A few days ago I revisited Andrew Weatherall's 2nd January 2020 show for NTS, a largely ambient and instrumental two hour mix he famously described as 'dusting the ornaments on the mantelpiece of your mind'.
It's a deeply affecting two hours that sets off with Prana Crafter's guitar ambience and goes deep into the psychic world of sound with a perfectly selected and sequenced set with tracks from Vito Ricci, G.S. Schray, Machete Savane, Anu Luz, Luke Sanger, Karen Gwyer, Neptune, Stephen Legget, Ana Bogner, Constantine and Christos Sakerillaridis, Felsmann and Tiley, Dream Diary, Terry Riley and Don Cherry, Ryan Teague, D.A.R.F.D.H.S., Luca Bacchetti, and Darryl Parsons. The list of artists alone indicates the range and scope of the man's musical knowledge and crate digging. Sonic adventuring leading to catharsis.
Andrew didn't create a huge amount of ambient music but it's definitely there throughout his back catalogue, one of the many strands that made him. When you listen to the ambient tracks from his Sabres Of Paradise or two Lone Swordsmen days and then play some from later on, the solo and Woodleigh Research Facility years, there's a striking coherence, the drones and synth sounds all fitting together into one larger whole. At least, that's the way it seemed to me when I put some of them together in a fifty minute mix. It's not entirely ambient- Andrew was never far away from a drum machine or drum sample- but it's an ambient inspired mix for Sunday.
Andrew Weatherall and Michael Smith: The Deep Hum (At The Heart Of It All)
Two Lone Swordsmen: Hope We Never Surface
Two Lone Swordsmen: As Worldly Pleasures Wave Goodbye...
Two Lone Swordsmen: It's Not The Worst I've Ever Looked... Just The Most I've Ever Cared
Woodleigh Research Facility: Gardens Dub
Woodleigh Research Facility: Emancipation Garage
Woodleigh Research Facility: Alma Coogan
The Sabres Of Paradise: Chapel Street Market 9AM
The Crescents was originally only to be found on a small circulation promo CD in a tie in deal with a Japanese clothing brand from 2003, some otherwise unreleased Weatherall and Tenniswood tracks plus the A and B- side from Hidden Library 002 (a 7" release from 2002). It was then given its first vinyl release on Sounds From The Flightpath Estate Volume 1 in 2024 and then when Rotters Golf Club put Still My World out on vinyl for Record Shop Day the same year. It's Andrew and Keith ambience and a very lovely track.
In 2013 as part of his artist in residence period at Faber and Faber Andrew collaborated with Hartlepudlian author Michael Smith on a version of Smith's novel Unreal City (a novel about modern life, art, commerce and London). Andrew and Nina Walsh put together a seven track soundtrack to accompany a new edition of the book with Andrew's annotations in the margins, a CD of the soundtrack and a 10" single. Andrew and Nina's ringing drones and Smith's East Yorkshire accent are made for each other. If you'd like to hear the whole Unreal City, you can find it at my Mixcloud where Michael popped in with a link to an article he'd written about making it.
1998's Stay Down seemed like a slightly subdued Two Lone Swordsmen album on release, twelve short pieces of sub- aquatic, downtempo, somewhere between ambient and underwater techno. It's grown over the years and has become my favorite TLS album, a full piece that has its own sound, ebb and flow, perfectly captured by its pair of deep sea divers on the cover. It's bookend by Hope We Never Surface and the lilting, gorgeous As Worldly Pleasures Wave Goodbye... (the latter is as good as any ambient electronic music made by anyone in the 90s, ambient music with dolphin chatter). A languid, strange and atmospheric album.
It's Not The Worst I've Ever Looked... Just the Most I've Ever Cared was on side six of 2000's Tiny Reminders, a three disc record that goes deep into bass, purism and experimentation. It's Not The Worst.. was the album's outlier, a three minute moment of calm, an acoustic guitar riff loop, some gentle synth sounds, a dusty rhythm, and acres of space.
Woodleigh Research Facility began life in Crystal Palace in 2015, Weatherall and Walsh recording in Youth's garden shed. The first results were an album, The Phoenix Suburb (And Other Stories), a double vinyl album in 2015 with Emancipation Garage the most ambient sounding track on the record. At some point in 2015 they sent Gardens Dub out to everyone who'd ordered the Moine Dubh series of 7" singles as an apology for the non- appearance of one of the singles- pressing plant problems I think.
Alma Coogan is an unreleased WRF track- it's on Youtube, a twelve minute ambient excursion which was done as part of the Faber residency. Andrew had worked again with Michael Smith to produce three tracks/ video poems about the English coast. In 2018 at Festival No. 6 WRF performed Alma Coogan as part of Andrew's Psychedelic Faber Social. WRF performed Alma Coogan live at a Durham literary festival where Andrew was a judge on the Gordon Burn Prize. Burn wrote Alma Coogan, a 1991 novel reprinted in 2004, set in an alternate world where Alma did not die of cancer in 1966 but lived to recount various seedy and unpleasant experiences in the entertainment industry, all based on real events, with the imagined Alma narrating the novel from retirement by the sea in 1986.
