Birds And Beasts

SUSS play ambient country/ ambient Americana, the sound of dusk falling over wide open spaces, roads disappearing into the horizon, dreams of the American west and all that kind of imagery. The SUSS trio are actually from New York, so their cosmic America is in reality as much an urban vision as a rural one. Their latest album, Birds And Beasts, is another beauty following in the tyre tracks of several previous ones. I got on board with Promise, an album released in December 2020 when things were pretty bleak, one lockdown gone, various waves of Covid compounded by government fiascos leading to a second lockdown incoming- the winter lockdown felt very different from the spring and summer 2020 one - and SUSS's ambient music was part of the soundtrack of that time, a hideaway from the world. The band say that this album is no less connected to world events, an articulation musically of the fragility of the natural world and the lack of balance in it- both birds and beasts abound. One of the tracks- Migration- features the late Gary Leib, SUSS's synth player who died suddenly in 2021. The rest were written and recorded for the album. The dominant instrument is the pedal steel guitar, often over a wash of synths and drones, various other guitars and loops creating a widescreen, emotive soundscape. It's frequently very moving, perfect music for sitting alone with late at night. Beasts is the second longest track on the album, a ten minute minor epic in no hurry at all to get wherever its going.

The album is available to download from Bandcamp and on yellow and pink vinyl elsewhere. The pedal steel guitar has a long tail in ambient music, most obviously in Brian Eno's Apollo and The KLF's Chill Out. SUSS have placed it back at the centre again, along with fellow travellers in the cosmic Americana/ ambient country sphere, Nashville Ambient Ensemble and Luke Schneider. This is a three minute track from their EP High Line- B- sides from 2020, psychedelia, ambient, loops, e- bow guitar and pedal steel, a low key, mini- symphony. 

We Pointed Them North

May Your Song Always Be Sung

Isaac's headstone was fixed in place at the cemetery yesterday. It's been a long road to get to this point. For a long time we couldn't do it. There's a finality about a headstone we just couldn't face- it'll be there long after we've all gone and it had to be right. We had a planter and two flower pots which have done the job for the last two and a half years, the various plants, shrubs and flowers changing with the seasons, different colours coming and going, and for a long time they were enough. The sunflowers became part of it too, bought from the supermarket down the road and bringing a big splash of sunshine every summer. A year ago we got to a point where we felt we needed to get him a headstone. It's taken a year since then to get it as we wanted it. We wanted a natural stone- at first we wanted slate but it was prohibitively expensive and very difficult to get hold of, so we went for grey sandstone instead. Ordering the stone, getting the wording right, getting everything as it should be, has taken a year but it's been worth the wait, to get it right, for us and for him. Mainly now, it feels like a relief, that it's done and in place and that it looks so good and so right- and maybe it feels like the end of something too, or at least the end of a part of this whole thing. 

The inscription at the bottom comes from the Covid memorial in London, written on the wall by a friend in the days that followed Isaac's death, 30th November 2021. It has felt for a long time now that that these were to be the words for his headstone. 

Isaac's middle name Neville was the name of my maternal grandfather. He died the year before Isaac was born and it seemed right to pass the name on. In one of those coincidences that could never be planned, one of my younger brothers has become a father this week for the first time. His son is four days old today and has also been given the middle name Neville, passing it on again, which is lovely and very moving. 

Forever Young

For those are are interested in the details, this is demo version of the song, recorded by Bob Dylan in June 1973 while visiting his publishers in New York. The song then appeared on Planet Waves in two versions, one slow paced and like a lullaby and the other faster and rockier. Dylan became a parent for the first time in 1966 and wrote it while in Tucson, presumably early in 1973. According to the liner notes of Biograph, he wrote it, 'thinking about one of [my] boys and not wanting to be too sentimental... I certainly didn't intend to write it... the song wrote itself'. The demo version is my favourite and I've been waiting for an occasion to post it.  

'May your heart always be joyful/ May your song always be sung/ And may you stay forever young'

Habitual Illusions

More new music, today from Coyote, the Nottingham duo who put out release after release of top quality music all of it worth the time and pennies they ask of you. Their latest is a two track EP, Habitual Illusions and Embrace It, both sounding ripe for the summer sunshine we're long overdue. First up is Habitual Illusions, big bass, dub grooves, laid back percussion and drums and a lovely, wobbly guitar line, all surrounded by acres of space.

The second track is Embrace It, synth strings and pattering rhythms and samples from a film where a woman gives advice about how to handle an LSD trip. In Ibiza. 'Embrace it, don't fight', she says.  

Both are available for purchase at Bandcamp along with the rest of their recent releases- the mini- album Hurry Up And Live from earlier this year, last summer's single with Rolo McGinty, Marijuana (there's a theme developing here isn't there?), last year's mini- album Everything Moves, Nothing Rests, the full length album The Mystery Light from November 2021 and much more- singles, remixes, EPs, everything. 

