Aira wants a bigger transition. Flo turns it down first. Between a keyboard, one stubborn bar and two different ideas, they find the moment before the drop.
Aira already has her fingers around the dial when Flo shakes his head. “Wait. Not yet.” She stops, looks at his hand, then at him. The same transition is coming through the speakers for the fifth time. The melody rises, the rhythm gathers pace, and exactly where things should take off, it all sounds slightly too polite. “More of that,” she says, pointing at the dial. Flo turns the volume down.
For a moment, she looks at him as though he has misunderstood. Headphones lie beside the small sequencer on the table. Daylight still hangs in the window, although the room lamps are already on. Aira leans forward. “I said more.” “I know.” Flo starts the section again. At the lower volume, it suddenly sounds thin. More than anything, though, it reveals how much is happening at once.
He pushes his chair aside and sits at the keyboard. There is no big explanation, just a few notes played with his right hand. The motif is immediately recognisable even with everything else missing. Aira listens to the last note, then hums the phrase, coming in one beat too early. Flo repeats it. She tries again. This time she leaves the little gap in place. “That one?” she asks. He nods.
Flo, the developer of AIRA-FLOW and producer Vtec-Flo, could give a lengthy explanation of musical tension. Instead, he plays the phrase a third time and leaves his hand hovering above the keys afterwards. Aira waits. Then waits a little longer. When he finally continues, she instinctively leans forward. He stops. “That is what I am looking for.” She studies the silent keys. “The moment when I start getting impatient?”
Back at the sequencer, he points to the space before the dial would make any difference. Together, they take something out for a short section. Aira listens, pulls a face and asks to hear it again. Making things smaller immediately before the big entrance feels wrong at first. Then the next bar arrives. She takes her hand away from the device. “Okay. Again.” Flo lets the passage run without touching anything.
On the third listen, her foot starts moving with the beat. The melody now has a moment to itself before everything returns. It is not a finished song, and certainly not a final mix. But the two no longer have to explain what they are looking for. Aira taps her finger on the table, right in the gap. Flo watches her finger and grins. “You are filling it up again.”
They laugh, and then the room grows quiet for a while. Flo works at the computer while Aira listens to another section on headphones. There is a muffled sound outside; someone is closing a window. The evening's big decisions now fit into a few seconds of music. He saves another version and plays it quietly, leaving the keyboard alone. Aira lifts one earcup. “I would still have liked to try that dial.”
Flo slides the device back towards her. She turns it, listens and turns it back. Then she tries again, a little less this time. He says nothing. In the end, her hand lands almost exactly where it started. “Just making sure,” she says. Flo nods with an exaggeratedly serious expression. When the transition begins again, they both keep their hands off the table. Neither of them misses the next entrance.
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