Sabres Of Paradise's second album Haunted Dancehall came out in 1994, a double disc masterpiece that followed the adventures of one Nicky Maguire. Side four concludes things in largely ambient style with Maguire at dawn in London as the city wakes up, first on Jacob Street and then at Chapel Street Market. The second of these is an Sabres at their ambient best, seagulls and wobbling synth sounds, Weatherall, Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns following Maguire through the streets, just a few steps behind.
We got back from Rhodes in the early hours of Monday night/ Tuesday Morning. Our pre- holiday fears about the wildfires and cancellations were unfounded- many of the local people we spoke to said the fires were not directly threatening Lindos and had been made to look worse on the television than they were. Some of the staff at the hotel had been affected and evacuated from their homes but they wanted us back and contributing to the local economy. The first few days were noticeably quieter than usual, the tourists returning in greater numbers by the end of the week. As a result we had the run of the hotel pools for the first few days. Rhodes at this time of year is very hot and very sunny. The town of Lindos is dominated by its Acropolis.
It was the first thing we saw from our balcony each morning and the last thing at night, illuminated against the night sky. Lindos town is built into a gap in the rocks by the harbour, a maze of streets and houses, restaurants and bars with roof terraces and shops. The Acropolis dates back to at least the third century BC, the Temple to Athena at the top overlooking the sea. It's the sort of place which it is impossible to get a bad photo of- I won't bore you with all my holiday snaps but the Acropolis and Lindos are spectacular and very photogenic.
It was in use through the Greek, Roman and Byzantine periods, then occupied by the Knights of St. John (who fortified it and built many of the castle walls around it) and then by the Ottomans. During the Italian occupation (1912- 1945) it was restored, badly, and the Greeks have been working to restore and protect the site since then. It is a hot walk up to the Acropolis but well worth it. The Greek attitude to handrails and guardrails once up there is very different from here. There are several places were you could walk straight over the edge and fall hundreds of feet to the rocks below. It's a wonderful place to visit and left a deep impression on me.
Back in 2012 Warrington musician Paul Fleming (also the Bunnymen's touring keyboard player), recording as Baltic Fleet, made an album of krauty/ cosmische/ post rock instrumentals on an album called Towers. One of them was this one...
Last Friday, while we were sunning it up in Rhodes, was Bandcamp Friday and a rush of interesting new music flowed through the internet into inboxes. Among them was the latest from Woodleigh Research Facility and Nina Walsh's Apparently Solo series, this one being Volume 4. Borderlands has been floating around for a while on Youtube and it was in one of Andrew Weatherall's NTS radio shows, a track Nina wrote on a midi keyboard that had been set up for Andrew to use at Facility 4 back in 2019. Nina's composition had a Smokebelch- esque feel to it, even more so when classical viola player Sarah Sarhandi was asked to contribute strings to it. Andrew went onto remix the track and it was planned to be included in a WRF event at the Barbican, an event which never happened when Andrew died in February 2020. Nina's original version, Andrew's eight minute remix and Jagz Kooner's remix (Jagz being a Sabres Of Paradise cohort of Andrew's) are all at Bandcamp. Andrew's remix adds sweeping synth strings, trademark rolling tom toms and twinkling melodies and a sense of widescreen, celestial floatation. Jagz pitches the tempo up slightly, the drums a bit thumpier and drops in some vocal snippets, Andrew asking questions about stars and rockets and machines.
More from the wider Weatherall connected world and some fine oompty- bumpty disco music to end the week. The Woodleigh Research Facility dates back to 2015, Andrew Weatherall and Nina Walsh creating an album The Phoenix Suburb (And Other Stories) in their recording facility in deepest south London, a collection of long tracks that find their own weird space somewhere between dub and deep house/ disco. In 2018 the very limited, vinyl only, 127 To Facility 4 album saw the light of day being sold from the back of a truck, each with it's own hand crafted sleeve, ten shorter slices of minimal, dystopic modern techno. It was followed in 2020 by a series of monthly emissions from Facility 4, twelve EPs of three tracks.
Last week Nina released Apparently Solo, three tracks from the vaults and the W.R.F. sound library (much of which is samples made up from recordings from Nina's late partner Erick Legrand. His guitar is on this newest release). Lead track Shlap is a homage to the Detroit techno of London's late 80s clubs, a sound that is part of the W.R.F. DNA, the drum machine crunching away as only a 303 can. Crack- Ed follows, bouncing rhythms, springs and whirrs, and a bubbling bassline that can be felt as well as heard. Crack-Ed is also, in title, a response to the streets and environment outside Facility 4.
The third track on Apparently Solo is Mistress Ploppy, a Black Adder reference- you can't go wrong with Black Adder can you? Half the proceeds from Apparently Solo will go to Shelter, one of Andrew's chosen charities. One of the W.R.F. monthly releases in 2020 contained Somnium, an elegiac recording with guitar, viola and eventually those familiar chuggy WRF drums.
Somnium was originally a tribute to Droog, Nina's faithful dog. A different version of Somnium, Goodnight Sweet Droog, can be heard at Nina's Bandcamp page, a lush and affecting piece of music, part of a three track EP celebrating the life of her canine friend.
