I've been excited about this EP for some time and it's finally out today. Hugo Nicolson is the man who learnt his trade engineering at On U Sound with Adrian Sherwood, went on to ably assist Andrew Weatherall on his groundbreaking early productions and remixes, and then produced several of Julian Cope's most significant albums (Peggy Suicide and Jehoavakill). He recently moved home from LA and has got an EP out today on Brighton's Higher Love label, a label that knows its musical onions. Hugo's EP kicks off with his own track, the nine minute extravaganza that is Field Of Dreams. Chanting voices, a big kick drum, tumbling reverb- laden piano, and an amazing snaking horn line, the sound of the souk over a thumping four four. All manner of sonics follow- distorted, buzzing bass, rattling percussion, dancing synthlines... everything swirling around and swaying with those horns and the voices in unison. There's a four minute radio edit which does the job as a taster but you going to want the full nine minutes for maximum joy...
There are remixes, three of them from Bagging Area repeat offenders/ heavyweights David Holmes, Hardway Bros and Rude Audio.
Holmes' remix judders and spins with an energy all of its own, the beats coming on strong and those chanting voices isolated before they're joined by a kaleidoscopic whirl of percussion and sounds, like being trapped on a rotating dancefloor, giddy and heady fun that threatens to tip over into madness. There's a pause at three and half minutes for a breather, a breakdown and some piano but those horns re- enter, summoning you back to the dance. The chanting section at five a a half minutes is equally hypnotic and then the horns work their magic again. A friend's partner said Holmes' remix made her heart race and made her feel a tad anxious and I can see what she means.
The Hardway Bros Cosmic Interpolation Mix sets out as Hardway Bros remixes often do, a cosmic disco drum pattern and Sean's trademark s-p-a-c-e-d production. The chanting voices make an appearance in this remix too as Sean keeps things more linear, a propulsive and driving remix that gets on the train tracks and heads relentlessly across the expanses of the desert with the occasional bleepy breakdown and face melting synth whooshes. Like Holmes' remix, it doesn't do things by halves, both clocking in north of nine minutes.
Rude Audio usually use ten minutes as the standard length for a remix. Surprisingly this one is closer to seven minutes, a blinding dub- dance version with bass that will shake your clothing and rattle your ribcage, synths that ricochet left and right and those chanting voices swirling around while the Arabian horn pulls us back into the dance. The entire EP is a trip, one of this year's best releases thus far, and should be soundtracking many an event. Build it and they will come.
Hugo Nicolson's Field Of Dreams can be bought and heard at Bandcamp.
Andy Bell's new solo album Pinball Wanderer, his third in recent years, comes out tomorrow. It's been trailed by his cosmische cover of The Passion's I'm In Love With A German Film Star, a cover that has vocals by Dot Allison and guitar by Michael Rother, and more recently by an eight and a half minute track called Apple Green UFO.
Apple Green UFO is a groove, a psychedelic monster, starting out funky and swampy like an offcut from The Stone Roses' Second Coming, but one that outdoes most of the songs that ended up on that album, or the 1990 B-side Something's Burning spliced with Can at their grooviest, with a guitar solo in the middle that is a murky, fuzzed up delight. There's a recurring organ/ horn part that gurgles away too, adding to the fun. Andy says the song started as an acoustic Led Zeppelin groove and then turned into a version of Histoire de Melody Nelson by Serge Gainsbourg. After hitting play repeatedly I can confirm that Apple Green UFO sounds like it does indeed carry the seeds of all these things inside it but still comes up smelling like something new. The album, out tomorrow, promises to be a big part of the soundtrack to spring 2025.
This was released while we were in Belfast last week, a new track by Belfast resident and DJ/ producer/ musician/ composer Phil Kieran in his Le Carousel guise. We're All Gonna Hurt is eight minutes of sleek, propulsive, cosmische electronic music, the sound of the future we all imagined when we were kids- pulsing basslines, rippling synths, machine arpeggios, melancholic and blissed out futuristic disco music. The vocals are provided by Jolene O'Hara and Jess Brien. Buy at Bandcamp.
This one came out last year- I missed it somehow- and it kicks hard, 303 driven robotic funk with blank eyed vocals from Cynthia Sley, Out Of My Mind.
Factory Floor are back, expanded to a three piece, the core duo of Gabe Gurnsey and Nic Colk Void joined by Joe Ward and recording with New Order's Stephen Morris in Macclesfield. Factory Flor last released new material in 2018, Soundtrack For A Film, a modular synth workout for Metropolis, the 1927 Fritz Lang film that invented science fiction cinema. The new track, Between You, is an FF tour de force, industrial machine drumming, bleak synths, tumbling percussion and Nic Void's emotionless vocal. It's hypnotic and powerful, warehouse bodybeat party music. The video below was filmed at a live performance in Montreal last year, a blur of movement, limbs and percussion. You can get Between You digitally at Bandcamp (the 300 limited vinyl have all long gone). Hopefully there will be an album to follow.
Back in 2016 Factory Floor released an album called 25 25 on DFA. I loved it, a perfect collision of minimal repetitive machine music, Hacienda beats and stripped back vocals, acid house reduced to its bare bones with absolute precision.
Their 2018 re- imagined soundtrack to the silent film Metropolis is a joy, less mechanical than 25 25, the modular synths bringing a human edge to the machine rhythms. They played it live for the film's 90th anniversary at the Science Museum's IMAX in 2017. This track was a highlight...
A few weeks ago I wrote a post about Lou Reed's solo albums, from his self- titled debut in 1972 through to New York in 1989 and the meandering quality of what Lou released in between those two records. At the time, inspired by a post at The Vinyl Villain about a 1981 Lou Reed best of album called Walk On the The Wild Side I thought I should commit to delving into Lou's solo releases further than I have before and see what I could discover. There is a view of Lou's solo career that there's a lot of duff material, a lot of chaff among the wheat. For every Transformer there's a Mistrial. This deep dive into the Lou Reed back catalogue may take months and may splutter out at some point but I thought I should give it a go and went back in with 1973's Berlin, the follow up to Transformer (I will at some point do his solo debut, the May 1972 album that bombed on release but as I noted last time, included the wonderful Wild Child among its treasures- I don't own a copy of the album yet. I could do it digitally but feel that committing to this Lou Reed project requires the acquisition of vinyl, the format it was recorded to be played on).
I had Berlin back in the late 80s, bought on cassette cheaply in the first flush of Lou Reed and Velvet Underground fandom. My memories of it were pretty scant but had been reawakened by the song from Walk On The Wild Side, How Do You Think It Feels, which is a superb song, a cabaret/ Weimar/ 70s New York crossover with stop- start dynamics, a killer guitar solo and the always arresting line, 'How do you think it feels?/ To always make love by proxy'. Listening again, three and a half decades later, Berlin blew me away. It was intended to be a sixty minute double album with longer versions of many of the songs but RCA pulled the plug on that and insisted it be cut down to a single disc. What was left was a killer ten song album that tells the story of a pair of New York addicts Jim and Caroline and their decline into drugs, domestic abuse, prostitution and suicide. So Lou Reed. Some of the songs, as was the case throughout the 70s, were Velvets leftovers- Oh Jim, Caroline Says II, Sad Song and Men Of Good Fortune were all played live or demoed by the band at some point.
