Keith And Sonny

In July Keith McIvor (JD Twitch) announced that he had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour and an appeal was started to raise money for his care. On Friday news of Keith's death came out via his DJ partner Jonnie Wilkes. Keith was just 57. He grew up in Edinburgh but moved to Glasgow in 1986 to go to university and became part of the city's dance music underground- at the legendary Pure and then with Wilkes as Optimo with a freewheeling musical policy that took in acid house and electronic dance music, post- punk, electroclash, punk and whatever they fancied playing. The pair continued to DJ as Optimo (named after Liquid Liquid's classic track). Keith as Twitch was also a producer and remixer. I have a load of Optimo productions, remixes and DJ sets. This one of Cold Cave from 2010 is always somewhere near the top of their pile...

Life Magazine (An Optimo Espacio Flexi Pop Mix)

The previous year they were one of the remix teams who took tracks from Journal For Plague Lovers, the Manics album from that year, into new places...

Journal For Plague Lovers (Optimo Espacio remix)

In 2021 a JD Twitch DJ set was released on tape and then in 2023 onto Bandcamp (free/ pay what you want), two forty five minute sets to raise money for the Glasgow North West food bank. Let There Be Drums is a masterclass in track selection and sequencing, all manner of human and machine operated rums and percussion, hand drums, tribal freak outs, early 90s UK hardcore breakbeats and meditative German forest music. Find it here. 

The outpouring of tributes on social media since Friday by Keith's friends and the wider music/ DJ community is testament to the man and how much he was loved. 

RIP Keith. 

Sonny Curtis died on Friday too, aged 88. Sonny was a member of The Crickets and wrote I Fought The Law, as performed and recorded by The Bobby Fuller Four. Imagine a world without I Fought The Law in it. 

I Fought The Law

In 1979 The Clash released their Cost Of Living EP with their cover of the song as the lead track, an incendiary and career defining song for The Clash, a band with three front men all bellowing the song's title and refrain into their mics...

I Fought The Law (Live At The Lyceum)

On The Cost Of Living EP the song took pole position and was followed by two Clash deep cuts, Groovy Times and The Gates Of the West and the re- recorded version of Capital Radio. The EP then had a brief reprisal of the Sonny Curtis song with Mikey Dread's vocal advertising the EP. Not that this jingle was ever going to be played on the radio (as the band noted in the previous song).

I Fought The Law (Reprise)

RIP Sonny Curtis. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Autumn Songs

Some songs with the word Autumn in the title for a Sunday mix in late September, a day ahead of the autumn equinox- tomorrow, Monday 22nd September at 7.22 pm, a day which marks the end of astronomical summer and the onset of astronomical autumn. Buckle up. Winter's coming. 

Autumn definitely seems to bring out the melancholy and downbeat in songwriters- the songs on my hard drive in the mix below are firmly in that camp- it's OK to wallow in that sometimes and I think by the time we get to the end there's some catharsis.

Forty Five Minutes Of Autumn

• The Small Faces: The Autumn Stone
• Lee Hazlewood: My Autumn's Done Come
• Jaymay: Autumn Fallin'
• Pacific: Autumn Island
• Yo La Tengo: Autumn Sweater
• Higamos Hogamos: Harold/ Autumn Equinox Sunset
• The Prisners Dream: Autumn Days
• East Village: Black Autumn
• Marcel Slettern: Autumn
• Brian Eno: Dunwich Beach, Autumn 1960
• Coldcut : Autumn Leaves (The Irresistible Force Remix)

The Small Faces song The Autumn Stone is from their later period when they'd shed their initial skin and become a little more hippy, a little more reflective, they sound a bit... earthier and woodier. Written by Steve Marriot and recorded in September 1968, The Autumn Stone is a ballad with a beautiful slow glow. The Small Faces were such a great band weren't they.

Lee Hazlewood's autumn isn't just seasonal, it's a lifetime thing sung by a man who seemed to be permanently found in the autumn of his life. This song was the flip side to Sand, a 1966 7" single. 

Jaymay is an American singer/ songwriter, an indie/ folk artist, whose song You Better Run was a music blog song back in the early 2010s golden days of music blogging. Her 2007 album of the same name, Autumn Fallin' is a lovely pun for those on the US side of the Atlantic. 

Pacific were on minor Creation records band in 1990. Their song Jetstream was a favourite with me and a friend who went into a flat share in 1992, a song that sampled the sinking of the Belgrano. Autumn Island was on their 1990 album Inference which is probably Creation's least heard album, undeservedly so but in 1990 Creation had many other irons in the fire and some bands just fell through the cracks. 

Yo La Tengo's Autumn Sweater is one of my favourite songs by anyone, ever. Everything about it- the words, the singing, the drumming, the tone, the feel, the longing to be gone, to be moving on... it's all just perfect. 'We could slip away/ Wouldn't that be better/Me with nothing to say/ And you in your autumn sweater'. 