Joe Duggan is a poet from Northern Ireland, currently in Crystal Palace, whose work I'm a big fan of. He writes about every day life and the lives of others, writing about the little details and the big themes. As well as a gifted writer he has a distinctive voice. Out today on Paisley Dark is a poem set to music by Warriors Of The Dystotheque. Fitzroy Avenue describes a party taking place at 47 Fitzroy, Belfast, 'various substances, Stella Artois and the vague outside chance of a result tonight'. Joe's Northern Irish accent, his use of repetition and the cosmic disco chug of the music are a perfect blend. 'It's all happening here'. Fitzroy Avenue, the video and not one but six remixes are all available today at Bandcamp.
The BFP Acid- Flex Mix is a beauty, the throb and buzz of the bassline and Joe's voice, some echo and some distorted synth sounds, combining over seven and a half minutes in a sweet spot of poetry and acid house.
Joe has previously recorded with Nina Walsh and Andrew Weatherall. He recorded Downhill with Andrew and Nina in their Woodleigh Research Facility guise, a collective based in the Crystal Palace environs. Downhill came out in March 2020, just weeks after Andrew died. 'From where I live', Joe declares over the wobble of synth bass and a kick drum, 'It's downhill all the way/ To the pubs of Waterloo Street/ Derry just kind of tilts me', the phrase, 'Has anyone seen Joe? Where'd he go?' repeated again and again.
Joe also put his words over WRF's music on Play Bingo With Me, more dystopic future machine music with Joe's voice revealing slices of everyday life.
In 2019 Joe recorded with Fireflies, another Crystal Palace based group (who also recorded a single for Andrew Weatherall's Moine Dubh 7" singles club). Fireflies are Nina, guitarist Franck Alba and Dani Cali. The five track EP, Surrounded On All Sides, opens with Joe's poem Falling Man, the tale of a man who fell 3, 500 feet from the wheel arch a plane over South London, from a flight that took off in Kenya. It's is a dark and affecting poem, full of empathy for someone who took an enormous, fatal, risk to find a better life and died trying. There is light and shade on the EP too- Leonard Cohen Knows is more reflective. You can buy Surrounded On All Sides here. Stick all of today's poetry/ music into one playlist/ onto one CD for a Joe Duggan Friday festival.
Back in 2020 Andrew Weatherall and Nina Walsh's Woodleigh Research Facility had a year long series of releases, an EP a month. The third, released in March 2020, came out only weeks after Andrew Weatherall had died. It was three tracks long, the second being Lottie's Theme.
Lottie's Theme starts with a child, Lottie I think, saying 'Mum, says you have to and Dad says and Granny says and everybody says and the whole world says...' as a wash of industrial noise swirls in. Clanging drums and percussion take up and Lottie carries on, 'the computer says it, the TV says it...', as more noise and grinding bass pick up. 'The sun says it, the moon says it, everything says...'
Nina has just released a four track EP of her own, Retrospective, four songs from the last twenty years bound together. The first song is a cover of Pink Military's Did You See Her, dating from the late 90s when Nina was recoding with Lol Hammond as Slab. Pink Military were faces on the Liverpool post- punk scene, Jayne Casey and a dozen or so members including various drummers that went off to Simply Red, Durutti Column, Slits and Siouxsie and The Banshees.
Three more tracks complete the EP- Lover Teacher has a grungy, fuzzy guitar riff (the fabled 60s Vox Invader guitar sold by WRF to Andy Bell ) and a harmonica, sounding like something from Laurel Canyon timeshifted into the mid 80s indie garage scene. Darkest Night is from the mid 00s, a blasted, small hours ballad, summoning the ghosts of early 70s Stones and their musical heirs. Don't Let The Bastards Grind You Down is a lament for another loss from Nina's world, Erick Legrand, with unearthly droning synths and guitar combining for several minutes before Nina's voice comes in for the last minute. The Retrospective EP can be bought here.
Nina Walsh shared this yesterday, Borderlands, an unreleased Woodleigh Research Facility piece echoing many of the sounds that her and Andrew's previous thirty years had taken in, from Sabres and Sabrettes to the WRF. Borderlands is fifteen minutes long, taking its time to get where it's going and in no particular rush, with a drum machine driven impetus kicking in at about five minutes in and the haunting melodies winding their way around the rhythms.
It's Isaac's funeral on Friday. Planning and organising your child's funeral isn't something you really ever think you'll have to do but with Isaac I guess it was always somewhere at the back of our minds. The reality is much more than you can ever imagine.
Some things happened yesterday which show the impact Isaac has had on people and the never failing to amaze me kindness of people. I hope some day we can pay it all back some way. At the weekend Nina Walsh contacted me to say she wanted to do something to raise money for the MPS Society, the charity that support children and adults with the group of rare genetic diseases that included the one, Hurler's Disease, that Isaac was born with. Nina wanted to auction off her and Andrew Weatherall's 39p museum, a treasure trove of sweets, crisps and pop that used to line the shelves at the Facility where so much of the Woodleigh Research Facility recordings were made. As an additional treat she said she'd throw in the original reference master CD of Andrew's Convenanza album and all these items would be bundled together in a brand new Facility 5 tote bag. To say this left me floored is an understatement. The auction is taking place at The Flightpath Estate Facebook page. There's a JustGiving page here for anyone who'd like to donate to the MPS Society. Here's a pair of pictures of part of the 39p museum and Mr Weatherall himself posing with a 39p can of bubblegum flavoured fizzy pop.