Take Your Baby By The Hand

In 2022 Peak High released a single that was one the best of the year, the magnificent Was That All It Was, a cover of a 1979 disco/ soul song by Jean Carne. Peak High (Jim McCall) then sent his version to Sean Johnston who remixed it twice, the first time pulling all the ALFOS/ Patrick Cowley levers, synths and drum machines set for the cosmic disco/ chug heart of the sun, the second going early 90s Sheffield bleep house. Now they've done it again.

The new release is a cover of Wang Chung's 1983 hit Dance Hall Days, a song for summer and late nights, the sequencers and synths throbbing and pulsing. Don Gomez's sweet vocal sends the song closer to perfection. All the labels apply- cosmic disco, Italo, Balearic, chug house. Once again Sean is on remix duties, his Hardway Bros remix toughening up the drums and sending it to a sweatier, darker place, most likely a basement. 

The Peak High and Hardway Bros versions are at Bandcamp. The video for the original song was directed by Derek Jarman, with some of the footage from Jarman's father's home movies. The toddler is Derek. 

Sean is back in his remix partnership with Duncan Gray as Hardway Bros Meets Monkton very shortly, the pair remixing the latest song from the Tici Taci label, a superb EP from Uj Pa Gaz, coming all the way from Tirana in Albania. The Hardway Bros Meets Monkton Uptown remix of Roxy is a six minute dub version, bassline leading the way, very much Uptown. The original version of Roxy is a gorgeous, woozy slice of electronic music, laid back Adriatica. Also on the EP is The Cove, six slo mo minutes, percussion, chugging drums and a keening topline that pulls at the heartstrings. There's a clip of the remix of Roxy at Soundcloud  and one of Roxy here. More excellence from Tici Taci- the EP comes out on 31st July. 

Back in 2018 Uj Pa Gaz remixed Fujiya & Miyagi's brilliant ode to middle age and its attendant physical shortcomings, Extended Dance Mix. 

Extended Dance Mix (Uj Pa Gaz Remix)

While I'm here, can I remind you about Duncan Grey's full length album from earlier this year, Five Fathoms Full. It's twelve tracks of wall to wall supercharged ALFOS- style cosmic disco/ indie dance and hasn't been heard by nearly enough people. Find it here. 

Monday's Long Song

Another Monday, another LCD Soundsystem long song. This one is from 2010 and the third LCD Soundsystem album This Is Happening. I remember feeling a little underwhelmed by the album but looking at it now maybe that was me and not James Murphy. The songs were good but none matched the sheer  emotional dance music majesty of Sound Of Silver's peaks. I payed it through recently and it sounded great, the melancholy tinged dance pop of I Can Change, the sleek NY sounds of Pow Pow and Drunk Girls, a song Murphy described as 'dumb' but also said that he liked dumb stuff. In May 2010 Drunk Girls was released as a single, the 7" coming with a Wooden Shjips cover of the song as its B- side and the 12" with a remix by Holy Ghost!

Drunk Girls (Holy Ghost! Remix)

Holy Ghost! are a synthpop duo from Brooklyn. Their remix splices electro, indie rock and disco, a New Order- ish, pulsating, high energy seven and a half minutes of fun with James outlining what drunk girls (and drunk boys) are and what they do, the shallows and depths of hedonism and his belief in waking up together. 

Fifty Five Minutes Of Mighty Force

Mighty Force began life in 1990 as an Exeter based record shop and then label run by Mark Darby, created largely to put out the music on a tape passed to him by one Richard D. James. Said cassette contained Analogue Bubblebath, the first appearance on vinyl of Aphex Twin. The label ran to 1999, from '95 in London, and then closed its doors. Mark began releasing music again in summer 2019 and since then had put out album after album of outstanding electronic music- ambient, techno, dance music, acid and all points in between and around, releases by David Harrow, Boxheater Jackson, M- Paths, Golden Donna, Myoptik, Long Range Desert Group, Yorkshire Machines, WRNR, Shrieky, SubDan, M- Paths, D'FunK, Fluffy Inside, AP Organism, Paddy Thorne, KAMS, Sven Kossler, Solipsism, and dyLAB plus several compilations of MF Acid and this year has already released two further compilations to celebrate the label's thirty three years. MF33 Volume 2 can be found here. The most recent Mighty Force release appeared ten days ago, an hour long mix of music by Boxheater Jackson containing music from his Indigenous State Of Mind album and some previously unreleased Boxheater tracks. Find it here. There is nothing on Mighty Force that isn't worth listening to, Mark's quality control is ridiculously high. Today's mix is a celebration of the label, nine tracks long with eight from the reborn Mighty Force. 