Higamos Hogamos are/ were Hackney based Steve Webster and various assistants and collaborators. I first heard them when Andrew Weatherall played some krauty/ cosmische tracks by them on a radio show in the dim and distant past- I think I followed up by going to the Higamos Hogamos MySpace page (which dates it). The track on this mix comes in two parts, the first half a lovely experimental instrumental and the second a field recording of the autumn equinox at sunset. 

The Prisners Dream (sic) were one of those American garage rock bands who made the grand total of one sole 7" single, released on Rene Records in 1967. They came from Canonsberg, Pennsylvania. Autumn Days is a gorgeously melancholic folk rock song, backed with You're The One I Really Love. Autumn Days was on a double album compilation from a couple of years ago called Ghost Riders, seventeen songs for a North American road trip with sleeve notes by Sonic Boom. I reviewed it at Ban Ban Ton Ton in 2022 and it's a record I still recommend highly. The Prisners were all between 17 and 19 years old when they recorded the song and sound utterly bereft, a state of being before they've even reached adulthood. 

East Village were on Heavenly, caught out in that short period between late 80s indie and early 90s indie- dance. Their album Drop Out has been re- issued several times, on each occasion to rave reviews. They made little in the way of waves at the time but every time Drop Out comes out again they attract a few new followers. 

Marcel Slettern is from Athens, Georgia,an electronic producer, writer and visual artist who goes for the single word title here- autumn, a few minutes of piano playing. I have no idea why or how this song ended up on my hard drive or where it came from but I'm glad it did. 

Brian Eno's Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960 is from his 1982 album On Land, a landmark ambient album. Dunwich was a Suffolk port that feel into the sea due to coastal erosion. It's one of those Eno ambient tracks which is absolutely beyond compare. 

Coldcut's cover of the jazz standard Autumn Leaves has been released in various versions and at various times. None of the versions quite matches The Irresistible Force's remix, a Balearic masterpiece and one which provides an ending that takes us to a better place. 

Soundtrack Saturday

Robert Redford died earlier this week at the age of 89, leaving a long and glittering life and career. One of the film of his most closely connected with its soundtrack is 1969's Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, a film I never tire of. It's a classic buddy movie/ Western, Redford and Paul Newman, two Hollywood superstars playing the titular train robbers, who flee to Bolivia to avoid the U.S. Rangers, taking Katherine Ross with them. The film ends with a shoot out, Butch and Sundance holed up and wounded and surrounded by the Bolivian army. They discuss their next move and Cassidy suggests they should go to  Australia. Then they charge out of the building, guns blazing into a freeze frame...

The song Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head, written by Hal David and Burt Bacharach, sung by B.J. Thomas and with Carole King on bass, was written for the film. Not everyone, Robert Redford included, thought it as the correct choice. It didn't fit with the film, there was no rain, Redford said it 'seemed like a dumb idea'. It was massive, sold over two million copies and won an Oscar. 

Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head

R.I.P. Robert Redford. 

Some Folks

While I was on holiday in Italy in early August I received a message via one of my social media apps. It read, 'We see that you are on vacation. When you return would you like to review an album that is not available anywhere and has not been released?' It was from Ephraim Washington who has an Instagram profile titled Last Of the Ancients with a black and white profile photo of what appears to be a man with a heavy white beard, dressed in clothes that a 19th century homesteader might have worn, large belt buckle proudly halfway up his stomach. I was intrigued and replied 'Yes' and when I got home an album, also titled Last Of The Ancients, was in my inbox. 

Then, as per often happens with new music in my downloads folder, I forgot about it. Last week while scrolling it caught my eye and I clicked play on the first few songs. It might be partly the changing seasons, summer long gone round and autumn already moving in but the songs chimed directly with me-dusty songs, seemingly from a time gone, songs that could have come from the 1890s (or the 1990s for that matter)- acoustic guitars and banjo, drums that sound like they're being played in another room, down the hall, with the doors left open in between the two rooms, a folk/ Americana feel, a singer recorded close to the mic, choral backing vocals that fill a space in the near distance, a little away from the microphone, songs about Sunday morning, cracks in the sky, the early hours of the morning, storms and uninvited fools. There's something of Greil Marcus' 'old weird America' about the eight songs on Last Of The Ancients- I can hear some Deserter's Songs in there as well, some Giant Sand and some Will Oldham too.

The Last Of The Ancients crackles into life with Sunday Morning Scene, muffled drums and twangy banjo and rather lovely singing voice (whether the singer is Ephraim Washington or the band is, I don't know). This is the second song, Some Folks, Ephraim opening up with, 'Some folks don't like me at all', as the banjo and choir move in circles behind him. A fiddle joins in and Ephraim draws some conclusions about thinking once and thinking twice. 

