Fifty Minutes Of 10: 40

I first heard the music of 10: 40 three years ago when 10: 40 (Jesse Fahnestock) shared his edit/ dub of Spacemen 3's How Does It Feel? in a few groups I'm a member of.

How Does It Feel? (10: 40's Terrace Moonshine Dub)

Jesse takes an already somnolent/ tripped out Pete Kember and co and filters him through a dub filter, everything stretched out and reverberating slowly. 

From there I dug into the 10: 40 back catalogue and found a treasure trove of edits, dubs, original music, remixes, Balearic shufflers, chuggers, bangers and a lot of slow, repetitive psychedelia. Jesse's big influences- Andrew Weatherall, Hardkiss, Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized- all made use of repetition and the long groove. After a while Jesse got in touch and stated sharing tracks with me, both as 10: 40 and his partnership with Darren Bell as Jezebell. At the start of 2023 10: 40 released Transition Theory, an album that is a full conceived piece of work, each track flowing beautifully into the next one. Jesse was one of the people we approached to be on Sounds From the Flightpath Estate Volume 1, a relative unknown next to some big hitters- David Holmes, Justin Robertson, Sean Johnstone, an unreleased Weatherall and Tenniswood track for crying out loud!- and his track Three Rings stands along side any of the others on the album. 

I thought it was time for a Sunday 10: 40 mix. Once I started going through my folders and realised how much music Jesse has made my head swam a bit- so much music, what to include? In the end I went for a mix of slow and low, dubby electronic psychedelia, a world where it's permanently twenty to eleven. Maybe the bangers need a mix of their own. This was a tricky one to do in some ways and the tempo speeds up and slows down which maybe I should have fixed and shifted the sequence around to make it flow more evenly. And yes, that Spacemen 3 edit should really have been on it too.

10: 40's Bandcamp is here. 

Fifty Minutes Of 10: 40

• One Way To Go (10: 40's So High It Hurts Edit)
• Green Shoots
• Neighbors Dub
• Left Behind Blues
• Sea Quenched
• Kissed Again
• Iz Um
• Hey You (10: 40 Remix)
• Tumbling Down

One Way To Go was on the B-side of the first 12" Verve released, back in 1992 when the Wigan psychonauts were four young, straggly haired, psychedelic/ shoegaze noise explorers, a genuinely brilliant live band and hadn't yet been forced to add The to their name or become balladeers. All In The Mind was a calling card, a gauntlet thrown down. Jesse does a full on dubbed out treatment. I suggested to him once that he should remix and dub the entire early Verve back catalogue. I think he thought I was joking.

Last December Jesse re- presented the entire 10: 40 back catalogue as an advent calendar, putting everything out there one more time before deleting it. Green Shoots was the behind 5th door, Neighbors Dub was 8th December's door, Sea Quenched the 18th, Iz Um was the 19th, and Left Behind Blues the 21st.

Kissed Again is an absolute beauty, the lead track on a three track EP that came out on Brighton's Higher Love label, the home of some truly wonderful modern Balearica. In September 2021 I described Kissed Again as ' a blissed out glide- by track from Jesse Fahnestock's 10:40 alias, an eight minute trip, with gently rising and falling synths, bubbling sounds, rolling piano chords, some acid squiggles and a sense of reaching an ending that'll leave you either grinning or slightly dewy eyed. Maybe both'. I'm sticking with that. 

Hey You is a cover  of 14 Iced Bears song Hey Fever by Puerto Montt City Orchestra with original singer Rob Sekula recording new vocals for the song. Jesse goes all Spiritualized, nearly eight minutes of trippy psychedelia.

Tumbling Down is the opener from Transition Theory and really, once you've let this mix paly through and ended on Tumbling Down you should cue up the album and go straight on through.