Nina wrote this-
IN MEMORY OF ISAAC TURNER
My thoughts have been very much with Adam and Isaac Turner this last week.
Baggingarea has always been the one stop shop that Andrew and I would visit when we needed to remember something about ourselves!
Sadly Adam's son, Isaac, who brought so much joy to so many via his pictorial everyday doings posted on social media, passed away last week and many a heart has been broken.
Isaac lived with a condition called Mucopolysaccharide disease (MPS), a condition I knew nothing about until getting to know Isaac, albeit through pixels alone. He was a brave young man with a terrific smile and we will all miss him dearly. My deepest condolences to Adam and the Turner family.
As a way to raise some funds for the MPS Society I have decided to auction Andrew's beloved 39p Museum that was curated over the duration of our partnership from Facilities 1 to 4. I will also include the original reference CD master of Convenanza, mastered by Noel Summerville at 3345 Mastering, bundled together in a brand spanking new Facility 5 tote bag (awaiting delivery!). 100% of proceeds will go to the MPS Society, payable via the JustGiving fundraiser page set up by the marvelous Martin Brannagan of the legendary Flightpath Estate Facebook page. There is also the option to just donate if you are feeling generous
The auction will end at midnight Christmas Eve.
Bids in the comments below this post.
Do I hear £10?
Yes, there are a couple of parts of that which have me blushing through my tears. And to have Isaac, the Woodleigh Research Facility and Andrew brought together in such a way just leaves me speechless.
As if that wasn't enough, there's this too. Last weekend Brother Joseph's Sonic Treasures radio show went out on Radio Magnetic, a Glasgow based internet radio station that I've supported in the past with guests like Sonic Boom, Andy Bell, Justin Robertson and David Holmes. I'll be able to share the full show soon, a six hour musical treat dedicated to Isaac and with an opening half hour that was a mix done especially for Isaac by Brother Joseph. The show's guest was Brother Chris Mackin, otherwise known as Chris Rotter. Chris was the guitarist in the live garage band incarnation of Two Lone Swordsmen and releases music on his own as Bad Meat Club. Back when Andrew Weatherall did a radio show for 6 Music he played a then unreleased Bad Meat Club tune called 86'd, a glistening skyscraper of a song, all soaring guitars and motorik rhythms. Chris messaged me to ask if it was OK to go ahead with the radio show. I replied to say it was and asked him to play 86'd for Isaac. Chris then took my breath away with a twenty three minute reworked version of 86'd, one minute for each of Isaac's years. Chris has now shared 86'd (For Isaac) at Bandcamp, asking only for a donation to the MPS Society as payment.
I can't fully put into words how this leaves me feeling. Thank you Nina and Chris.
A new EP from Woodleigh Research Facility fell into the internet last Friday., the latest missive from Nina Walsh following her move from South London out west to Dorset. A studio fire at the new Facility 5 temporarily derailed things but all is not lost. Aptly, All Is Not Lost is the name of the EP and that spirit of optimism is found within the grooves and bytes of the music. Opening track Too Many Good Things is the kind of thundering electronic groove that she used to conjure up with Andrew Weatherall back when the WRF was a duo and not just Nina but Andrew's spirit and vibes are clearly shining down on this one, his music and presence being channeled into Facility 5. Driving bassline. Handclaps. Sirens. FX.
The other two tracks are more songs than tracks- on the first the old WRF drum machine is present and the dubby basslines pump away but Nina sings on top. Alchemy is a dark delight led by a dirty after hours groove with some post punk guitar lines, strings bending and wailing, while Nina channels her inner Siouxsie. Rounding the EP off is All Is Not Lost, a ghostly, swirling, lullabye- no drums, no pounding rhythms, just a harmonium, some effects and Nina singing, reflections on time passing, mortality, life...
A year ago Nina released this, Woodleigh Lament, a gorgeous, melodic, lilting tribute to Mr Weatherall and his absence. The sound of All Is Not Lost suggests the will to go on, the spirit of keeping going, are very much alive in Nina. WRF forever.
Since Andrew Weatherall's death Nina Walsh has been keeping their two person project, Woodleigh Research Facility, going on her own. The WRF started with an album in 2015, a low slung, dubby, steam- powered drum machine, set of instrumentals called The Phoenix Suburb (And Other Stories)- the title a reference to the Crystal Palace area where Andrew and Nina recorded at Youth's studio, named Facility 4. In 2018 a second album appeared in limited vinyl quantities with individualised sleeve artwork and sold through a car boot sale, 127 To Facility 4 (a second pressing saw some copies sold via the WRF website which is where I was fortunate and quick fingered enough to get one). Several one off digital and/ or physical releases have also been put out- a 2017 track called S.O.M.A.25, a hard edged, techno tribute to Soma Records released for their twenty- fifth anniversary compilation and two years later Heilige Seidhr came out on Hoga Nord to celebrate the 2019 Convenanza. Then at the start of 2020 the WRF announced a series of monthly, digital only releases, three new tracks a month for a year, a huge burst of creativity and industry. When Andrew died in February 2020 it put those releases into a very different light, eleven epitaphs sent forth at the end of each month. The onset of Covid and the first lockdown a month later added to the sense of loss around those releases. The torrent of ideas and music in those thirty six tracks, songs and poems set to music is still revealing itself, a wealth of back catalogue treasure to explore.
