Wednesday's Long Song

We got back from Gran Canaria in the early hours on Monday night/ Tuesday morning, Manchester welcoming us with drizzle and road works in a reassuring kind of way. Ten days in Gran Canaria was very much what we all needed, sunshine every day and not very much to do other than slow right down and potter between the pool, the beach and places to eat and drink. Usually when we go on holiday we're taking days to go out and do and see things, visiting cities and historical or cultural sites (and record shops). In Puerto Rico there wasn't much of that- a fantastic array of cactuses aside- so we ground to a halt. Much of the time it was too hot to do very much at all, the mercury rising to the mid- to- high thirties most days. On the descent from 30, 000 feet into Las Palmas airport my right ear unblocked itself, the congestion around my sinuses shifting completely which was worth the holiday in itself (even if I can feel it returning as I type this). 

While we were away it seemed like there were a lot of interesting musical releases which I'll spend part of this week catching up with. One of them was this, a David Holmes remix of Orbital's Belfast, part of a 30th anniversary album the Hartnoll brothers have released to celebrate three decades of music called 30 Something. Belfast came out in 1991 on the III 12" along with the tracks LC1 and Satan. Belfast was named after the experience Orbital had playing in the city after Homes booked them to play at the Art College in Belfast in May 1990. David's remix doesn't radically alter the original, instead tweaking it, updating it from 1990 to 2022 and just making it a bit moreso. Twelve minutes of euphoric blissed out splendor (with a tinge of melancholy)

Here's the original from the III 12" single with the famous sample of soprano (singer not gangster) Emily Van Evera, a sampled voice that appeared on The Beloved's The Sun Rising a year previously. 

Belfast