Hull's finest outfit Fila Brazillia, formed in 1990 by Steve Cobby and David McSherry, have a new e.p. out, five new songs recorded and released after a sixteen year hiatus. As chance would have it (and I'm blogging very much on the fly this week) the second track fits in very nicely with Monday's and Tuesday's tracks (Monday- Manika Kaur dubbed out by Youth. Tuesday- Daniel Avery and Alessandro Cortini). It's a sort of making a blogtape. This is Midnight Friends, a haze of shimmering chords, echo- laden piano or organ, repeating melodies and riffs, building and falling away for a good seven and a half minutes, some ambient sounds and bass part coming and going, tickling the nape of your neck.
The other four songs on Fila's MMXX are worth splashing out for too, there's some jazzy future funk and the spacey electronic dance of The Silver Scale is a wonderful piece of music.
Picking up where yesterday's Youth remix of Manika Kaur left off and heading into a world of drones comes the second trailer from the forthcoming Daniel Avery and Alessandro Cortini album Illusion Of Time. Spectral noises, ambient buzz, dischord, layers of sound with some feedback on top, both unsettling and rather beautiful. I suspect played loud on a proper system this is going to sound huge.
Not long after writing Friday's post which featured Jah Wobble and Youth a further Youth excursion appeared on my internet. This is a long dub remix of an Australian singer and songwriter, Manika Kaur, whose Punjabi Sikh heritage has led her into making devotional music. Her 2015 album was produced by Talvin Singh and she's worked with Scottish folkie James Yorkston. On this one Youth extends the original track into a 2020 ambient dub tour de force, a journey in which, to quote Martin 'Youth' Glover himself, 'to build invisible bridges between ancient tradition and the modern world'. Eternal bliss indeed.
We're in one of those periods where there's a flurry of new releases and news about upcoming releases and there seems to be a wealth of good new music in the air. Norwich's Sink Ya Teeth are a two woman duo who make eminently funky post- punk dark- disco. They've been on tour with A Certain Ratio. They sound like there should have been boxes of their singles wrapped in beautiful and enigmatic Peter Saville sleeves at 86 Palatine Road. This is the second single, Somewhere Else, ahead of their second album, Two. It's a banger.
Some top quality dub disco from 1983 via Jah Wobble and his Invaders Of The Heart and a track named after the band or vice versa. Wobble's bass is the bedrock around which everything else revolves. Lots of eastern influences to the fore in this the 3rd mix off the 12"- eastern scales, instrumentation and vocals, and a tune that unfolds entirely at its own pace. The trombone solo is a joy.
Wobble has a new out imminently with Youth, an album called Acid Punk Dub Apocalypse, with Hollie Cook and Alex Paterson on board. Wobble and Youth have got previous not least the rather excellent Dub Trees project from 2016- this one, a dubbed out mix of their own work, came from Youth's garden studio in South London.
Youth is someone whose work is woven through my record collection, from his beginnings as bass player in Killing Joke through his long standing work with The Orb, in the 90s as Blue Pearl, his various works as producer and his more recent collaboration with Woodleigh Research Facility. The recordings with Andrew Weatherall and Nina Walsh were done around the same as the Dub Trees e.p. this version is from, possibly all stewed in the same pot.
Brand new and retro- futuristic, Kris Baha's Barely Alive remixed by Timothy J. Fairplay, a chilly, detached crawl through the early 1980s with 808 and ARP synth- this probably needs a new tag in classic Fairplay style, 2020 chill wave or nu D.D.R. synthpop. Ghostly and physical at the same time. The original mix is pretty smart too.
Just imagine, just what the doctor ordered, just in time. Sonic Boom returns with a song ahead of an album in June (All Things Being Equal), waves of sound, layers of dreamlike warmth, multi- tracked vocals and the faintest hope that actually everything might be alright after all.
