From Slough To San Francisco

Out today, remixes of five tracks from Duncan Gray's Five Fathoms Full album which came out last year, a chuggy cosmic disco delight from the heart of Slough. Five Fathoms Further is the hundredth release on Tici Taci which is an achievement in itself. The remixes take Duncan's sound and colour palette as the starting point and head outwards. Meat Katie remix the title track, adding a vicious kick drum, a throbbing bassline and some haste to proceedings. 

Bagging Area favourites Number (an extra- curricular outfit for Red Snapper's Ali Friend and Rich Thair where they get to explore punk- funk/ dark disco) take on Hot Jupe and send it to early 80s New York, the rubber band bassline sounding like it's been listening to ESG and ACR and the sampled voice could straight from an NYC radio station. Lovely post- punk bump and grind.

Jack Butters remixes In The Attic, high calibre machine funk bringing distorto guitar, tabla and fuzz synth bass. Mr BC's version of Greenville heads for the cosmic- disco after party, widescreen, robotic synth action. Finally Justin Drake takes on Shark Bumps, thudding kick drum and rumbling bass suddenly lit up by synths and sparkles. There are excerpts at Soundcloud and the full Five Fathoms Further can be found at Tici Taci. 

Over in San Francisco DJ, musician and producer Cole Odin has launched a new project called Joy Theatre, a label and a production house for the Bay Area. The six track album opens up with an already released piece of music, the seven minute majesty that is Psychemagik's remix of Cole's Dawn's Approaching- blissed out SF cosmische that never stops giving with chuggy drums, angelic vocals, big piano chords. Cole wrote Dawn's Approaching as a tribute to Underworld's Rez and when the synth squiggle appears in the third minute you'll hear why. A welcome re- release. 

There are five further tracks on Joy Theatre. Babylon Black is a dark disco delight from two Bay Area producers, Buna Babillions and Corey Black. Evil Eyes is bass led party music. Jesse Fahnestock is well known round these parts as one half of Jezebell and all of 10:40. In the 90s Jesse lived in San Francisco and DJed at Bulletproof, an influence on Cole. Jesse appears on Joy Theatre under his own name, Jesse Black Fahnestock, with a track called Quienes Son, eight minutes of dub- disco with snakey horns working their way in and some of Jesse' signature production sounds. 

Over on side two there are more Bay Area tracks and artists- D- Freq by Sweetdique starts out like the theme from an 80s teen movie but when things have gone very dark indeed and then turns into a deep, slo mo joyride. The Arturian gives up Break Free, shimmering cosmic sounds with thudding drums and bass, flashes of synth blazing across the skies. Finally Jamel Lee closes the album with I Remember The Sun- the sound of children playing, deep house drums, synth chords always looking upwards and a spoken word vocal about the sunlight. 

Vinyl available here. 

Forty Five More Minutes Of New Order And Friends

This is a follow up to last Sunday's Your Silent Face mix which veered into their New Order's back catalogue and those of some adjacent artists- Galaxie 500, The Liminanas, Ian McCulloch, Gorillaz, The Times, Mike Garry, Joe Duddell and Andrew Weatherall. This one starts off with another Power, Corruption And Lies song, Age Of Consent, and then heads off with some covers, some 80s NO, another Weatherall remix and some recent edits. 

Forty Five More Minutes Of New Order And Friends

• New Order: Age Of Consent
• Iron And Wine: Love Vigilantes
• Thurston Moore: Leave Me Alone
• New Order: Dreams Never End
• New Order: Lonesome Tonight
• New Order: Regret (Sabres Slow 'N' Lo)
• New Order: Vanishing Point (Rich Lane Edit)
• New Order: Blue Monday (Newly Reordered Remix)

Age Of Consent is the opening song on New Order's 1983 album Power, Corruption And Lies, a day- glo, lysergic rush of guitars, bass, drums and synths, Bernard sounding more comfortable as vocalist. His choppy, rapid Velvets guitar breaks are a joy too. A peak New Order album song. 

As is Love Vigilantes, the opening song on 1985's Low Life, forty years old this month. Bernard's Vietnam ghost story lyric is up there among his most off the wall, and the band, Stephen Morris in particular, are on it, the classic New Order sound perfected. Iron And Wine's 2009 Americana acoustic cover is a low key beauty, Sam Beams tripping the song down to the country that lies at its core. 

