Chris Bell

Songshifting Chris Bell

In the third and final Songshifting novel, musos, journos and punters unite to protest the impresario's ban on recorded music. Former music journo Rarity Dean is arrested and taken to the barge, the impresario's headquarters, where she suspects she's about to be tortured by agents Raguly and Nebuly. Meanwhile, her muso friends are resorting to unusual firepower in their rescue attempt. Rarity must harness all her initiative to try and convince the Affable DJ Hologram that indoctrinating audiences with the crowd control drug Deludol is misguided. Her experience as a songshifter proves invaluable as she rallies a new musical movement with the express aim of defying the authorities.

"There's a component of songshifting that allows us to zoom in on details from our pasts, but there's also a dreamlike quality to it. Once you get good at it ... songshifting allows you to access a node in a grid-like structure that interconnects all of your dreams and suddenly you're in there, a dream inhabitant..."

"Songshifting: An audience with the impresario delivers everything a reader wants from the best of speculative fiction: a coherent world at once richly textured, vividly painted and centred on an idea that is both surprising and relatable - in this case the transporting power of music. Bell's vision at once entertains and entrances. He has achieved that rare thing: a dystopia you don't want to leave." OLIVER HARRIS, DEEP SHELTER, THE HOLLOW MAN, THE HOUSE OF FAME

"Songshifting occupies a unique place in modern fiction: a simple, elegiac story, fierce and uncompromising, it is at once a love letter to a forgotten era, a richly evoked dystopia, and an examination of memory, longing, and music itself. Speculative fiction needs more writers like Chris Bell, ready and able to interrogate our world on their own terms, and probe the darker recesses of our minds. Songshifting demands to be read" ROBERT DINSDALE, GINGERBREAD

"Songshifting is wise, elegiac and compelling. It speaks deeply to what music means to us - not just as an art form but as part of our emotional landscape. Wonderful stuff" DAVE HUTCHINSON, EUROPE IN AUTUMN, EUROPE AT MIDNIGHT, EUROPE IN WINTER

What readers said about Songshifting

"[Songshifting is] as good about rock music as Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad - and in my eyes that's high praise indeed. It's extremely well-written ... Chris Bell does a great job of showing how much Rarity Dean cares about the music under her outer shell of journo cynicism, and he also does the even more difficult job of writing about music, musicians and the touring life interestingly ... Bell really knows his stuff when it comes to music, and he is able to convey that very well ... [he] does a great job of communicating the growing fear, paranoia and dread that the impresario's actions cause" Tim Jones, Beattie's Book Blog

"Bell writes excellently. It's particularly rewarding to see that done around the subject of music because it's such a hard thing to write about well. There's a real and plausible sense of the future musical landscape despite all the bands being fictional, and the characters are well drawn"

"Songshifting has the authenticity so many attempts at capturing rock music in a novel lack"

"The music scene that provides the backdrop to most of what happens is beautifully fleshed out. I love the slang Bell invented as well as the sense of history he invokes"