Last week there was a minor internet kerfuffle surrounding a Facebook page that I'm one of the admins of- The Flightpath Estate. It was set up several years ago as a place to share appreciation of the work of Andrew Weatherall and news about releases, DJ nights and so on. It trundled along quietly with a few hundred members. One of my co- admins Martin set up a resource called the Weatherdrive, an online dump for recordings of DJ sets, radio shows and mixes, over 700 hours worth of listening in total. In the aftermath of Andrew' untimely death MixMag, the dance music magazine, picked up on the Weatherdrive and published a short article about it (which included a link to this blog). The article broke the Weatherdrive as it was deluged with people wanting to download mixes and the Flightpath Estate has since more than doubled its membership. MixMag then got back in touch to see if we wanted to write an article pointing readers in the direction of the ten best Andrew Weatherall mixes on the Weatherdrive. With some hugely appreciated support from Martin and Mark I wrote that article (stretching the definition of ten to twelve and reviving McGuire, the fictional figure from Weatherall's sleevenotes to Haunted Dancehall, something I hope he wouldn't mind). The article was published on MixMag's website yesterday. You can read it here. It takes in twelve mixes/ sets recorded between 1991 and 2019 and on their own contain a huge wealth and variety of music. Hours of fun plus some words written by me.
To celebrate here are two dub obscurities from Andrew Weatherall's back catalogue, both from the mid 1990s and neither currently available digitally as far as I can see. The first is a Sabres Of Paradise dub track. Ysaebud is a monstrous piece of dubbed out splendour, a unholy shotgun marriage of side six of Sandinista! and King Tubby. It came out as a one sided 7" single with an etched B-side and was released in 1997, a couple of years after Sabres split, and was credited to S.O.P (From The Vault). According to Curley, who worked in the Sabres office, the track was rescued from a safe in the office on Dean Street and the single was mastered directly from cassette.
Two years earlier the War Child Help! compilation was released, a record largely populated by Britpop aristocrats plus Johnny Depp and Kate Moss and some people from the dance music world (Portishead, Massive Attack, Orbital, Stereo MCs, The KLF under a pseudonym). Help! was intended to provide aid for the young inhabitants of war torn Bosnia and Herzegovina and ended up raising over £1.5 million. The idea was that everyone would record their contributions in a day, mix them the following day and then the album would come out a week later. Tucked away fairly anonymously towards the end was a track by the Planet 4 Folk Quartet, their one and only recording. Planet 4 Folk Quartet were Andrew Weatherall and David Harrow. Message To Crommie is a gorgeous piece of piano- led dub, ticking percussion and a softly padding bassline, pausing for a beautiful melodica breakdown, before the bass takes over again.
A song from 2004 that lives on through music blogs, popping up every now and then. Johnny Boy were a male/female duo from Liverpool. Their 7" single You Are The Generation Who Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve comes in like a 21st century Phil Spector, a shimmer of piano, guitars, bells and sound effects over those crashing, overloaded drums, The Ronettes had they come from Bootle rather than NYC, and singer Lolly's vocals. James Dean Bradfield is on production duties- the other half of Johnny Boy was Davo who was the Manic's guitar tech.
A critique of consumerism, drug abuse and entitlism as far as I can see.
'Burberry Beamer beakheads Leaving Adidas sleek mystique reversed Without a dream or scream between 'em Believing time does reimburse So for all we are receiving There's an evens key to turn You was the generation that bought more shoes and you get what you deserve'
Kelly Lee Owens remixed by Prins Thomas in 2018, a seventeen minute Diskomiks that stretches her song Bird out into new places and new shapes. Six minutes in the kick drum takes over as everything else falls away. There's a wobbly bass note and then some ace bongo/congas work and then it all starts to build again. The last minute or so has some moody, reflective strings to round the journey off. Long and worth investing in. If you're short of time or attention span there's an eight minute edit version, which is still pretty long.
Kelly has a new album out in May, Inner Life, and trailed it last week with the whip-crack smart techno of Melt! Her debut album in 2017 was one of my favourites of that year. I played it recently to see if it still was (and it is). Modern, moving, intense electronic music. Promises to be a good 'un.