Thurston Moore's cover of Leave Me Alone, another Power, Corruption And Lies song, is from the B-side of a 7" single from 2019, recorded in Salford with 'local musicians and local pints', to quote Thurston. 

Dreams Never End is from Movement, the 1981 New Order debut that saw them trying to will themselves out of being Joy Division and into becoming something else. Hooky sings Dreams Never End, his bass and Bernard's guitar wrapping around each other, inching away from the shadow Ian's death cast of them. If a compilation of the band's 10 best album tracks were put together this song would be on it.

Lonesome Tonight was the B-side to Thieves Like Us, a superb 1984 single. Lonesome Tonight is its low key flip, melancholic, stripped down, beautiful, self- produced song that any other band would have given A- side status to and promoted to the world. The band's limitations forced them to experiment, to use their heads and the studio, and Factory put few, if any, demands on them to be commercial. From this they made truly great records. 

Regret was their 1993 comeback single, an indie- pop guitar riff with a singalong chorus. Sabres Of Paradise got to work on it and turned in a pair of epic remixes. Andrew Weatherall's genius is evident in both, especially the first remix- take the bassline, slow it down and find acres of space, loop a little guitar part and a line of vocal, and hey presto, turn New Order's indie- pop into Lee Perry style dub.

Vanishing Point was an album track, another one, that could have been a single, off 1989's era- defining Technique. Rich Lane's edit takes all the best bits, pumps them up and sends it off flying.

There are times when I think I never need to hear Blue Monday again. The band may feel the same. A few years ago Jack Butters, a friend of Rich Lane's, made an entirely unofficial edit that goes all thumpy and acidic, finding a new story inside the song, making it worth hearing all over again. 

Shapes And Patterns And Burning Floors

Let's end the working week, the last full week before the Christmas holiday, and the end of the school term with some more new music- both electronic but with a world of difference between them. First is a track from M- Paths who I first encountered at Mighty Force, with a really impressive pair of albums. This new one is self- released, a four minute burst of Aphex Twin inspired ambient electro/ techno called Shapes and Patterns that has rapid, rattling drums, dancing synths and repetitive melodic passages interrupted by bursts of bass, the music never settling for long but constantly twisting and turning.

Out today on the ever wonderful Tici Taci is a new EP from Jack Butters, an original called Floor Burner and a pair of remixes. The vocal sample, 'I think it's time to make the floor burn', should leave no one in any doubt about why this track exists. Drums and synths judder and chug, the bassline descends, wobbly FX fire off all over the place. 

The remixes come from Rule Six and The Time Machine Drop Outs. Rule Six go for the low slung, slow burn, the bassline pumping on as the synths and FX glitter around it. Time Machine Drop Outs are Matt Gunn (see yesterday's post) and Chad Jackson (of the Hacienda and hearing drummers getting wicked among other things). The tempo is low, the guitar is funky, the floor is burned. 

An Hour Of Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown And Downtown

Hardway Bros (Sean Johnston) and Monkton (Duncan Gray) DJ and remix together. In both cases there's something about the partnership that pushes both to do something that's different from what each does on their own. Their remixes as Hardway Bros Meets Monkton reference the seminal Augustus Pablo album King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown and as a result you'd be right to expect lots of dub percolating through the sounds cooked up in the remix studio. Dub, bass, echo, melodica- all are present. So is plenty of glorious chug and the wide spaces of cosmic disco. Cosmic, psychedelic, dub disco. The remixes also tend to be long, usually going up towards ten minutes, so this mix was always going to be a long one. 

An Hour of Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown And Downtown

• Jack Butters: Shake It Off (Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown Version)
• Electric Blue Vision: Other Skies (Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown Version)
• Perry Granville: Sailing Ships (Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown Version)
• Fjordfunk: It's All Black (Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown)
• GLOK: That Time Of Night (Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown Dub)
• Psychederek: Screamadereka (Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown Downtown Remix)
• Phil Kieran and Green Velvet: Enjoy The Day (Hardway Meets Monkton Downtown Remix)

Jack Butters is from Stoke- on- Trent, a city fmaous for consisting of five towns, its historic past as the centre of pottery and ceramics, and for it's football team Stoke City (the old ground, the Victoria Ground, was a fairly fearsome awayday in the past). What Stoke should be famous for now is Jack's music, not least this dubbed out Hardway and Monkton remix. I heard this played by Sean at ALFOS at The Golden Lion last summer and it sounded immense.