Lou tells Jim and Caroline's story, playing acoustic guitar with Bob Ezrin producing (and the production is uniformly excellent). There are electric guitars, piano, trombones, organs, trumpets and sax, Mellotron, bass by Jack Bruce and a spectral choir. The title track opens with a cacophony of noise, voices, cabaret piano, a mass singing of Happy Birthday and then the song appears, piano notes and lush echo and then Lou, half singing, half speaking of candlelight and Dubonnet on ice, 'oh honey it was paradise'. Lady Day kicks in with organ and drums, the seedy world of Lou, and of Jim and Caroline, brought to life. The sound and music builds on the game- raising drama that Bowie and Mick Ronson brought to Transformer the previous year and takes it into new territory. Men Of Good Fortune and Caroline Says I continue the story, Lou diving into the grime and depression of Jim and Caroline's lives- 'Caroline says that I'm not a man/ So she'll go and get it where she can... But she's still my queen'
Oh Jim at the end of side one is heartbreaking, a five minute song with tumbling drums and squelching organ, droning trumpets and slashes of guitar, Lou singing of two- bit friends and being like an alley cat. It builds into squealing guitars before breaking down in the second half, just an acoustic guitar and Lou close to the mic, singing as Caroline, 'Oh Jim/ How could you treat me this way?/ You know you broke my heart ever since you went away'.
Side two goes further and harder. Caroline Says II is a ghostly starting point, more acoustic guitars and Lou singing softly. The cabaret sound re- appears, as Lou croons for Caroline, 'She's not afraid to die/ All of her friends/ They call her Alaska/ When she takes speed they laugh and ask her/ What is in her mind?' followed by the violence of the line' You can hit me all you want but I don't love you any more', the orchestral backing at odds with the lyrics. The Kids follows, Caroline's children being taken away because 'they say she is not a good mother'. When the sound of two children crying comes in it's too much- the story goes that the children crying were told by Reed and Evrin that their mother had actually left them and they then pressed record. If true, they'd quite rightly be done for neglect and abuse themselves. The early 1970s; they were different times.
The Bed follows, fading out of the ending of The Kids, side two really a side long medley. In The Bed Jim lies in the bed where their children were conceived and where 'she cut her wrists' and Lou sings as Jim, 'and I say oh oh oh oh/ What a feeling' (a line later sampled by A Certain Ratio on their 1990 single Good Feeling). We're deep into theatre and storytelling now, the ghostly choir swirling around a lone acoustic guitar, Jim alone in the apartment, everything lost, Caroline dead. 'I never would have started if I'd known that it would end this way', Lou sings as Jim- but follows it with the emotionally dead Jim singing that he's not sorry that it ended this way. Jim has no remorse.
Berlin ends with the seven minute song Sad Song, the conclusion of the album's tale, Jim and Caroline's horrific story, the song fading in from the choir and FX that swell out of The Bed's ending. Sax breaks in, dancing around quirkily. A bass bumps up and down. Trumpets. Lou singing of a picture book where 'she looks like Mary Queen of Scots', horns parping and drums thumping, the guitar solos and the strings sweep and then Lou breaks into the song's title, utterly dead pan, just the two words, 'sad... song', Jim's lack of remorse and amorality still the centrepiece of Lou's lyrics. Then we are treated to a long, gloriously melancholic but weirdly uplifting fade out, the strings with Lou and the choir, 'Sad song/ Sad song'.
Berlin is a masterpiece. My re- discovery of it recently reveals it as good as anything else Lou Red did post- The Velvet Underground, a fully realised work of art that doesn't flinch from the world it depicts, Lou's songwriting at its best and the production and playing pushing Lou beyond the early 70s guitar rock of his debut and Transformer. It was slagged on release, declared a disaster and panned as depressing. Lou always liked it. He resurrected it in 2008 for some live shows and was asked if he felt vindicated. 'For what?', he replied, never a man to suffer journalists gladly. 'I always liked Berlin'. I don't know yet what's coming next in my Lou Reed solo deep dive but it'll have to be good to match Berlin.
We had two days and nights in Belfast last week, flying out very early Wednesday morning and returning Friday midday. I'd never been before. It's a great city, we loved our time their exploring the place and while it might be a bit of a cliche to say that the Guinness is excellent, it really is. Belfast has many wonderful pubs in which to try the Guinness, loads of history (the difficult parts of which it doesn't shy away from and which are still part of its present) and lots to do. I definitely intend to go back.
We also missed David Holmes and Timmy Stewart DJing together which took place in Belfast last night. Luckily last week David returned to NTS for his monthly God's Waiting Room show, so we've got that to listen to instead- three hours of sounds starting out ambient and drifty, going cinematic and jazz- ambient jazz in fact- and then veering into psychedelic jazz and all sorts of interesting, superbly well stitched together songs. There's no tracklist available at the moment but you can tune in at Mixcloud.
I also offer you this for Sunday, a two hour mix celebrating the sounds of Bristol courtesy of Nick Callaghan and Love Will Save The Day FM. Nick's put together an all vinyl, two hour celebration of The Wild Bunch, the Bristol collective and sound system from whom Massive Attack emerged. Surface Noise is two hours of Bristol based treasures, the sounds that The Wild Bunch were listening to and playing, the reggae and dub, mid- 80s hip hop, post punk, soul and New Wave sounds that fed into the ether and became such a key part of 90s culture. Find it here. It goes well with a pint or two of Sunday Guinness.
1968 film Bullitt is a classic of its kind, a late 60s crime/ detective thriller with a realistic feel, shot almost entirely on location, with gritty characters, violence, a car chase, corrupt city officials, some very natural sounding speech and scriptwriting, some very outdated attitudes towards the female characters, and Steve McQueen as Frank Bullitt. Most films would be improved by Steve McQueen.
The score by Lalo Schifrin is a massive part of the film too, 60s American jazz that adds an edge to the film but works as a standalone album. Some of the tracks were re- recorded for the album's release, given a more pop feel to aid sales.
Just Coffee wasn't on the original album release but made it onto the expanded edition, a slow and atmospheric musical backdrop to your Saturday morning espresso while you think about the day ahead. Wear the blue polo neck jumper and the tweed jacket over it. Oh, and the brown suede chukka boots...
Cathy, played by Jacqueline Bissett, is Frank Bullitt's girlfriend. Cathy is an architect, a world away from Frank's police work. In one scene they find a young woman murdered in a motel bedroom. 'Frank, you work in a sewer', she says to him. But she's still there at the end of the film, asleep in bed when Frank returns from the finale at San Francisco airport having shot a man dead.
Friday's improvisational jazz comes from Bill Frisell, an album from 2004 called Unspeakable which used electronica and samples as a jumping off point, fragments of obscurities on vinyl, and built from there, Bill's electric and acoustic guitars joined by horns, strings and turntables. Not really jazz at all- something else. The guitars on this cross over all sorts of borders and boundaries and the rhythms are all funked up and danceable.
White Fang was a 1906 Jack London novel about a wild dog in Yukon which I read many years ago. London was one of Jack Kerouac's inspirations and Kerouac's friends Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso both turn up in song titles on the album (Hymn For Ginsberg and Gregory C). Frisell is a fan of the jazz that the Beat Generation loved and were inspired by, Wes Montgomery et al, and I guess sees his own music as sharing a similar spirit to theirs.
My dive back into Bob Dylan's back catalogue took me into the triple CD release The Bootleg Series Volumes 1- 3 (Rare and Unreleased) 1961- 1991, released in January 1991. Across three CDs, presented chronologically, there are fifty eight at the time previously unreleased Dylan songs. Some are offcuts, songs abandoned partway through- in the case of Suze (The Cough Song) because he started coughing. Some are embryonic versions of songs that were finished differently (there are alternate versions of Like A Rolling Stone, The Times They Are A- Changin' and Tangled Up In Blue for example). And some are songs that for whatever reason, didn't make it onto the album that came out of the period of time that Dylan recorded them. There was always a bootleg industry around Dylan, lost and missing songs passed around on illicitly pressed vinyl and cassette. In 1991 Dylan and CBS decided they may as well have a cut of the action (previously, in 1985, with the release of the Biograph box set, eighteen then unreleased songs saw the official light of day). Of the fifty eight songs on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1- 3, forty five are session outtakes for Dylan studio albums including these two which I've been pressing play on repeatedly.