On U Sound have a long tradition of budget priced label samplers, a series called Pay It All Back, dating back to 1984. In March 2019 they released Volume 7, eighteen tracks from recent years with Adrian Sherwood at the controls including some previously unreleased tracks and some alternate mixes. It's a fantastic record with heavy dub, roots and reggae vibes from Lee Perry, Roots Manuva, Horace Andy, Denise Sherwood, Mark Stewart, LSK, Congo Natty, African Head Charge, Little Axe and loads more. This one is the one that caught my ear when I was playing it recently.
Fast, heavy rhythm, crashing noises, strings being stretched and bent, distortion, cymbals echoing and bouncing round, rim shots- five minutes of exhilarating, motorik, dubwise chaos. The group is Nisennenmondai which meant nothing to me at first. On digging a little deeper I discovered they are a Japanese trio, three women, formed in Tokyo in 1999 and named after the Japanese word for Y2K millennium bug.
San Pedro Collective, the new musical vehicle combining the talents of Rikki Turner, Suddi Raval and Simon Wolstencroft among a floating cast of members, have a new single out. Where Do I Begin? features the vocals of Sarah Bouchier and mines the warm, progressive house sound of the early 1990s to striking effect. It feels good and is a floor filler but the vocals hint at darker times, Sarah singing 'it's a crisis' over the swirling hypnotic groove. There's an eye watering breakdown too for that arms in the air moment.
I spend quite a bit of time at the moment having conversations about music with people online. In one such exchange yesterday this track came up, a blast of optimism from 2009 by Phoreski, a chunky, chugging Italo, grin inducing, floor filler with drum pads, throbbing synth bass, guitars, keyboards and bells and the button marked 'euphoria' turned all the way round. It's Friday and tracks like this make it feel like Friday.
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.
This song by Low took me by surprise the weekend before last. I was sorting through a pile a freebie CDs that had built up near the pile of records that has built up. I've got several albums by Low but not the one this song is on (an album called C'mon released in 2011). Having listened to and skipped a few songs on the CD I let Witches play. The opening guitar chords, clanging and distorted were enough on their own, but then the ensuing menace coming through the speakers, Alan and Mimi's vocals, and the natural echo provided by the Sacred Heart studio in Duluth, Minnesota (a former church). There's what sounds like a banjo in there too.
I don't know what Witches is about, facing your fears maybe. Like the music the lyrics are foreboding and full of shadows. 'One night I got up and told my father there were witches in my room He gave me a baseball bat and said here's what you do...
All you guys out there trying to act like Al Green...'
This came out only a few weeks ago, the first Andrew Weatherall release of 2020 but what will now be one of the last with his name on it- two remixes of The Venetians. The band was the studio only project of Rik Swinn who arrived in Sydney in late 1982, having recorded the tracks with Vic Coppersmith- Heaven. They became a touring band and their sound is very left of centre early 80s, groovy post- punk synth pop. The 12" came out a few weeks ago and includes two Andrew Weatherall remixes, the first a swirly, percussive vocal remix and the second an instrumental, spacey affair, much further away from home. This is the first of the pair, A.W. Edition Uno.
While we're here last week in the rush of articles, obituaries, mixes and appreciations of the great man his friend and musical partner in Woodleigh Research facility Nina Wash posted up some links to some playlists on Youtube. These playlists were Weatherall's work but weren't widely known about because as Nina says 'he wasn't very good at the internet'. Collectively they are called The Black Notebooks and are a treasure trove of songs, from The Blue Aeroplanes to Townes van Zandt, Durutti Column, Willie Nelson, The Triffids, Pink Military, Moon Duo and Alan Vega and all points in between. You can find them all, volumes 1 to 9 at Ban Ton Ton.
