It was actually Alec Empire who recommended Zan Lyons to me, the God of Sadness comprised of forty kilos of afro, a lineage of good karma and sadness. Heaps.  Zan, he said, was something of a new breed of entertainers. Every time you pay the 10 euros at the entrance and hear the first 10 seconds, you know you’re in for 6 more hours like that every single time. Zan tweaks his shit, he’s got this violin and feeds it through distortion pedals and it is so strange at a party, we have to see it. The sheer absurdity of a distorted violin at an electro party and the small chance of both Alec and Nic Endo turning up at a party is something that makes you walk through a smaller district of similar streets and knee-deep puddles of rain that come to greet you every few steps.

So we’ve been walking for like 20 minutes and it’s finally a small Japanese dude under an alcove who asks if we’re there for Blade Runner or the other party. The “other party” seems to sound like fun but we end up paying 8 euros at a ragged black counter, a hidden hand-written scribbling giving us the right hint, “Zan Lyons vs. Blade Runner”.

And then we enter.

A huge factory interior. To the left, a gigantic projection of Blade Runner without sound. Under that, under glittering blue light, forty kilos of afro, a lineage of good karma and sadness. Heaps. With a violin, a Mac and some extra equipment. To the right, some four hundred people, in silence. Listening.

And then it’s almost like crying. Right there, some four hundred breaths that never seem to come out totally, a Polaroid of you being alone in the middle of the crowd, very alone, any crowd. This is Friday night. And it all comes back now with two years of dreams every night, all of them shattered and force-fed back again with the emotional equivalent of the universe’s biggest power driller on vasopressine. Vasopressine makes you remember. And we are the violin. (It’s a hellish and painful thing to be a violin, guess you haven’t heard that one before.)

`You gotta hate somebody before this is over,’ said the
Finn’s voice. `Them, me, it doesn’t matter.’
`Where’s Dixie?’
`That’s kinda hard to explain, Case.’
A sense of the Finn’s presence surrounded him, smell of
Cuban cigarettes, smoke locked in musty tweed, old machines
given up to the mineral rituals of rust.
`Hate’ll get you through,’ the voice said. `So many little
triggers in the brain, and you just go yankin’~ ’em all. Now
you gotta _hate._ The lock that screens the hardwiring, it’s down
under those towers the Flatline showed you, when you came
in. _He_ won’t try to stop you.’
`Neuromancer,’ Case said.
`His name’s not something I can know. But he’s given up,
now. It’s the T-A ice you gotta worry about. Not the wall, but
internal virus systems. Kuang’s wide open to some of the stuff
they got running loose in here.’
`Hate,’ Case said. `Who do I hate? You tell me.’
`Who do you love?’ the Finn’s voice asked.
He whipped the program through a turn and dived for the
blue towers.