Worried Blues is from an April 1962 session for his second album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Bob playing in the fingerpicking style he used at the time and subsequently abandoned. Worried Blues was written by Hally Wood, a singer, musician and folk musicologist, who was part of the New York folk scene of the 1950s and 60s, and who played with Pete Seeger and Leadbelly. The line 'I'm going where the climate suits my clothes' appears, a line that later on crops up in Fred Neil's Everybody's Talkin' from Midnight Cowboy. Worried Blues is a good song that just didn't make the cut for the album- it wasn't alone, there are a further twenty three songs recorded during the sessions that didn't get onto Freewheelin' also.
This is the song that jumped out at me most during my immersion into The Bootleg Series Volumes 1- 3 is this one from disc 2, a heartfelt and genuinely great 'lost' Dylan song...
There are loads of covers of Mama, You Been On My Mind including one by Joan Baez, various live versions, another demo on piano and a 1970 version with George Harrison playing along, but this is the one, recorded in 1964 during a studio session for what became Another Side Of Bob Dylan. It was written while on tour in Europe after breaking up with Suze Rotolo, probably while on holiday in Greece after a tour of England in May. Dylan's words, five verses each ending with the title of the song, are perfectly weighed and measured, poetic and colloquial-
'Perhaps it's the colour of the sun cut flat And covering the crossroads I'm standing at Or maybe it's the weather or something like that But mama, you been on my mind'
The descending chord sequence and vocal melody are gorgeous, yearning for lost love and maybe containing an admission of responsibility for the break up. It's a truly great Dylan song.
A couple of weeks ago a friend tipped me off to this single, Everyday, by Celeste, released in January and built around a very recognisable sample, Death In Vegas' Dirge- Dot's ah ah aaah, the guitar and bass. Celeste's voice is a bit special and when the drums kick in halfway through it takes off. The lyrics and Celeste's performance seem to suggest a problematic relationship, everything swirling around as Dirge kicks away behind her. Everyday was first released a year ago as a 7" single for Record Store Day 2024 but is now the first single from what will be her second album later this year.
The song came to me at a time when I was rediscovering Death In Vegas main man Richard Fearless' 2019 album Deep Rave Memory, an eight track album that is a perfect encapsulation of what electro/ dub- techno/ techno can be. It's best heard as a whole, a dark trip, but the title track is my current favourite- kick drum in a shipping container, echo and space, a discordant filter, everything at odds with everything else for a little while and then it all comes into sync and a rippling melody dances on top- a melody that repeats and repeats, then gets replaced by a different one, and then again by another, the bleakly beautiful krauty techno driving onwards for nine, ten, eleven minutes, imprinting itself into your brain.
Matt Gunn's latest EP, a three track wonder called Nowhere, came out last Friday. Matt said that while recording it he just 'let all the influences come out and just hit record'. The first track is eight minutes of dub/ shoegaze splendour called Somthing Ain't Wrong If Something Ain't Right, an electronic drumbeat crawl with currents of guitar drippled all over the place, FX and blurred, multi- tracked vocals singing a hymn to a feeling. Eventually a bassline hits. Think Nick McCabe in 1992 playing along with The Orb at an after party as the sun comes up and you're in the right area.
Second track NoWerk takes Dusseldorf as its launchpad, a Kling Klang inspired six minutes of machine music. Again, the vocals are buried in the track, within earshot but almost out of reach. Squelchy rhythms and clean keyboard topline melodies.
The third track is The Third Wave, almost nine minutes long and not a second wasted, more FXed guitars, more shimmering psychedelia in no hurry to get anywhere quickly. Two and a half minutes in drums and electronic strings show up, some electric piano, more sun dazzled guitar lines. Some time spent in ambient psychedelics contemplating... stuff.
The picture above shows Two Lone Weatherdolls. Except they're not alone, they're together, along with a replica of a Lewis chessman from the British Museum and a load of other bits and bobs that fill up the front of shelves in my house. The Weatherdolls are the work of Claire Doll, a teenage friend of Andrew Weatherall. Claire began making them in lockdown in the aftermath of Andrew's untimely death five years ago today. She raffled them for charity. The slightly smaller one on the right, I won in a raffle. The larger one on the left, was won by a friend and then passed to a friend who passed it to me to look after on behalf of the Flightpath Estate (he holds a copy of our album under his arm), to accompany us when DJing (he came to Head in Stretford last July when me, Martin and Dan played there and will make the journey to The Golden Lion for AW62 in April this year).
What Andrew would have made of this is anyone's guess. He was largely I think unfussed by fame. He turned away from the light of celebrity and the greasy pole on many occasions, choosing the road less travelled. He would have chuckled about all of this I'm sure, and been secretly pleased too, the way people have kept his name and spirit alive since that day, 17th February 2020.
His business acumen was fairly haphazard. Recently Lizzie, his partner when he died in 2020 and for the many years before that, said that in 2019 he found an envelope of cash in the studio, the payment for a DJ gig or remix presumably, and said they should 'spunk it on a holiday'. In her post Lizzie added she was grateful for his 'slipshod accounting' and said that we should on this day, 'raise a cup of splosh and a Tunnocks tea cake or two in his honour, play something fitting... and keep him present'.
I know as well as anyone from my experience in recent years that we keep those who have gone alive by speaking about them and by remembering them. This blog has done its best to do that in the years since Mr Weatherall left us. He was an inspiration in so many ways. His loss is enormous and felt daily. Wherever you are Andrew, thank you.
Breakdown was a One Dove single, released in 1993 after a year of record company shenanigans and delays. After his work on Screamadelica Andrew went almost immediately into the producer's role on One Dove's album Morning Dove White (with Hugo Nicolson at his side, his studio engineer and right hand man in those early years). One Dove's album is the equal of Screamadelica, in many ways a more even and complete album. The spacious, dubbed out songs with Andrew's magic FX dust sprinkled over them and Dot's voice on top float by in a post- acid house haze, the sun coming up on the morning after. Sabres Of Paradise were coming into being by the time Andrew worked on Morning Dove White and Hugo's presence was also required by Primal Scream as their on stage, the man who provided the sequencer and sample action, a key part of the Screamadelica live shows. The One Dove tracks are as a result split between those done by Andrew and Hugo and those done by Andrew with Jagz and Gary (Hugo did Fallen and Breakdown, Sabres much of the rest). The Squire Black Dove remix of Breakdown is a lengthy, full on, widescreen Sabres dub excursion, with samples from Exorcist by Shades Of Rhythm, a bass loop from They Came In Peace by Tranquility Bass, a bucket of dubbed out space, rimshots and melodica from Andrew's imagination, and a vocal sample from who knows where- 'against the black blue sky/ The shadow of the dove/ An open mind's excursion... can you remember? The shadow of the dove...'