Nina has packed up and moved out of London (and is building Facility 5 out west). She is keeping the spirit and sound of Woodleigh Research Facility alive with a trickle of releases. Last month a new Nina written and produced WRF EP came out, Vernal Invocation, three new pieces of music led by Lex Talionis, seven minutes of that familiar drum machine sound, some dancing keyboard melodies and some moody synths.
Backed up by two further instrumentals, Alcyone and Salacia, the EP is proof that Andrew's musical partnership with Nina continues to bear fruit after his passing, something about him audibly evident in the grooves and sounds.
In Greek mythology Alcyone was the daughter King Aeolus. She married Ceyx but foolishly the pair displeased Zeus and Hera and Zeus threw a thunderbolt at their ship. The gods took pity on the pair and changed them into kingfisher birds (or halcyons).
Salacia was the Roman goddess of the sea, worshipped as the goddess of salt water and guardian of the depths, the personification of calm and sunlit ocean waves. She married Neptune and they had three children, the most famous being Triton, half man, half fish. That's got to be inconvenient in daily life in the 21st century but he maybe he made it work two thousand years ago. Salacia sounds aquatic and oceangoing.
On New Year's Day Brother Joseph's Sonic Treasures radio show featured two special long form pieces from Nina Walsh's Facility 4 (the recording home of Woodleigh Research Facility, the musical vehicle of her and Andrew Weatherall in recent years). These two pieces were lined up to be played on Weatherall's Music's Not For Everyone but in February tragedy intervened, took Andrew away and the monthly radio with him. The first piece, C-Pij01 Facility 4 Day, is an hour of wonderful ambient wash, a combination of harmonium, synth, flute, cello, guitar, viola and trumpet and some voices (played by Nina, Franck Alba, Anita Hurst, Chris Cornetto and Marcos Alegria- this line up includes the players on Andrew Weatherall's Convenanza album as well as the W.R.F. records and I don't know for sure but I wouldn't be surprised if the Fort Beulah N.U. project is to be found within it's ranks too).
The second part, Night, is two and a half hours long, introduced by Brother Joseph and then fading into distortion and noise, echoes and bangs before a song starts to take shape, guitar chords. Then back to ambient sound, FX and washes, drones and voices coming through the mist and the wandering trumpet floating on top. After an hour and ten minutes it dissolves, Brother Joseph returns and then the guitar/ bass/ drums kick back in, an 80s post- punk bassline with a lovely synth topline... and then there's more, twists and turns, musical sections mixed together, one segueing into another. Magical.
Nina and Andrew's monthly Woddleigh Research Facility e.p. releases finished at the end of December. The final one was a single track, twenty three minutes long, called A Walk With Bill and Bob, Vol. 4. It's a trippy, experimental sound collage, almost a megamix- a drum machine intro with some bursts of static and a dippy synthline. A lovely Peter Hook- esque bassline. Some woodwind and dislocated voices. Various vaguely familiar sounding motifs surface- some of the elements from Andrew's Moton 5 e.p. appear and then disappear again. The drum machine keeps pushing onwards, 'in the here and now'.
Back at the start of the year it was announced that Andrew Weatherall and Nina Walsh's Woodleigh Research Facility would be releasing a year long series of three track digital only EPs, one a month. The first one at the end of January was an EP called Into The Cosmic Hole. When it came out it was a fascinating piece of work, three sonic messages from Facility 2- the weird, shamanic title track, the robotic machine science fiction- electro of Phonox Special No 1 (Outer Space) and the homage to Stockholm Monsters and Martin Hannett of Birthday Three. Eleven more of these would be a superb way to mark the passing of the year, a year long advent calendar of the weird, the wired and the wonderful. Sadly, by the time the second release came out at the end of February he was gone.
2020 has been coloured by Andrew's passing for me, even with everything else that has happened. It's a strange thing to be moved by the death of a person you don't know and it's not anything compared to what his family and close friends felt and are feeling still. His sudden death on February 17th brought a stream of loss and grief across social media. My Facebook and Twitter timelines were almost nothing but Andrew Weatherall for days. The broadsheet newspapers and the BBC news covered his life and career (he always baulked at that word when interviewed). Then the world then shut down. Events to celebrate Andrew's life were shelved. The Flightpath Estate (a Facebook group I co- moderate with another fan, Martin Brannagan) began to grow, from three hundred fans to well over a thousand. People from Andrew's real life began to join the group, the boundaries between fans and family and friends dissolving. Part of the increasing membership came from some press interest in the Weatherdrive, an online resource of Weatherall DJ mixes spanning the period from 1990 to 2020, from the heyday of acid house to ALFOS. Mixmag picked up on it and asked The Flightpath Estate if we'd like to write an article about the 10 best of Andrew's DJ sets on the Weatherdrive.
