This is where the sound happens. MRI, Inselspital Bern. Photo: Janina Neustupny

Tube Techno

Short Essay

In this essay, our author turns an MRI scan into a rave of sound – reflections on confinement, sonic states of mind, and unexpected moments of liberation.

Pfff-zzz-pfff-zzz-pff-zz – braaaaaaaa. The set begins. Every snarl of the machine conjures millions of brain images that come to life in seconds. My thoughts jam. Transparency has its limits. I return to this tube every year or two, thanks to a micro-tumor that’s been squatting in my head for 15 years – a bit of anarchy has always won my sympathy. They call him a harmless fellow, but he keeps costing me money – a trickster messing with my hormones. Thanks, bud.

Thoughts tangle like pasta. My brain roasts in the narrow tube, uneasy like an overcrowded club. Yet my hearing sharpens. Why do these high-pitched bleeps feel oddly comforting, even liberating?

Stretched on this mattress seeing my blue toe nails, my thoughts flow while bpms rise – ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. How differently can one experience sound? What is it that makes me sky-rocket when a beat tickles through my whole body or a guitar solo makes me pile up like a storm cloud? Ratatat – the tube techno energizes me and resembles the collective spirit like a flash of lightning discharged on a summer evening. A moment of an «us» in this solitude. Ratatat – inner peace, while the pace is still high in the tube.

The bored assistant’s voice cuts in. Machine stops. Music stops. Cold sensation in my arm. Making my brain glow like a flickering lightshow for my radiologist and neurologist. The second set starts.

Southern Return by Dimitri Howald

Dub-dub-dub-dub-dub-dub-dub second thoughts as well. Has Daft Punk landed here? I feel lonely now, a bit lost. Snarling pulses – tak-tak-tak – spinning around me – tak-tak-tak-tak-pfff – through my body – tak-tak-tak-tak – pfff. They feel more threatening as I long for the lightness of Dimitri Howald’s «7+9=1» levitating me with a sonic hug, beaming me to his own musical universe. Brazilian warmth. All that jazz and love. Far away and always close.

Tsch-pfff-dadadadadaaaa – draadradraaadraadraaadraaadraaaa, the apotheosis of my session is near, so is my mental state of mind, slipping into acceptance. Buzzing, beeping – whatever. Somehow, tiredness gets to me, I can switch out the sonic inputs totally, blend them off into silence. Like the contrast medium in my veins, my state of mind illuminates and settles for the last minutes of tube techno.

MRI soundscapes can be found on YouTube – a strange kind of techno anyone can tune into. And composers like Patricia Bosshard and Simon Grab once turned MRI sounds into music.

Biography

Janina NeustupnyJanina Neustupny is Head of Outreach for Norient since 2022. She’s a cultural worker and team member of Musikvielfalt.ch with a passion for connecting artists and pushing projects. Follow her on Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Published on February 18, 2026

Last updated on February 18, 2026

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Sweat and Focus

by E.R. Pulgar

On a humid Miami night where techno melts into dembow, samba, and ballroom, a first rave becomes a baptism of sound, sweat, and transformation. I hear it churning beneath the bridge. I watch my teenage self get closer to the drone of a big bass, the type that makes the walls not just thud but go glomp-glomp-glomp-glomp. The kind of bass that makes wet jelly of a concrete wall. Nasty, in the best way.

I’m alone for this one, my first. I’m in tune to the beat, black platforms stomping while I walk, the moist air overwhelming as I near the little house with the big sound at its center, the place where liquid sound slowly became solid. Glomp-glomp-glomp-glomp-thump-thump-thump-thump.

The house is tiny, the bouncer drop-dead gorgeous. They have a cherub face made demonic by way of a white contact lens in their left eye. Their broad shoulders and muscular chest are barely covered by a black tank, little waist barely clinging to mesh shorts not-really hiding tight electric blue briefs. Their boots are trembling to the sound. They look me up and down, then wave me in. I feel the hard techno blaring from the speakers make waves in my hair.

Past the guard, a small empty living room, turntables in the back, and a room of bad bitches shoulder to shoulder writhing and swaying and punching the air, letting their hair down and up and down again, maniacal servants of the rhythm, a sweet dream of sweat and focus set to purple light coming from the floor, just barely illuminating the walls, the faces, some with studs in their ears and noses and cheeks and eyebrows. We’re vibrating to the beat, and letting ourselves vibrate.

When we think we can’t get sweatier, dembow infiltrates the techno, the old shit my cousin made me listen to in the car driving up and down Caracas, a rattling clang straight out of a song by The Noise.1

Fist-bumping becomes waist-whining. I find myself in a grinding train, and give myself to the moment. Soon, I’m in the dead center of the pit. I finally catch sight of the DJ. Their black lipstick is slightly smeared, a leather harness bounces over the tiniest silver bikini in tune with the orange braids framing their chiseled face, a Medusa that brings life. They lock eyes with me, wink, and turn up one of the knobs on the controller. The sea of bodies keeps throwing it back.

Carnival whistles and drums crash in, reggaeton quickly swapped out, suddenly blended together with a raucous Brazilian samba. A circle opens in the middle, and two divas twirl, holy dancers spinning infinitely toward the divine, like the monks I read about in school.2 Shoulder, shoulder, pop, pop, pose. The DJ takes another shift, a loud metallic crash in tune with one of the girls – gorgeous in a flowing green skirt, matching kitten heels, and a yellow bikini – dipping and getting back up.

HA!

The audience watches her get back up, strut towards the other girl, tease her with her hands, walk back, dip again.

HA!

Diva #2 spins faster, moving toward the middle and not stopping until the floor is hers.

HA!

Back on the floor, back up, gravity left outside in the rain of this humid city. I’m captivated by the battle, and the bass and cymbals drown it out. I peek at the window and see that familiar swelter of a tropical rain, a hidden percussion gently shaking the outside. I’m rocked back as one of the divas dives back to the floor, rocking us all, an adoring crowd drenched in saltwater sweat.

1. The Noise was a Puerto Rican collective in the 1990s that largely converged in a club of the same name.
2. Whirling Dervishes are Sufi mystics who commune with Allah via active meditation

This is an excerpt of an in-progress novel that takes place in the afterlife and a fictionalized version of Earth. This section, partly inspired by raves and ballroom, follows the main character’s introduction to raving in Miami, drawing from nights of partying and reporting on nightlife around the world and in the 305.

Biography

E.R. Pulgar is a Venezuelan American poet, translator, and music journalist. They are the author of Sonnet to the Serpent and Other Poems (Wonder) and the translator of Isadoro Saturno’s Dear Parent or Guardian (UDP). Their poems and translations have appeared in Poetry Daily, Changes Review, Epiphany Lit, the Poetry Project Newsletter, and elsewhere. They are a contributing writer at SPIN, and their cultural criticism and reporting has appeared in Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Resident Advisor, i-D, and elsewhere.

Published on September 18, 2025

Last updated on September 18, 2025

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