Mercury Rev had a brief flurry of fame/ renown in 1989- 1991, often in conjunction with fellow travellers The Flaming Lips. In 1993 founder member David Baker left the group and Jonathan Donohue and Sean Grasshopper Mackowiac carried on, playing experimental psychedelic rock until they collapsed in 1996/7. Grasshopper retreated to a Jesuit guest house in upstate New York while Donahue sat around listening to children's music and playing melodies on a piano. He was invited to play with The Chemical Brothers on the track that became The Private Psychedelic Reel and when he returned to the US contacted Grasshopper and from all the wreckage- debt, psychedelic and experimental rock that made them a cult band but seemed to be bus constantly hurtling out of control, drugs, lost members and management, depression, broken relationships- they regrouped in the Catskill Mountains pulled the songs that became Deserter's Songs into being. Deserter's Songs is one of the best albums of the 90s, a heartfelt, concise, weirdly affecting record that harks back to the songs of the 1930s and '40s. It also featured a pair of musicians from The Band, Levon Helm and Garth Hudson. Garth died two weeks ago, the last survivor of the men who made Big Pink.
RIP Garth Hudson.
Last year Mercury Rev released an album called Born Horses, an album I bought and which divides me- half of it I don't like at all, easy listening pastiche with Donahue abandoning his upper register singing for something deeper and half of it I really like, a few genuinely revelatory songs a bout birds and horses that are like nothing else.
For this Sunday mix I've focussed mainly on the years 1998- 2004 and the trio of albums they made in those years- Deserter's Songs, 2001's stunning All Is Dream and 2004's mixed bag The Secret Migration. These three, well the first two, are albums that everyone should own and which bear repeat playing. I don't know if the end of the century/ millennium things was a factor in their creation but it seems like a good story, that pre- millennial uncertainty fed into Deserter's Songs, sent them back into America's weird past, and the new century gifted them All Is Dream.
Delta Blues Bottleneck Sun (Chemical Brothers Remix)
Dream On
The Dark Is Rising is the opening song on 2001's All Is Dream, a song infused with both fragility and strength, in those huge Hollywood strings, a piccolo and Donahue's so human voice. It's a late night, freak- you- out song that in some ways has become mixed up with my feelings about Isaac's death, my grief and especially those mornings when I wake up having dreamt about him. 'I dreamed of you on my farm/ I dreamed of you in my arms/ But my dreams are always wrong', are the lines that hit me. 'I always dreamed I'd love you/ I never dreamed I'd lose you' too. A friend who has been through a similar experienced pointed me to the end of the song though and the last line- 'In my dreams I'm always strong'- and I started to see it differently. Tides Of The Moon is from the same album, an album that closes with the seven minutes epic Hercules which I tried to fit in here too and failed.
Holes opens Deserter's Songs, a truly stunning piece of music, orchestral pop with a saw wobbling its way through it and Donahue's voice and lyrics, not least the break down and extraordinary moment where he sings, 'Holes/ Dug by little moles/ Angry jealous spies/ Got telephones for eyes', and makes it sound deeply profound. 'How does that old song go?'
Observatory Crest is a cover of a 1974 Captain Beefheart song, recorded for a 2001 Peel Session and included on the 2006 compilation Stillness Breathes, complete with birdsong.
Endlessly is from Deserter's Songs too. I could have included Goddess On A Hiway instead. Both are highlights from an album packed with them. Endlessly seemed to fit with the feel better, the sound of the 1940s cinema/ 1890s theatre/ psychedelic Willy Wonka/ late 90s alt- rock crossover.
Opus 40 is also from Deserter's Songs, possibly its peak, tripped out psychedelic/ silver screen freakery with the line, 'I'm alive she cried but I don't know what it means', as fine an eleven word summation of the human condition as any.
Diamonds is from The Secret Migration, released in January 2005, an album that flirted with Tolkien- esque imagery and which was probably a few songs too long, a song of nature, love and devotion.
Delta Blues Bottleneck Stomp was an upbeat way to end Deserter's Song (apart from the hidden track that came after it), a joyous harpsichord/ piano riff that sounded like they'd heard it on a late 80s house record and repurposed it for an album recorded in the woods of upstate New York by men dressed in late 19th century clothes with two former members of The Band. The Chemical Brothers repaid the favour Donahue had done for them on The Private Psychedelic Reel by remixing it, one of their best.
Donahue also sang on Dream On, the closing song from The Chemical Brothers' 1997 album Surrender, an album not short of guest vocalists- Bernard Sumner, Noel Gallagher and Hope Sandoval all show up. Dream On is a sleepy, half asleep, blissed out and gently building psychedelic finale, and in some way completes this mix by going back to the start, a dream sequence. It also has a false ending and after a period of silence the song wakes up again briefly.
Performance came out in 1970, the year of my birth, a druggy, graphic, psyched out crime thriller. I'm not suggesting my birth and the film are related in any way, merely coincidental. Nic Roeg signed Mick Jagger up for the role of Turner (also my surname), Mick playing the part of a reclusive late 60s rock star (largely playing himself except for the reclusive part) holed up in his West London home (Powis Square, Notting Hill) suddenly brought into contact with the violent criminal underworld when Edward Fox (Chas) gatecrashes his home. Turner is in a three way relationship which involves Anita Pallenberg (playing Pherber). Inevitably drugs are taken and Chas is given mushrooms. Chas and Turner begin to become each other, a drug fuelled identity crisis that ends in violence.
Part of the drama and mystique of Performance is the real world that intersected it. In the opening scenes Jagger and Pallenberg have sex. The rumours were that the sex and drug trips were real and not acted. At the time Pallenberg was Keith Richards' girlfriend (having abandoned Brian Jones the same year on the ill fated trip to Morocco Jones, Pallenberg and Richards undertook). Keith became suspicious his songwriting partner and friend was going beyond the acceptable boundaries- although in Rolling Stones world, what are acceptable boundaries and where do they lie? He spent days during the filming parked outside the house in Powis Square in his Rolls Royce waiting to pick Anita up after filming, silently seething that Mick might be inside being filmed having sex with Anita.
The soundtrack, also released in 1970, is a proper soundtrack, the score written by Stones associate and producer Jack Nietsche, with Ry Cooder contributing some filthy slide guitar. Merry Clayton sings on two songs- she famously provided the vocal on The Stones Gimme Shelter (from 1969), an epic piece of singing that completely defines the song. The title track is a short two minute ambient piece, whooshing noises and a hum (recorded by Bernie Krause), unsettling and intense. Merry's voice comes in after a minute, instantly recognisable and equally instantly evoking Gimme Shelter.
There are songs by Randy Newman, Buffy Sainte- Marie and The Last Poets and several more Nietsche pieces including this one, Ry Cooder's guitar the soundtrack to Turner's nocturnal, shadow existence in the house in Notting Hill...
The Stones were originally lined up to do the soundtrack.They were in the middle of their hot streak, that run of four albums from 1968 to 1973 where they released Let It Bleed, Beggar's Banquet, Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main Street, the albums where they live up to the legend. Needless to say Jagger and Richards personal relationship was not at its best during the filming of Performance and the soundtrack ended up coming together via Nietsche, Crawford, Cooder et al. Except for one song, Memo From Turner, a Jagger- Richards co- write. And what a song it is...
Raw '68/ 69 Stones, Ry Cooder's slide guitar, groove and swagger, instant late 60s cool glamour/ dirt, Jagger drawling like he's come in from Louisiana, singing lines about Spanish speaking gentlemen, leather boys, Coke conventions and soft machines. There are three versions, the one above that appeared in the film and on the soundtrack and as a Jagger solo single, and two earlier ones- one played by Traffic and a second with Al Kooper and Richards. In the film, when the song plays Jagger/ Turner lip syncs to it, breaking the fourth wall and inventing a whole sub- genre of indie/ rock videos. Fans of Happy Mondays and Bummed will spot the 'we've been courteous' sample. Fans of Big Audio Dynamite will know that e=mc2 is written about Nic Roeg's films, verse two about Performance and spot the 'you'll look funny when you're fifty' sample.