Julian Cope played the second of two nights at Gorilla on Saturday night, a wide ranging one man show with songs from his back catalogue (from The Teardrop Explodes through to the new Self Civil War) and plenty of story telling and comedy in between. Cope is announced on to the stage by his roadie and appears in Luftwaffe cap, shades, sleeveless hooded top, shorts and biker boots, promising us that he won't talk too much and then proceeds to do exactly that- not that anyone is complaining. Cope is an accomplished raconteur as much as anything else. He kicks off with a long story about buying the title Grand Prince of Pomerania off the internet and then goes into Soul Desert following that with a new one, Your Facebook My Laptop. We get Read It In Books, interrupted by Julian filling us in on the genesis of that song, what he calls 'the writing group' he was a member of (The Crucial Three of legend), the birthplace of both the Bunnymen and The Teardrops, it's riff borrowed from a Fall song (Mark E Smith and Martin Bramah are both nodded to) and Ian McCulloch's role in it, with some gentle piss taking of Mac. It's not nasty or personal- he takes the piss out of himself and out of us too. All the songs bar one are played on acoustic guitar and fleshed out by FX pedals including an epic Autogeddon Blues, a brilliant They Were All On Hard Drugs (which has a lengthy preamble, as you can probably imagine, which finishes with him describing finding four different types of magic mushroom within a few hundred yards of Stonehenge), Cromwell In Ireland, Drink Me Under The Table, The Greatness And Perfection of Love, a sparkling run through World Shut Your Mouth, and Treason. When all his songs are presented like this, one man with his guitar, they seem more and more part of the same story- there's real no separation between the Teardrops pop hits and his current cottage industry album. He jokes about the Teardrops, that he approached the others about putting them back together but the rest of the band were just too out of it. He jokes about the stream of near hits he had as a solo artist, all of them peaking at number 42. He tells us about painting a Messerschmidt- a model not a real one- and having some deep grey paint left over at the exact moment a brand new Fender guitar is delivered. He then plays the next song with the guitar he painted. He mentions his poor promotion of his new albums and then repeatedly remembers to promote Self Civil War. He reminds us of the criticism that his songs are ba- ba- ba songs, then plays the ba- ba- ba songs, proving what a great songwriter he is. There's a long discussion about folk music and his issues with it and then we, the folk, are encouraged to join in with the 'Oi' backing vocals. For The Great Dominions he moves onto the synth with his roadie accompanying him and then goes back to the guitar for a marvellous Pristeen and finally a crowd pleasing Sunspots. He hams up the leaving of the stage, revelling in the applause while undercutting it too, and then returns to play Out Of My Mind On Dope And Speed. There's not really anyone else quite like him- so esoteric, so open, so poppy but so versed in the underground. Long may he run.
A list of records that I love out of all proportion to their importance or impact would include Special One by Ultra Vivid Scene, a single from the New York band's second album (released in 1990 so nothing to do with the self- proclaimed special one Jose Mourinho). Ultra Vivid Scene were largely the work of one man, Kurt Ralske, who made two albums for 4AD, both packed with alternative guitar songs, Velvets inspired melodies and Mary Chain style drums and bass. Special One is a brilliant little song, instantly bringing Vox teardrop guitars, valve amps and wraparound sunglasses to mind and has Kim Deal on backing vox singing the 'how do you think it feels?' line.
Nothing really happened for Ultra Vivid Scene. Apparently they played some gigs in London to support the second album, Joy 1967- 1990, that were terrible, 4AD's staff begging the room full of journalists not to review them. The first self titled album still gets played round here from time to time as does Joy 1967- 1990. There was a third in 1992 called Rev which I've never heard.
Loaded was the starting point for Andrew Weatherall and in the mainstream it is what he'll be remembered for I guess. He'd been in the studio before as a remixer- his first named credit was on the Happy Monday's Hallelujah Club Remix but Loaded is where the story begins. He'd given Primal Scream a positive review of a gig in Exeter at a time when no- one was interested in them. He also raved about their self titled second album, a rock 'n' roll, Stooges inspired guitar record that had managed to alienate the fans of their first album without really finding any new ones. In the summer of 1989 I saw Primal Scream touring to promote Ivy Ivy Ivy at a venue in Liverpool called Planet X in front of about thirty people. The Scream gave it their all, Bobby occasionally complaining about the low ceiling. We were right at the front next to Throb and they finished with I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have, Bobby on his knees screaming into the mic. A few months later Weatherall turned I'm Losing More... into Loaded.