The Woodleigh Research Facility release campaign continued, updates from Andrew's studio life, a monthly reminder that he was gone but still there. The recordings present a vast range of sounds but are clearly the work of the same people, Andrew's intuitive nature and vision along with Nina's creativity and studio production skills. As the months have ticked by I've played these EPs, some more than others admittedly, and noticed how the W.R.F. releases seem to echo music he made in the previous three decades, reverberations from the past into the present. The lengthy running times, like the remixes of the early 90s where the music has space and time to unfold at its own pace. David Harrow said that when they were in the studio making music as Blood Sugar listening to what they'd done, he'd often be ready to change the drum pattern or bring a new element in, and Andrew would say, 'let it go round again', and the track would be extended out for another pattern/ 12 bars. The trademark hissing drum machines and mechanical rhythms point back to the music he released on his three Emissions labels in the 1990s and the stranger, more abstract, one off recordings he made, such as the Glowing Trees 12" he put out as Meek. The topline melodies point to the sound of Sabres of Paradise, especially the Haunted Dancehall album, and the bass- heavy mutant electro of Two Lone Swordsmen records. The metallic hi- hats and rattling snares sound like the ones on the TLS remixes of twenty years ago. The dub influence resonates through the Woodleigh EPs and through so much of his previous work (and DJ sets). The esoteric song titles could come from any point in his back catalogue.
The monthly EPs will have given us thirty six tracks by the end of the year, a huge amount of music from someone whose creative flow was clearly in full swing. Looking back, even if you pick four songs from completely different parts of his back pages, there's clearly a line running through everything. He reinvented his sound and moved from one identity to another, zigging when others zagged, from the remixes accompanied by Hugo Nicolson to Sabres of Paradise to Two Lone Swordsmen to The Asphodells to his solo records to WRF, but it's all part of a body of work with common themes and a unifying vision. Even the stuff that is outlying and on the fringes- the secret side projects, the machine funk aliases like Rude Solo and Frisch und Munter, the panel beating techno of Lords Of Afford, the odd folk music of his Moine Dubh label, the shadowy collective Fort Beulah N.U. who made five one sided white label 12" singles- fits into the world he created. He'd often play it down, be self- deprecating and modest, saying he was just a grand amateur, but the music is endlessly inventive. Even when he seemed to have driven himself down a one way road he'd manage to pull off a deft three point turn and come back with something else, something new.
Jockey Slut, started in Manchester as a dance music fanzine and then became something much bigger, and interviewed the man many times. In the summer they announced they were going to publish a special edition book, Andrew's interviews for the magazine compiled along with some new material (including an oral history of the acid house and Sabres years and a Richard Norris article). The book began to drop through letterboxes last week. Towards the back there is a double page spread about The Flightpath Estate and the Weatherdrive and its thousand hours of DJ mixes spanning Weatherall's career, based around an interview with Martin. Towards the bottom of the page, and this was a surprise to me as I leafed through it for the first time, is my name and this blog's name.
Which, as that man on The Fast Show used to say, was nice.
It was more than nice, it was incredible. A few people have since commented on social media that they were drawn back into the orbit of Andrew's music because of this blog, which is amazing and lovely to hear. It's what music blogging is for, to share the music and the world it's created in with other people. In a way music blogs are just an updated version of the fanzines of the 1980s, but with far less photocopying and Letraset. That this blog has become a minor footnote in the story is crazy, humbling and when I think about it, a bit mind-blowing too.
In an attempt to close the year in which he left I started to put together a mix of some of Andrew's music. I wondered if I could somehow manage to summarise his vast and varied back catalogue into one handy hour long compilation but I realised almost immediately this would be an impossible task. In the end I chose a couple of Two Lone Swordsmen tracks as a starting point and then went where it took me, throwing in quite a few of the ones he sings on, some remixes, some tracks that only came out on compilations and often just went with whatever the previous track seemed to suggest as a follow up. It ended up being a little over ninety minutes long and you can find it at Mixcloud.
Audrey Witherspoon’s Blues
Two Lone Swordsmen: Constant Reminder
Two Lone Swordsmen: Light The Last Flare
X- Press 2: Witchi Tai To (Two Lone Swordsmen Remix)
Two Lone Swordsmen: Patient Saints
Andrew Weatherall: The Confidence Man
Woodleigh Research Facility: Birthday Three
The Asphodells: One Minute’s Silence (Wooden Shjips Remix)
Andrew Weatherall: Kaif
Michael Smith and Andrew Weatherall: Water Music
Radioactive Man: Fed- Ex To Munchen (Andrew Weatherall
Remix)
Andrew Weatherall: Youth Ozone Machine
Andrew Weatherall: Cosmonautrix
Andrew Weatherall: Saturday International
Two Lone Swordsmen: Tiny Reminder No 3 (Calexico Remix)
Another Bagging Area mix for you, an hour of old and new and fairly ambient/ drone/ instrumental based but with Mark E. Smith turning at the end to add his inimitable voice to proceedings. In fact the only other voice is Andrew Weatherall's, heard briefly at the end of Prana Crafter's Starlight, Sing Us A Lullaby, a moment that got to me the first time I heard it. You can find Tiers In December on Mixcloud.