In May 2010 Andrew Weatherall and Sean Johnston started a club night at The Drop in Stoke Newington, a Thursday night in a small, 140 capacity room. Sean and Andrew met back in the early days of acid house and the fun that went with it all. As one of Flash Faction Sean had a 12" released on Andrew's Sabres Of Paradise label, the mighty techno rush of Repoman, and Sean had joined Sabres on tour. In the 2000s they re- connected. Andrew invited Sean to DJ at the launch for his Watch The Ride compilation and when Andrew was short of a driver for a jaunt to Brighton to play a DJ gig, Sean stepped in and took the wheel. In the car Andrew asked if Sean had anything they could listen to. Sean had recently been enjoying the slowed down sounds of Daniele Baldelli and the early/ mid 80s Italo cosmic disco scene (as detailed in Bill Brewster's book Last Night A DJ Saved My Life). After re- emerging with some remixes and a bit of a reset around 2007/ 8, Andrew was looking for a new thing and they hatched a plan to play together, slowed down, cosmic sounds, 'never knowingly exceeding 122 BPM' as the tagline later stated.
Weatherall had frequently turned away from whatever he had going on, moving onto a new sound or night or band, and with A Love From Outer Space (as the night was called, named after an AR Kane song that Andrew had played at Shoom in the late 80s) he did so again. Sean gave an interview to The Quietus last month which outlines the history of ALFOS and also thirteen tracks that span and summarise ALFOS. Read it here. Make sure go all the way through to the end, there are some great stories attached to some of the records not least the one on page 8, Superpitcher's Voodoo and 'the genius of Andrew Weatherall'.
ALFOS became a travelling club night finding residencies outside London (Phonox in Brixton has become its London home). There have been regular ALFOS trips to Glasgow, Belfast, Dublin, Leeds, Manchester, Chieti in Italy and The Golden Lion in Todmorden. When Andrew died (17th February 2020, the anniversary coming up soon) Sean played Phonox the same week, a pre- booked gig for the pair. He made the emotional decision to go solo. During lockdown Sean began broadcasting the ALFOS Emergency Broadcast Sessions out of his kitchen in Hackney, a crowd of ALFOS devotees tuning in via the internet for some communal musical action to lighten the lockdown load. ALFOS, in real life and online, has become a community, the crowd as much a part of the ALFOS ethos as the music.. As an attendee both at The Golden Lion and in Manchester, I can confirm this. People make new friends at ALFOS. ALFOS is undoubtedly about fun. It's hedonistic. It's about dancing and being locked into the groove. It's about new music played alongside old, about the joy of digging out new tunes/ old tunes, slowing down records to that 122 sweet spot, the pitching down revealing something new. A lot of the ALFOS records have an emotional heft too, something that pulls at the heartstrings and the soul. It's connected to the tempo, the 118- 122 BPM pulses like the human heartbeat and forges some kind of connection to the blood pumping from the heart while dancing.
To celebrate ALFOS's fifteenth birthday Sean has put together a compilation album of selected ALFOS tracks, some never available before. The artists are as wide a variety of nationalities as you'll find in one place with musicians and producers from Portugal and Mexico, from Italy and Poland, south east Asia and from Denmark, from Belfast and from Slough. Spaced out chug, cosmic krautrock, spun out Scandi- disco, records that nod to the Balearic and acid house roots but with their eyes locked on the present. The vinyl has twelve tracks across two discs, kicking off with Neville Watson's previously unreleased dub of The Blow Monkeys' Save Me, a slow motion sundown moment. Further in there is Popular Tyre's Feel Like A Laser Beam, eight minutes of drum machine powered, interstellar robo- disco, a track rescued from an abandoned hard drive that Weatherall and Johnston turned into an ALFOS classic.
The digital/ CD release is expanded, nineteen tracks and a twentieth track, all the previous ones sequenced into a continuous mix. It's already shaping up to be one of 2025's best compilations. When taken together, on either vinyl or digital, what's clear about all of the music- from Laars to Secret Circuit via Das Komplex, Briosky, Kimo, Duncan Gray and more- isn't just the slowed down tempos, the famed cosmic sheen or the peaky, trippy edges, it's the warmth of the music, the inclusive nature of it. Come on in, it says, it's lovely in here.
You can buy A Love From Outer Space// A Compilation at Bandcamp and your local record shop.
The album comes with a fanzine, which has an essay/ interview written by Tim Murray and masses of photos. On the back of the fanzine there is a page of thank yous from Sean and down towards the bottom, there is a very nice mention to The Flightpath Estate, something I don't think any of the five of us would have dreamed of a few years ago. 'The eternal brotherhood of The Flightpath Estate for keeping the record straight'. That's my next t- shirt/ badge/ tattoo sorted.
10:40 released an EP back in 2023 as Powder Wax Vol. 1, a dancefloor oriented track called Little Black Dress with vocals by S.A.A.R.A. There were three mixes. The Undressed Dub bent the original most out of shape with rattling drums, juddering synths and acres of space. Eventually the four four drums kicked in and a fragment of vocal remained among the swirls of FX.
Now there's a follow up, Powder Wax Vol 2, two more tracks aimed at the floor and the lights, no nonsense, four four fun. Actually, lots of fun and nonsense is likely to be ignited by this pair of tracks. Beneath The Waves is quality machine funk, squelchy synth sounds, some 80s sci- fi chord changes, a snippet of voice that's been chopped up and the feeling that this could go on and on.... Second track Miracle Me comes in on thumping drums, bending synth sounds, stepped chords and a snare kicking away. There's more vocal on this one, 'I need you/ Deep inside', sung soulfully and housed up, while the synths and FX get wiggier. I could see this one filling floors and raising hands.
Which handily, we'll get the chance to find out in person when Jesse and Darren bring their Jezebell takeover to The Golden Lion next month, on the 15th and 16th March. Me and Martin are taking part on the Sunday, playing tunes alongside Jesse and Darren, Adam Roberts, Kim Lana and FC Kahuna. The previous day/ night has a line up consisting of OBOST playing live and DJ sets from Stuart Alexander, Nessa Johnson, Martin Moscrop from ACR, Jamie Tolley and Jezebell finishing things off. It should be a lot of fun.
Powder Wax Vol. 2 is out today and it should be available here.
Causeway are an Idaho duo, Marshall Watson and Allison Rae, who have an album out on Friday on Manchester's Sprechen label- Anywhere. Appropriately enough, Friday is Valentine's Day, and for much of the album Allison sings of the pain that that particular emotion can bring. 'My heart is an empty well', she sings on last year's single Dancing With Shadows, a single that came with multiple remixes, all worth hearing, remixes by label boss Chris Massey, Hardway Bros and Kiaki and one by Marshall himself. 'Tragedy I'm here for you/ This loneliness is meant for two'.
The album is built on the foundations of the 80s indie disco classics- New Order, The Cure, Depeche Mode, OMD- with cavernous drums, a wall of synths and pulsating sequencers, a dreamwave reawakening of being lost in dry ice on the floor. It's not totally retro- the production is sleekly 2025, there's the chug of 21st century cosmic disco hitched to the cinematic feel of club music. Opener Love Me Like Your Last Time turns all the buttons up to eleven, a sheen of synths and vocals caught under the neon and laser lights. The pain and melodrama of love is shot through the songs like writing in a stick of rock- It's Never Enough should soundtrack the final scenes of a lost 80s film, a figure in a trench coat walking away from the camera, perfect 80s noir. Criminal opens with bursts of synth noise and distant vocals, 'I'll always be a criminal baby'. The title track, Anywhere, rattles along rapidly, the drum machine firing underneath the chord changes and a squealing topline. 'Here we are/ One last time', she sings, another song, another break up, another ending. The penultimate song is Ruin Me, a crunching, industrial rhythm and hissing snare underpinning Allison's dual vocals, with a chorus begging for more pain- 'Ruin me gently/ Again and again'. Anywhere finishes with a cover of Nobody's Diary, from Yazoo's second album, 1983's You And Me Both, a single written by Alison Moyet when she was sixteen. Causeway's version updates Yazoo's synth duo pop, the multi- tracked synths and surging sequencers pumping away as Allison songs Alison, more heartbreak, more hyper- melancholy.