The first version of Loaded was in Weatherall's own words 'too polite' and Andrew Innes encouraged him to go back and 'fucking destroy it'. Primal Scream had nothing to lose. At this point Gillespie, Innes and Throb were still unconvinced about acid house despite Alan McGee's enthusiasm but had met Weatherall at a rave and were happy for him to remix the song. Weatherall set about taking the song to pieces and remaking it.
Taking the horns from the end section of the original song and Henry Olsen's rolling bassline Weatherall stitched Peter Fonda's famous dialogue from The Wild Angels, a 1966 biker film, to the start of the song.
The question, 'Just what is it that you want to do?' is asked by Frank Maxwell. Fonda replies with his rallying call- 'we want to be free, we want to be free, to do what we want to do... and we want to get loaded and we want to have a good time'. The part about riding 'our machines without being hassled by the man' was cut. I've often thought there should be a version with that part included. Fonda's declaration had been used before, not least by Psychic TV (Weatherall was a big PTV fan). It sums up the spirit of the times perfectly.
The drumbeat with its massive crash cymbal came from Edie Brickell And The New Bohemians, a bootleg version of their hit What I Am, which in turn had been borrowed from a Soul II Soul record (and that was sampled from elsewhere).
The 'I don't want to lose your love' vocal part, the bit where on a dancefloor or at a gig everyone is singing in unison regardless of their ability to hit the notes, comes from a 1976 song by The Emotions.
The only bit of Bobby Gillespie that made it onto the record is the vocal part at 3.09 where he sings 'we're gonna get deep down, deep down, woo hey!' in response to Frank Maxwell's repeated question. Gillespie's vocal is from a cover of a Robert Johnson song, Terraplane Blues, presumably something the Scream had recorded but never released. There's an 'ah yeah' bit at about five minutes which sounds like Bobby, some ace slide guitar and acoustic guitar, some lovely Italo house piano and Innes' crunchy guitar parts that make the breakdown before we are launched back in.
The song was pressed up onto acetate and then some promos for DJs and as summer turned into autumn people began to notice the impact it had on dance floors. The rhythms evoke Sympathy For The Devil, the shuffling groove, and crowds in clubs began to chant the 'woo woo' part spontaneously. Loads of people have described their reactions to being told this monster rave anthem was the work of Primal Scream, the disbelief, the shaking of heads and then the wide eyed joy of becoming a believer. Members of Primal Scream have recounted being phoned by Weatherall and others in the small hours excitedly describing the effect Loaded was having on a floor right there and then. It was finally given its full released in February 1990, Creation finding themselves with a hit on their hands. Loaded reached number sixteen in the UK and propelled the band into the Top of The Pops studios where Gillespie wriggled with his maracas, black leather and long hair, feet seemingly glued to the spot. Ride's Mark Gardener was drafted in to mime on the keyboards, Throb is resplendent in teddy boy red and Innes pulls all the moves, Les Paul, hippy shirt and long curls. For a song that has such deep roots, that sent thousands of indie kids hurtling to the dance floor and still raises the roof when played at parties, it's an odd TV performance that doesn't quite nail it. And of course, the man who made it is nowhere to be seen.
It's amazing how the internet throws things up- this clip is The Stone Roses performing Fools Gold on Dutch TV in 1989. We've all seen the the famous Top Of the Pops performance, some of us many, many times, but until the other night I'd never seen this clip before. I didn't know it existed. Ian, John, Reni and Mani at the height of their cool, all four giving it the insouciant, hair growing out swagger that was a massive part of their appeal. The crowd, considering this a mimed performance, are going for it too. Dutch kids clearly knew the score.
