The Sky Without You

The opening track on Andy Bell's solo album Flicker is a three minute piece of sound, backwards guitars, washes of backwards vocals and some phased drones, that weird, looped weightlessness that comes when you reverse the tapes and run them backwards (Andy's inspiration was at least in part The Stone Roses who had a tendency to do this in 1988/ 89 with songs like Full Fathom Five and Guernica, a rush of pure sound that the band compared to driving out to Manchester airport and lying on the bonnet of the car at the end of the runway as jets took off overhead. While stoned). 

The Sky Without You

This song and several others have been remixed for a new EP along with two other new EPs, all out in November on vinyl and digitally. The Sky Without You has been remixed by David Holmes, a man who has played a big part in this blog virtually and in real life recently. Holmes' Radical Mycology Remix takes the original's backwards psychedelia and expands it outwards and inwards: outwards by doubling the length and layering more sounds, waves and rhythms, a snare drum and then at one minute twenty five soaring off with ripples and pulses, full on psych flight; inwards in that this is psychedelia as exploration within, head music. The video is a hallucinogenic feast too.  

The remixes come thick and fast after that, versions of songs from Flicker from Richard Norris, Claude Cooper, A Place To Bury Strangers, Maps and bdrmm. The vinyl's all gone but you can get the digital release here. 

As well as the remix EP there's a four track 10"/ digital EP of cover versions, the three already released covers of The Kinks, Pentangle and Arthur Russell (the latter two of which have been songs I've gone to often this year, songs to find solace inside) with a new one- Yoko Ono's Listen, the Snow Is Falling. The EP, Untitled Film Stills, is here.  The third EP of the set is acoustic versions of five of the songs from Flicker, The Grounding Process, and can be got here. 

The Pentangle cover is Light Flight, from their 1970 album Basket Of Light. To call this jazz/ folk seems to undersell it. Unique otherworldly, celtic jazz folk might be better and is still just a list of genres. In this clip Pentangle play live on a BBC special some in June 1970, when I was one month old. 

As C commented when I posted Andy's cover earlier this year the song was the theme tune to Take Three Girls, a BBC drama which ran from 1969 to 1971 following the lives of three young women flat sharing in London during the Swinging Sixties, the first BBC drama to be broadcast in colour.