Anywhere is out on Valentine's Day, an album for lovers and for those who want to wallow in the pain of lost love while dancing under the neon lights. Get it on vinyl and digitally at Bandcamp.
Back in the early days of The Bad Seeds Anita Lane was for a short time a member of the band along with Nick Cave, Mick Harvey, Rowland S Howard and Blixa Bargeld. She painted, wrote and contributed to lyrics- she co- wrote From Her To Eternity, a key early Bad Seeds song- and wrote one Bad Seeds song in its entirety, Stranger Than Kindness, from 1986's Your Funeral... My Trial.
Stranger Than Kindness is a key Bad Seeds song, the lyric a list of the problematic issues of being in a close personal relationship with an addict with some vivid imagery- 'bottled light from hotels', 'soft cold bones', no home and no bread, passion dying in the light and being a stranger to kindness. Musically its wired and tense, Cave's voice deep and flat over detuned strings and guitars. It's a powerful and moving song, one that seems to retain its mystery no matter how many times you hear it (although Nick says that it has revealed more of itself to him over time).
The Bad Seeds have performed it live since the mid- 80s, In 2013 they played it at KCRW, a Santa Monica radio station set that became a full live album release. Over the decades and line up changes it's changed a little, slightly less of the edge of chaos feel of the original version.
Anita was from Melbourne and went to college with Rowland S. Howard. When she first met Nick in 1977 they began a relationship. She was in The Birthday Party and moved to London with Cave and the band, leaving The Bad Seeds after the release of their first album and the group's relocation to West Berlin. Her impact on Nick was profound and even after their personal (and intermittent) relationship hit the rocks she remained a presence in his life- and the lives of various related bands. She released two solo albums, played and recorded with Mick Harvey and returned to The Bad Seeds with vocals on two songs on Murder Ballads in 1996. Mick's song from last year, When We Were Beautiful And Young, a moving lament for the power of youth and reflection on aging and mortality, is at least partly about her.
Anita died in 2021. She appears on last year's Bad Seeds album Wild God, on the song O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is), a celebration of her with her voice (taken from an answerphone message) speaking for the final minute of the song about a flat she and Nick shared next to Brixton Prison and how they attempted to write a contract of love but never got beyond drawing the border on the piece of paper. The song also contains an opening line that jars somewhat, each time I hear it- apparently I'm not the only one who was a bit thrown by the line. Nick recently wrote about it at The Red Hand Files.
Something else from the Eclectics label to kick start the week- see yesterday's edits mix that included No- Thing, a tribute to David Lynch by Resident Rockers, Eclectics in house DJ/ edit producers. Grant Williams relaunched Eclectics a few weeks ago and one of the first fruits was a track he recorded while on the turntables. In his own words an 'experimental fun track' with the emphasis on experimental and the fun of the mind melting variety. Voices is eight and a half minutes of wiggy, tripped out electronic psychedelia, 'a slowed down tech track, the vocals grabbed [from elsewhere] matched the bpm and I played the two simultaneously in sync and then messed about with the vocals in real time'. Grant then added more delay and echo and recorded it live in one take. Titled Voices, its free to download at Bandcamp under the Resident Rockers name.
Also out now and slightly more direct but equally good fun is Blavatsky And Tolley's latest release, four tracks for Berlin label Nein. Falling (What Time Is Love?) is ten minutes of slow mo intensity, electronic disco- punk featuring Gene Serene, a certain KLF keyboard riff contained within, and remixes by Tronik Youth, Ian Vale and Ed Tomlinson. The original mix is slowed down and souped up, the stuttering, robotic vocal intoning 'deeper and deeper', a ghost in the machine. Falling comes out in early March- find it and pre- order at Bandcamp.
In recent weeks I've done two Sunday mixes made up of edits. Part One is here and Part Two is here. Today is Part Three, another forty five minutes of edits, this one largely dancefloor oriented and with an 80s feel.
Can't Cope is from Jezebell's Jezebellaeric Beats Vol. 1, a dubbed out and spaced out way to enter into the mix, our friend the Archdrude Julian H. Cope sent spinning even further out into the cosmos than he was previously. Safesurfer is from 1991's epic Peggy Suicide, the start of Julian's imperial period. Swamp Shuffle is also from Jezebellaeric Beats Vol. 1, the closing track, this time David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Jerry Harrison and Chris Frantz given the treatment by Jesse and Darren.
No- Thing is from Resident Rockers, the in- house edit team at Eclectics. Heroes. Twin Peaks. Moby. Acid. No- thing will keep us together.
The M&M Hardway Bros edit takes Sleaford Mods Mork and Mindy, a song from 2020's Spare Ribs, with Billy Nomates on guest vocals, a tale of a childhood spent in colourless suburban council estates, Action Man and Cindy and mum and dad being out, long afternoons with nothing to do. Sean monkeyed about with it and turned it into an ALFOS at The Golden Lion moment.
Hunterbrau's edit of Depeche Mode's 1987 classic Never Let Me Down came out on Paisley Dark, dark disco/ slowed down sleek goth.
Rich Lane's Cotton Dubs are second to none. His edit of Sinead O'Connor's Jackie (from her debut, the Lion And Then Cobra) repurposes Sinead with an 808 while losing none of her power.
Longed is an edit of All Day Long from New Order's 1986 album Brotherhood. The chopped, looped and edited version here, largely instrumental, is from an intriguing project I was tipped off about on Bandcamp, a highly unofficial edit service by Follytechnic Music Library. Longed is from a collection of New Order edits called Ordered 86- 93 but there's waaaay more there than just one album of nine New Order edits. Have a dig around, see what you can unearth.
Back in 1987 Joe Strummer was somewhat adrift. The Clash had broken up, his former songwriting partner Mick Jones had moved on and was enjoying his time with his new band Big Audio Dynamite who had captured the new thing- sampling, dance music, a rock/ rap/ reggae/ pop fusion that The Clash had pioneered at the start of the 80s before Joe and Paul attempted to reverse back to three chord punk rock. Joe was given the opportunity to find some direction when he met Alex Cox, a filmmaker whose guerrilla approach to making movies matched Strummer's approach to life. Cox signed Strummer up for his Spaghetti Western film Straight To Hell, a film with a soundtrack that featured The Pogues, Zander Schloss (who would become guitarist in Joe's Latino Rockabilly War and who worked with Joe on his next soundtrack), San Francisco band Pray For Rain and a couple of Strummer originals. These songs broke Joe's writer's block. He acted in the film too, immersing himself into the character (a bank robber called Simms).
Cox asked Joe to stay on board for his next film, a clumsy satire about US imperialism in South America and American exceptionalism with Ed Harris in the title role as Walker. The film is bizarre, a bit of a mess. Even Strummer wasn't sure about the finished version. But the soundtrack is a minor Strummer gem, a fourteen track album with eleven Latin instrumentals, from salsa to Afro- Cuban bebop, all recorded acoustically on Strummer's insistence- 'I thought let's be 1850, nothing plugged in', he said. On three of the songs, Joe sings, a trio of lost Strummer solo songs (recently re- found via the 2018 solo compilation 001), songs that bridge his work in The Clash and his late 90s re- emergence and renaissance with his Mescaleros.