Kams: Hopfen (Richard Norris Remix)
Stray Harmonix: Mountain Of One
Harold Budd: The Pearl
A Winged Victory For The Sullen: Keep It Dark, Deutschland
Recorded in August at Facility 1, this is a forlorn but beautiful instrumental from Nina Walsh, keeping the spirit and questing nature of the Woodleigh Research Facility alive despite the absence of WRF partner Andrew Weatherall. The title is Woodleigh Lament and it's obvious who it is a lament for. Brushed drums and slow rhythm ticking onward and the achingly sad melody on top. The new Google Blogger format/ interface is shit. It took me ages to be able to get the photo to upload- in the end I had to upload it to Google Photos and then upload it to here from there. The Bandcamp player has two options, to embed in either html or Wordpress. Neither works with the new Blogger (obviously I didn't expect the Wordpress one to). It's messed about with the formatting of text too. Why can't they just leave stuff alone?
Recorded this month and released at the same time is Ella Baila, pushed along by one of those steam powered drum machines with a circling topline and a bubbling, acidic synth coming in and out.
Out today from Woodleigh Research Facility, the latest monthly emission from Andrew Weatherall and Nina Walsh. As there have been every month since January, when Andrew was still very much with us, there are three songs here available from the usual digital outfitters.
Where Nobody Else is superb science fiction ambient techno, Nina's disembodied voice over the top, like a strange tannoy announcement, 'it's time to go', over and over.
Lottie's Theme starts with a child's voice and then drums, metallic sounds and industrial noise, seven minutes of insistent rhythms and sounds before the child, presumably Lottie, returns at the end.
Downhill was on a WRF mix a few years ago and it's exciting that it's finally getting a proper release. WRF pound out more of their spooked, throbbing sounds as a vehicle for the voice and poetry of Joe Duggan. Over a marching beat and repeating bass wobble Joe describes the walk from his house to the pub 'from where I live, it's downhill all the way'. More rhythm, more space and more echo and Joe's Derry tones, 'Has anyone seen Joe? Where'd he go?'
This week's mix is made up entirely of songs released during lockdown, since mid- March 2020. Some of them have been written and recorded during this period. I could easily have doubled the length of this so maybe I'll come back to this and do a part two. This one has the trippy psyche of Sonic Boom, dusty funk desert blues from Ess O Ess, some dubby jazz (or jazzy dub) courtesy of Jah Wobble, Number's post- punk dance stance, yet more excellence from Weatherall and Walsh's Woodleigh Research Facility, Justin Robertson and Sofia Hedblom's blend of Nigerian rhythms and electronic dub, Dan Wainwright's pagan chug and some Balearic bliss from Joe Morris, Rich Lane, The Long Champs and a cover by Rheinzand. There's one segue which is a bit of a mess but it'll have to do. Life has surface noise and all that.
Sonic Boom: Just Imagine
Ess O Ess and Saul Richards: Totem (Swamp Crawl)
Another Monday, another Weatherall remix. This one came out in 1995, a Sabres of Paradise remix of Fun>Da>Mental. At seven and a half minutes long it's in no rush to get anywhere very quickly and has some very dusty and lazy sounds floating on top of the stoned groove. In fact, the title Mother In India (Sabres At Dusk Mix) is a pretty accurate description of what it sounds like.
The sleeve listed inspirational mothers, sisters and daughters throughout history that Fun>Da>Mental wanted to pay tribute to, from Indira Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto to Boudica, Marie Curie, Betty Shabazz, Joan of Arc, Miriam Makeba, Mahalia Jackson, Emily and Sylvia Pankhurst, Angela Davies, Harriet Tubman, Coretta Scott King and Alice Walker.
This remix was one of the last Sabres of Paradise ones and I'm sure I read somewhere recently that it was the first tie that Andrew and Keith Tenniswood really worked together one to one so in some ways the Two Lone Swordsmen were born here. In 1995 the Sabres studio was above a dry cleaners in Hounslow, on the Flightpath Estate and I can hear some of the sound of the first Two Lone Swordsmen album, 1996's The 5th Mission (Return To The Flightpath Estate), in these two remixes.
To come bang up to date the fifth monthly Woodleigh Research Facility three track ep came out on Friday, a set of songs called Karra Mesh. Sonically and thematically the title track fits in very well with the two Fun>Da>Mental remixes above, the sounds he was exploring two and a half decades ago still circling.
It's over halfway through April already. The weeks seem to be flying by even though some of the days seem very long. This is Isolation Mix Three. I thought I'd do something different from the ambient, blissed out, opiated sounds of the first two mixes and this mix is something that I first wrote about doing in a post here about three years ago. This is an hour and three minutes of spoken word and poetry and music. Andrew Weatherall features in various guises and with various poets, the Beat Generation and The Clash are represented, there's some reggae and the unmistakable voice of John Cooper Clarke.
