, on a dancefloor that is a strip of ground between a body of water and a drop.

The anthem, then the break

Before Size touched a record, the anthem. Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau through the underground system. Go Below has played it on guided trips before, carol services included, so Thursday sat down in a habit the mine already had. Quarrying at Cwmorthin began in 1810, and the first soundtrack was drills, tools, wagons, running water and voices in the slate. Harrison’s guide, Chris, picked up a jumper bar in one chamber and said a single blast hole could take seven hours, and that lighting the fuse had sometimes been work for a child small enough to get clear. Then the anthem. Then Nav, warming up the crew who had been down there getting the shed to stand. Then Size.

He had said, before anyone descended, that he has always played to the place and the people in it, and that the furthest version of that would be pumping a set into the mountain, hearing it travel through slate, rock and mud, and bringing it back. The engineers built that chain. Convolution reverb measured the chamber’s impulse response beforehand. During the set, vibration transducers drove elements of the music into the surrounding slate. Geophones and hydrophones caught what moved through rock, water and mud, and that signal went back into the mix. He also said that by 1,375 feet, everyone there would already have shared an adventure. With the helmets still on in the photograph, the line is a caption.

Harrison heard him open on something atmospheric, a spoken-word sample about Bristol, and then about an hour of breaks in a chamber whose ceiling disappears. The release says the finished performance was prepared for G-SHOCK Radio, with the full set soon on the station’s Mixcloud. The note we were sent did not include a link to the recording itself, only to the station.

G-SHOCK Radio on Mixcloud

A form, and a watch

The world-record line went out as a submission. The release calls Thursday an attempt at the world’s deepest underground rave, and the notes to editors say it remains subject to independent verification. Jason Heffler, writing the photo story for EDM.com on the 16th, caught the missing line on the form: the brand has not named the body that will assess it, or said when a decision might arrive. Go Below’s own sentence, in the same release, is about the people who cut the passages. “This event serves as an opportunity to share the history of the quarrymen with both the attendees and a wider global audience.”

The other reason for the shed is a watch. The GDG-B100 MUDMAN, £200, in three colourways named in the note: GDG-B100-1 in black, GDG-B100-1A3 in dark green with orange accents, GDG-B100-1A5 in sand with a black bezel. Shock, dust and mud resistant, water resistant to 20 bar, a high-contrast MIP LCD, a red LED backlight, Smartphone Link. The group in the helmets were the first to get their hands on it, ahead of the wider release. The question the night leaves is who gets to sell underground. Thursday’s answer is projected on the slate, above the helmets.

Size has two dates that are not a hole in a mountain. Full Cycle’s Sunday special is at O2 Academy Bristol on 8 November, billed in the release and on the Live Nation listing as a 25th-anniversary day party. Doors at 3pm, curfew at 10. Krust and Suv are on the bill with him, Dynamite MC and Tali hosting, Kenny Dope and Craze as the guests. Reprazent’s New Forms, the 1997 Mercury Prize record, comes back with a full live band on a UK tour in June 2027. The release pointed at the tour and did not list the cities.

Sources

Signals From the Heart of the Rave Vol. 10

CJ Archer