Electric Blue Vision is Jesse Fahnestock of 10:40 and Jezebell with singer Emilia Harmony. Other Skies came out last November, a 2023 highlight with three great remixes- this one plus remixes by Tambores En Benirras and Balearic Ultras. Sean and Duncan's remix is more majestic melodica led dub, a complete reconstruction of Jesse and Emilia's song.

Perry Granville's Sailing Ships becomes a metallic- dub- by- way- of- post punk- and- acid house trip in the Hardway Bros and Monkton hands, noises rattling round and ricocheting as the bass pushes on and thunder rumbles. There are stuttering vocal sample and pulverising synths, drop outs and re- entries and always underpinning everything, huge, live sounding bass. 

Fjordfunk released It's All Back in 2020 on the Tici Taci label, an eleven minute cosmic disco tune remixed into an eleven minute cosmische dub disco tune by Hardway and Monkton with a squealing guitar line dropping in and out and an ultra- distorted voice saying things that are impossible to make out. 

GLOK is Ride's Andy Bell. Since 2019 Andy's released several albums and singles as GLOK, experimental cosmische/ synth songs and tracks. That Time Of Night was on 2021's Pattern Recognition and features the voice of Shiarra Bell, Andy's wife, talking about the pleasures of being lost on a dancefloor, 'just one person, one part of the whole mass of people.. the heat and the light and the flashing...'. Hardway and Monkton take the track and turn it into a sleek, propulsive, krauty trip, a keening guitar line running through it with a booming, metronomic kick drum.

Psychederek is from Stretford, just up the road from me, and has recently released one of this year's best EPs, Alt!. In August 2021 he released the Space Arcade 12" on Chris Massey's Sprechen label, with the very ace Screamadereka coming in double Hardway Monkton remix form- the Downtown remix and Disco Dub version. The Downtown Remix is a glorious sunlit thing in two halves, the first half dubby psyche and the second a chuggy, pacier, cosmische glide. 

Phil Kieran and Green Velvet's Enjoy The Day came out in late 2022. Phil is a Belfast based DJ and producer. Green Velvet is from Chicago. Enjoy The Day is full on, four four drums and techno bass, chopped up and FXed vocals, 'you got it', and a piano line that is the definition of happy/ sad. 

Shake It Up

The Tici Taci label celebrates ten years of releases this year, an oasis of electronic excellence and chuggy dancefloor wonders. Tici Taci have a run of releases lined up to take us through 2023 with Mystic Thug, The Long Champs, more from Mr BC, more still from Duncan Gray and four retrospective compilations covering sixty- four back catalogue tracks. One of the most recent releases is from Jack Butters, whose Shake It Up throbs and pulses for three minutes before, without warning, turning into a loping skank- and then back again. 

On the remix tip the Hardway Bros Meets Monkton Uptown version is a dubbed out delight, the bassline dredging the bottom end and the spaced out synth sounds lighting up the top, everything cool and tickety boo for eight minutes. 

The second remix, by Mr BC, is a snake- hipped, lithe dancefloor groove with an increasingly hypnotising acid synthline aimed right between the eyes, which builds in intensity through to the sampled voice at the end which concludes, 'you must be out of your tiny mind'. 

Dumb It Down

Like Drew I've been listening to the Mary Chain mostly this week, working my way through the studio albums in the car to and from work and getting to know Damage And Loss at home. So Saturday, April 1st (no Fools stuff here I'm afraid), first day off work for two weeks, something different and brand new for the blog to go with the return of Bruce Pennington's kitchy sci-fi 70s artworks.

This is the latest from Rich Lane, a chuggy piece of machine music for dancers and headnodders alike. Even better than the original mix of Dumb It Down is the Jack Butters remix (click the Next symbol on the player), music from a dark machine, a twangy guitar in there too and the robotic vocal of Alien Sofa. Buy both from Bandcamp for £1.80 and Rich, Jack and Alien will put it towards the cost of a pint in a Wetherspoons somewhere.