Tennessee Rain is a ballad, Joe with acoustic guitar and banjo, a sad- eyed song with an upbeat tempo, Joe singing, 'well I wish I was drunk in Havana, I wish I was at the Mardi Gras'. Tropic Of No Return is a lilting choral song, backed by tropical birdsong and some lightly picked and strummed acoustic guitars, gradually gathering a little steam. The third song is The Unknown Immortal, a song sung from the point of view of a soldier in Walker's gringo army, a man away from home and his love for seven years, a man who 'was once an immortal'. It's difficult though not to hear it as at least partly autobiographical, Joe's post- Clash malaise compounded by the death of his mother a few weeks before Walker started filming, him ruefully accepting that his previous life as frontman for the greatest band in the world, the punk rock war lord, now trying to carve out a new role as singer/ songwriter/ soundtrack musician with some of the musical styles that informed Sandinista! and Combat Rock.
Sometimes a band come around who create an album that is a perfect encapsulation of a sound, of those people in that room making those songs at that exact point in time. They may go on to make further records and albums, some of them very fine, but nothing they do will ever come close to that one off capturing of the moment. In November 1988 the Canadian band Cowboy Junkies did that with their album The Trinity Session. The album was mostly recorded in one night, 27th November 1987 live in Toronto, at the Church of The Holy Trinity, with the band all sitting round one microphone. They played a hushed, spooky but beautiful set of songs, originals, traditional songs and covers, with the voice of Margo Timmins a ghostly presence on top. The covers famously included perhaps the definitive version of The Velvet Underground's Sweet Jane (Lou Reed was of that opinion). But apart from Margo's voice, the brushed drums, the stripped back electric guitar, and the other instruments- fiddle, pedal steel, harmonica, accordion- the biggest presence on the album is the natural reverb of the church, the echo that surrounds the group as they move around, towards and away from the sole microphone.
Their previous album, Whites Off Earth Now!, saw them tour the south of the USA and the music they heard down in the Deep South states, country and western, informed the song writing and selection for The Trinity Session. Their own song, 200 More Miles, is a song about life on the road...
The 1990 follow up to The Trinity Session, The Caution Horses, was a good album. Their cover of Neil Young's Powderfinger, the opening song and single Sun Comes Up, It's Tuesday Morning and a few other songs were good and it had the same slowed down style and hushed approach but it was more polished and as a result lost a little of what made The Trinity Session so special.
These two clips came my way recently and I don't believe I've ever seen them before. First is Cowboy Junkies in London at MTV's studios playing live and being interviewed for 120 Minutes, a ten minute clip with Margo talking and a stripped down version of the band playing.
But there's also this if you've got the time and inclination, a full live performance by the band from 1990 in Koln, Germany, filmed for German TV. Slow music and slow TV in front of a fairly subdued audience. If you're in a rush and want the sweet hit of Sweet Jane, it's starts at 53.01.
There's lots of new music around as we head into February. I have a list in my notebook that's a page long, all of which I intend to write about here. Today's new music is a pair of releases that came out at the end of January from opposite hemispheres. First up is Eduardo, my friend from Sao Paulo, Brazil, who records as Pandit Pam Pam. His latest is a six track mini- album titled Dot. Pandit Pam Pam's previous EP, Ar, was a musical response to the poor quality of air in Sao Paulo. Dot was originally lined up to be on that EP but Eduardo was persuaded to leave it off and make something new with Dot as the starting point. Eduardo has a young baby and his recording is to some extent built around the baby's needs as the second track- Recorded With Diogo In My Arms- makes clear.
Dot, the title track, doesn't appear until five tracks into the EP. Shuffling drums, echo, a rippling melody on top, bags of atmosphere, and then at nearly two minutes in a female voice drifts in and out again. It's a gorgeous piece of music, calling to mind a fractured version of One Dove or Death In Vegas gone ambient.
The rest of the EP is equally beautiful, from ambient opener Samba De Longe to the eight minute modular synth/ sleeping babe track mentioned above, the skittery ambience of Fot and even more hazy Interludio. The EP ends with Guitar 2- background buzz of static, wash of FX and picked guitar notes creating a very blissed out, blurred out track that stretches time. You can listen and buy at Bandcamp. Highly recommended for small hours and headphones listening.
Back in the UK comes an EP from Velvett called Lay Down. Velvett are Jo Sims and Natali Williams. Lay Down starts out ambient but drums kick in and then Natali's vocal, both suggesting mid- 90s trip hop is in the ether again (Kruder and Dorfmeister were featured here only a few days ago). Slowed down late night sounds.
There are remixes, one from Warehouse Preservation Society which toughens up the rhythms and stretches it out into something darker, and one from Dickie Continental (Red Snapper's Rich Thair) which builds slowly, drums and strings, and snatches of the original mix flitting in and out, Rich cutting from one element to another. The trip hop vibe continues.
There's also a Velvett club mix, the Rubber Dub Club Mix which suddenly switches everything into gay disco mode, bouncing bassline, whooshes, and Hi NRG sequencers. You can find the whole EP at Bandcamp.
Seeing the recent Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown sent me spinning into Dylan's back catalogue again- Bringing it All Back Home mainly but also Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde On Blonde, bits and bobs from The Bootleg Series, songs from the 70s that maybe I've overlooked before, Another Side Of Bob Dylan from 1964. I haven't had a Dylan phase for a long time and I don't think Dylan is something one ever finishes or gets to the end of, there's always more, always another way in.
A Complete Unknown star Timothee Chalamet appeared on SNL (Saturday Night Live) last week playing three Dylan songs. In the film he is Bob Dylan. Apparently he signed up for the role in 2019 but then Covid delayed everything, giving him ample time to learn to play guitar and harmonica for the film and to sing like Dylan, Dylan's particular intonations and stresses. On SNL he plays two songs as a medley, Outlaw Blues (from Bringing It All Back Home) coupled with Three Angels (from 1970's New Morning, a deep cut). Outlaw Blues is an amazing song, Dylan giving it everything, charging out of the traps and amped up with the band, 'ain't it hard to stumble on the black side of the lagoon' and howling the lines at the end of each verse, 'when it's nine below zero and... three o 'clock in the afternoon'. In 1965 an album song like Outlaw Blues was better than many contemporary band's best singles (see also Love Minus Zero/ No Limit also from side 1 of Bringing It All Back Home). Chalamet doing Dylan but not in costume, doing Dylan as himself. I think it's pretty meta.
He also sang and played Tomorrow Is A Long Time, the beautiful acoustic song that first appeared on the Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II album, released in 1971, a fairly randomly sequenced double album of Dylan singles and album songs. Tomorrow Is A Long Time was originally recorded in 1962 live at New York's Town Hall. Chalamet nails it again, the band playing quietly behind him (including James Blake on keys).
M- Paths released two albums on Exeter's Mighty Force, a label reborn after a post- 1999 hiatus. Label boss Mark Darby released the first Aphex Twin 12" and pulled together an array of talent for the second life of the label, including M- Paths and Reverb Delay. Those two outfits are two different sides of producer and DJ Marcus Farley, M- Paths an optimistic ambient/ techno, electronic side (M- Paths by name, empaths by nature is the tagline) and Reverb Delay a heavier dub techno affair, inspired by Basic Channel and the techno sounds of Detroit. Marcus has set up a Bandcamp page called M- Paths Recordings to release new tracks and experimental sounds throughout 2025, a calendar of releases.