Fifty Five Minutes Of Mighty Force

• Aphex Twin: Analogue Bubblebath
• AP Organism: Moon Rocks
• Fluffy Inside: Nylon Corner
• KAMS: Website Rave
• Long Range Desert Group: Lutheran Burglar
• Yorkshire Machines: LS3 03
• M- Paths: M- Paths By Name, Empaths By Nature
• Boxheater Jackson: Let It All Go!
• David Harrow: Jitter

Analogue Bubblebath is a perfect piece of electronic music, a track Mark heard in his shop over the shop's sound system and was 'like nothing (he'd) ever heard before'. It took a while to convince Richard/ Aphex Twin to release it, Richard eventually agreeing while under the influence of LSD. Analogue Bubble bath is otherworldly, emotive, inventive, ambient dance music that keeps shifting shape, and still sounds like the future. 

AP Organism released Space Docks And Moon Rocks in May 2023, a two track EP of dubby/ cosmic/ ambient electronica from Andy Pitman.  

Fluffy Inside's Nylon Corners came out in July 2023, a ten track album that works as both headphone and dancefloor music. The title track is a beauty, acid melodies dancing about over rattling 303 percussion.

Website Rave is from KAMS Described Spaces album, a twelve track delight. Website Rave sounds exactly like its title suggests it should- acid basslines, thumping machine drums, squiggles, sirens, the occasional sampled vocal shout. 

Long Range Desert Group's album Pro- oxidant was one of my favourites back in 2022, drawing its influences not just from electronic music but from post- punk, from ACR, 23 Skidoo and Talking Heads. Heads down, absorbing and cinematic, the whole album is  an essential Mighty Force release. 

Yorkshire Machines put out their Firing Up EP in late 2023. It is thumpy acid dance music. LS3 03 samples Sean Bean from the TV adaptation of David Peace's deeply unsettling Red Riding quartet of novels. No one made the construction of a vast shopping centre sound more like a threat than a promise.

M- Paths have had two albums out on Mighty Force, Hope in March 2023 and Submerge in April this year. The track here is from Hope. On the whole M- Paths make chilled out ambient and ambient techno. The one here is pretty thumpy though, dance music as a thing of optimism. 

Boxheater Jackson has had two full length albums out on Mighty Force, the first We Are One in 2022  and the second this year's Indigenous State Of Mind from September last year. Both albums are superb, Big Vern creating widescreen, stripped down, consciousness raising, awestruck dance music. Boxheater Jackson is otherwise known as Big Vern Burns. He who DJed alongside Andrew Weatherall at the Double Gone Chapel and before that was an engineer at Sabresonic and then went onto Rotters Golf Club. 

David Harrow's road to Mighty Force takes in a past that includes time spent with Psychic TV, writing and producing with Anne Clark, being a key member of the On U Sound crew, playing with Jah Wobble, recording with Andrew Weatherall as Blood Sugar and then on Sabres as Technova, writing Billie Ray Martin's Your Loving Arms, moving to LA and releasing music as James Hardway and more recently putting out modular synth/ ambient/ dub recordings under his own name. Jitter was the title track on a two track EP from 2023, a slice of mighty, jittery acid techno to finish things here. 

V.A. Saturday

Another V. A. Saturday, another Soul Jazz compilation- this one a 2001 post- punk/ punk- funk/ industrial party with the demob suits and short back and sides groups from the UK in the late 70s and early 80s. In The Beginning There Was Rhythm has action from the regional outposts of the punk funk/ industrial scenes, from Manchester (two ACR songs, Shack Up and Knife Slits Water) and Sheffield (The Human League's Being Boiled and Cabaret Voltaire's Sluggin' Fer Jesus) and also the London based bands 23 Skidoo, Throbbing Gristle and This Heat.

The title track is a song by The Slits, originally a 7" single released by Rough Trade and Y Records in 1980, The Slits on one side and Where There's A Will There's A Way by The Pop Group on the flip. 

In The Beginning There Was Rhythm

It's a spindly, scratchy and idiosyncratic five minutes, the bass and beat bumping along and Dennis Bovell's dub production at the fore, Viv's abstract guitar and bursts of piano and Ari stopping every now and then to declare, 'Silence is a rhythm too'.

The Pop Group's She Is Beyond Good And Evil is also on the CD, a 1979 single with Mark Stewart using the language of unconditional love as an act of revolution, romance and politics bound together with some dub bass, wire scratch guitars and reggae drums. 

She Is Beyond Good And Evil

From Bristol to Leeds and Gang Of Four's thumping, atonal, driving racket, the 1981 song To Hell With Poverty, a song that dances in the face of having only a fiver in your pocket until Giro day/ pay day, 'To hell with poverty/ We'll get drunk on cheap wine'.

To Hell With Poverty

We finished school for the summer holiday yesterday, six weeks off working stretching out ahead of me, thirty one years of teaching completed and like Jon King and Gang Of Four, cheap wine tonight's option.