Jack Kerouac/Joe Strummer: MacDougal Street Blues
John Cooper Clarke: Twat
Misty In Roots: Introduction to Live At The Counter Eurovision
Linton Kwesi Johnson: Inglan Is A Bitch
The Clash (and Allen Ginsberg): Ghetto Defendant (Extended
Version)
Allen Ginsberg/ Tom Waits: Closing Time/America
Andrew Weatherall and Michael Smith: The Deep Hum (At The
Heart Of It All)
Joe Gideon and The Shark: Civilisation
Woodleigh Research Facility and Joe Duggan: Downhill
Fireflies and Joe Duggan: Leonard Cohen Knows
BP Fallon and David Holmes: Henry McCullough (Andrew
Weatherall Remix)
Mike Garry and Joe Duddell: St Anthony: An Ode To Anthony H
Wilson (Andrew Weatherall Remix)
The monthly Woodleigh Research Facility e.p. releases keep coming even though Andrew has gone. Apparently the ones for April, May and June are already lined up. March's three tracks appeared at the usual download sites on Friday along with a message from Nina-
'We continue together in the here and now...'
The third of the three tracks is Somnium, a lilting, slightly melancholic thing with plucked notes, strings and a drum machine.
Fort Beulah N.U. project was a secretive Andrew Weatherall project that started in 2017, a series of five one sided 12" singles, with hand stamped centres and numbered and signed sleeves. Yes, I bought all five. Cottage industry dub, detours into ambient and semi- techno areas, weird meditative tunes with strange vocal samples. I'm not sure exactly who the players and contributors are but the wonderful Nina Walsh was involved and various other people in the Woodleigh Research Facility orbit. I'm not usually one for copying and pasting press releases but in the absence of much else to go off will do so this time. This was issued prior to the release of 001 by Mr Weatherall:
''Fort Beulah N.U. is a collective of singers, players, sonic research operatives and Gnostic adventurers affiliated to the Woodleigh Research Facility. Fort Beulah N.U. would like to thank Heidi Barker for her vocals on F.B. 001…… Peace and unity is easier to achieve than those that profit from the lack of it would have you believe….” Andrew Weatherall. June 2017.
The five Fort Beulah tracks are sequenced in order below by a kindly Mixcloud uploader and are a fine way to spend forty minutes.
Back in September 2017 this short video came out to promote 002 which seems to have been called Alain.
Another piece of the jigsaw (maybe)... Fort Beulah is a place in Vermont, the town at the centre of Sinclair Lewis' 1936 novel It Can't Happen Here, a satirical account of a demagogic politician taking the Presidency by storm in the 1930s with promises of American values, patriotism and a return to traditional values (written against a backdrop of actual fascist dictators being in power in Europe). Whether this shadowy musical collective is named after the Fort Beulah of Sinclair Lewis' novel and is therefore a sideways comment on Trump I don't know. But it seems plausible.
Today is the day of Andrew's funeral. In the words he'd use to sign off some of his messages and missives Jah bless to all his family and friends and all those attending. Rest in peace Lord Sabre.
In 2008 Primal Scream released an album called Beautiful Future, an album I bought but have hardly played. I seem to remember Bobby Gillespie saying this was an album which had 'sugar coated melodies' or something similar. It came after Riot City Blues which was where I drifted away from the Scream- Country Girl was a pastiche of pastiche and the rest of the album bar a couple of songs didn't sink in. Having said that Beautiful Future's follow up, More Light, five years later was the best Scream album since Evil Heat for me. Looking at the tracklisting for Beautiful Future now I can't recall much about any of it, there are several collaborations (Josh Homme, Linda Thompson, Lovefoxx), but the bonus/ freebie cover of Urban Guerrilla and the instrumental Time Of The Assassin were both ok. Where Beautiful Future achieves its status is as the source material for one of Andrew Weatherall's greatest remixes and in 2008 a sign that after a few quieter years he was back in the game. Uptown on the album is a Bobby Gillespie Saturday Night Fever tribute song. In Weatherall's hands it becomes 21st century gold, a alchemist's calling card. Opening with dub FX, echoes bouncing around and then Bobby cooing 'you feel so good you never wanted to leave', Uptown becomes a disco odyssey, clipped guitar, a sweet melodica line, four on the floor drums and a bassline from the centre of the club. Weatherall builds it over the ensuing nine minutes, layering sound, the riffs and melodies circling, noises ricocheting left and right, Bobby occasionally whispering 'uptown' and those melancholic, sweeping strings. At the heart of this disco is the eternal sadness of the hedonist, the realisation that the lights have to come on, the night will be over, the morning will come- the knowledge that chasing the magical moments on the floor cannot last forever but that while they last, they are bliss. Short lived bliss. It's all in there.
Before his tragic passing just over a week ago Andrew and Nina Walsh had already lined up the second of the monthly Woodleigh Research Facility digital only e.p.s following January's Into the Cosmic Hole. The second one is called Facility 4: Approach and brings us three more tunes from the end times soundsystem- Fume Homage, The Approach and Servant. The e.p. comes out tomorrow at all the usual digital places. The ghostly noises, the cavernous echo, the steam powered drum machine rhythms, the deep sea bass, the long synth sounds and little arpeggios, the sense of slight dislocation, all lingering on in his absence.