I posted January's Shapes And Patterns at the end of last year here. February's release, Love Is On Your Side, came out yesterday, an off kilter track with a naggingly superb topline and the ghost of backing vocals drifting by. It breaks down and the female voice sings 'let your heart be your guide', before the rhythm kicks back in, synths and spring noises joined by strings. Reverb Delay's February release, Super Being is Reverb Delay in Dub, an excursion in echo and space that sounds like it comes from offworld.
We started communicating via messenger and email, mainly musical tip offs and recommends and also our mutual despair at the current state of Manchester United Football Club, but also realised we'd both grown up in/ around Manchester, shopped in the same record shops and probably attended the same gigs and nights. Between us the idea for an interview came up and following a bit of back and forth and a lengthy email trail, this is the result...
Adam: What's your background?
Marcus: I really do believe that our environment moulds the music we like and
the music we make. I was born in Wandsworth in 1970. As a baby my
parents moved to the Peak District, near Macclesfield. Our
nearest city was Manchester and I spent my youth in Affleck’s Palace,
Piccadilly Records and Eastern Bloc and was a regular at the indie nights at the
Ritz and 42nd Street.
There was something about the North,
particularly Macclesfield, Manchester and Salford in the 1980s. These were not the thriving towns and cities we see now, they
were gloomy and gritty and had an edge. I agree with Tony
Wilson when he famously said of my favourite band, that Joy Division is the
sound of Manchester. It is also the sound of Macclesfield, with Ian
Curtis and Stephen Morris growing up there and attending King’s School like I did.
Adam: What's your sound? Where does it come from?
Marcus: As Victor Hugo said, 'Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.' It sounds like a contradiction in terms, but I think it’s the sound of
uplifting melancholia- music and lyrics that make you feel better,
despite being about heartache or malaise. Love will Tear
us Apart is a good example - heart wrenching lyrics, yet the music is
uplifting, and no matter how bad things may have been, Ian was in a far more terrible
place, and by default, that lifts you out of your own gloom. I took my daughter to see the mural of Ian on the main shopping street
in Macclesfield recently. She's a fan, too. It was a really good experience, as I
felt so proud of Ian, and the town I grew up in.
Which is a long way of saying that I think you can hear Joy Division's
influence in M-Paths. You can also hear 4AD bands like
Dead Can Dance, Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, and two of my musical heroes, Talk Talk (particularly for the
ambient parts of their last 3 studio Albums and Mark Hollis’ solo album), and
Susumu Yokota (particularly his Sakura, Boy and Tree and Grinning Cat
albums).
Adam: I'd never heard any of Susuma's music before and can now thoroughly recommend Sakura, an ambient album released a quarter of a century ago and filled with a certain kind of timeless beauty. Listen to Sakura here.
Adam: What came next?
Marcus: I have a Philosophy Degree. In my early 20s I went to
Birmingham to do social work training- and this is the essence of M-Paths by Name,
Empaths by nature, as I have been a social worker for 26 years.
Like a lot of people, it was The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays and Weatherall’s work
on Screamadelica that got me interested in electronic dance music. Then
the pastoral tones of Aphex Twin really drew me into that world. But
when I moved to Birmingham, I discovered the newly formed House Of God techno
night. Birmingham is similar in a
way to Detroit, a then dying and now dead car industry with large industrial
wastelands. The DJ and producer Surgeon, and the producers Regis and Female developed what we now call Birmingham techno on the Downwards record label. Uncompromising, hard techno that has both a funky swing in a Chicago House way, and a locked groove influence from Jeff Mills and Robert Hood, with an added ingredient of industrial music. But I had a real epiphany moment sometime in 1993 at the House Of God when I first heard Basic Channel’s Phylyps Trak and the Maurizio remix of Vainqueur’s Lyot. Everything came together for me. I had to make dub techno. Something that took almost 30 years, as Reverb Delay, for me to get round to doing. House of God still has the same core DJs over 30 years later - Surgeon, Sir Real, Terry Donovan and Paul Damage. Each is superb in their own right with their own style and selections.
Adam: How did you start releasing your music?
Marcus: My friend Spotter suggested that I try signing for Mark Darby’s Mighty
Force. Mighty Force famously released the first Aphex Twin 12" and the
first music by Tom Middleton (of Global Communication) and
Matthew Herbert. Mark Darby has become a good friend. He worked for Rough
Trade also, working with labels such as 4AD, so we have a shared history
musically of what we have liked.
Adam: I'm always interested in how people actually go about creating music, how it happens. What's your creative process? What comes first, rhythm or melody?
Marcus: I always start with
kick drum and hi hats for the Reverb Delay stuff as they're the basis for dub
techno that everything fits around so I like to get a groove going first. With M-Paths I always start with pure ambient pads and chords then add
the rhythm in sections.
Initially I set out to make really hard
dancefloor techno, but it's really hard to get right - it’s like punk - seems
simple enough, but that is often harder than something more grandiose to do as
there are less elements and they all need to be absolutely on point. Without
really thinking, it kind of happened by osmosis that I ended up making ambient and more home listening stuff as M-Paths, the pads and chords
just became really ambient naturally and I love breakbeats so I do a lot with
slow breakbeats. I loved dub and when I first heard Basic Channel I knew I wanted to make dub techno but didn't know how it was
done. As my skills developed I realised it was driven mostly by the
effects, done very subtly. Atmosphere can happen not by
adding stuff but by taking elements out, particularly drums, even just
removing the hi hat in sections, or removing claps and rides. I like most electronic music from house to techno to
jungle to ambient, and can listen to gabber at breakfast. I don’t think I create music due to my mood. I generally have
a few songs on the go at once for different projects. But I definitely
listen to music dependent on mood. Apart from Joy Division, Susumu
Yokota and Talk Talk- I can listen to in any mood, any time.
Adam: gabber?! Now there's a largely forgotten musical scene, Belgian and Dutch 90s hardcore techno.
Marcus: I'm a big
fan of Dutch techno, particularly the stuff from the Parkzicht club in
Rotterdam where Speedy J was a DJ with DJ Rob and others.
Adam: back in the early/ mid 90s I was a big fan of Speedy J. My then flatmate and I used to love Beam Me Up! and the album Ginger, proper space age ambient techno from The Netherlands. It seemed so futuristic. Speedy J was on Warp too and in 1994 everything Warp released was worth listening to.
Marcus: They play Speedy J at every Feyenoord home game! United have The Stone Roses, they have Speedy J!
Adam: a question for the kit and equipment nerds. What do you use in the studio?
Marcus: I have had some great synths and drum machines, but I would say that now my go to is Roland Cloud, where I can access all the Roland drum machines and synths that I need whilst taking up zero extra space. My studio is by default in the smallest room in the house and most of the space is already taken up with records, CDs and decks. Within Roland Cloud, my go to is the Space Echo effects unit, used a lot with my Reverb Delay stuff and also in M-Paths. I have always used echo units, as well as delay and reverb. The echo units in Ableton are decent, and so is Replika by Native Instruments. The Space Echo has been used by lots of bands over the years but I wanted it as that is what Basic Channel and Vainqueur use.
Adam: what are you into at the moment? What's the last album you bought?
Marcus:The new Sandwell District album, their
first music as Sandwell District in over 10 years and the first since
Juan Mendez (Silent Servant) sadly died. They have put up one song for
preview and it's absolutely immense. It was started by Karl O’Connor (who
records also as Regis also and runs Downwards), Peter Sutton (Female), Juan
Mendez and Dave Sumner (Function) and is named after Sandwell where Karl
O’Connor grew up. Brilliant name, brilliant label. Other than that, I mainly buy old vinyl stuff I stupidly got rid of on vinyl years ago!