Some Folks

On She's Not Alone there's more plucked banjo, a lot of echo and a ghostly swirl and then in the second half of the song it all snaps into focus, swelling and becoming really quite moving. Miles Of Blue shuffles in with a ton of echo and the sound of instruments playing in a room with timber walls. The album ends with The Storm, the sound of the wind howling and a bent guitar string, a song pitched somewhere between a long dark night of the soul and the first rays of morning. 

 

Breadcrumb Trail

In 1991 US band Slint released Spiderland, their second/ last album. The band had come together in Louisville, Kentucky in 1986 when two local punk bands folded (Squirrel Bait and Maurice). Slint's line up- Brian McMahon, David Pajo, Todd Brashear and Britt Walford- spent four days in August 1990 recording Spiderland, an album that got little press and coverage on release in the US but was picked up by the inkies in the UK and gradually grew to become one of the 90s rock's cult albums, an influence on the entire post- rock/ indie and alt- rock scenes. 

The sessions were intense, members of the  took things very seriously (as the US punk/ hardcore/ indie scene kind of demanded at the turn of the 90s- this was not done for laughs or as disposable pop music). Slint's quiet- loud dynamics, tempo shifts, unusual song structures and angular rhythms set the course for a lot of what would follow. Brian McMahon's spoken word vocals would explode into shouting and the lyrics were odd- strange narrative accounts, syntax all over the place, off kilter. Spiderland is clearly not Nevermind. It was never going to cross over and blow up like Nirvana did but in its own way it was just as influential.

The album opens with Breadcrumb Trail...

Breadcrumb Trail

David Pajo's guitar possibly recalling Tom Verlaine, stutters and repeats a riff, the drums rumble, there's a lot of space evident- you can almost hear the room they are recording in- and McMahon talks about the day the carnival came into town. Pajo repeatedly changes course completely, the song's structure changing instantly, switching to distorted riffs. McMahon's singing becomes pained and distant. The  they switch again, the bass and d rums following and becoming more of a presence. It's exhilarating and intense, a bit uncomfortable, not a song that could become background music or a prime time radio standard. 

The second song is Nosferatu Rock (which I really should have posted last Saturday in the Saturday Soundtrack slot). The song is inspired by  F.W. Murnau's the 1922 film, German Expressionist vampire horror. 

Nosferatu Rock

Snares and tom toms, more sharp and angular guitar playing with an intermittent electric guitar squeal that is impossible to ignore and an explosive chorus, all jagged riff slashing and cymbal smashes. 'I could just settle down, I'd be doing just fine', McMahon mutters at one point before the chorus bursts into earshot again. Eventually they settle into a grinding, crunching groove, riffs and drums in sync, before everything dissolves and burns up into thirty seconds of feedback. The remaining four songs are all equally powerful concluding with the epic end song Good Morning Captain, the bleak seven minute closing shot. McMahon made himself sick from straining to sing/ speak/ shout over the guitars. They split up before Spiderland was even released, the toll too much (but did reform in 2005 and played together for two years). 

Mogwai, Godspeed! You Black Emperor, Tortoise, Explosions In The Sky, Pavement.... all these bands (and more) must have been listening to Spiderland, all took something from it. It is frequently held up as one of those albums that was hardly picked up at the time but which as gone on to have a second and third life. 

Wonderful Aspiration Of The Source

Michael Hix is a founding member of the Nashville Ambient Ensemble, an ambient Americana collective whose 2021 album Cerulean was one I discovered in the spring of that year along with Luke Schneider's pedal steel ambient drone lp Altar Of Harmony. In some ways I always associate them with lockdown and also with Isaac's death. The combination of traditional instruments and synths, ambient drones and plucked strings, was more or less the only music that made sense to me for a while in the period after he died, the weeks and months in late 2021/ early 2022. Elegy (appropriately enough) is from Cerulean. 

Elegy

Michael Hix is about to release a solo album titled Wonderful Aspiration Of The Source, ten instrumentals for electric guitar partly inspired by his Buddhist meditation and partly by a need to simplify (part of the same thing I imagine). There are two tracks currently at Bandcamp, Cadence and Deer Park, both played entirely using electric guitar, no synths or pedal steel, just a Telecaster and some live looping set ups. Both conjure Vini Reilly gone to Nashville to some extent for me- minimal and emotive guitar playing, crossing the blurry lines between ambient Americana and cosmic country. 

Some Things'll Never Change

Two weeks ago reader and internet friend Spencer sent me a message abut a track with some enthusiastic words. In the past Spencer has been the starting point of several posts and for a while as eries of songs/ tracks he sent me became a series. The one he sent two weeks ago was more than enough to prompt a guest post. Here it is...

One of the 'Old School Balearic Classics': Originally released in 1986, it became a regular final tune of the night on the White Isle...

The Way It Is

In 1990, the piano instrumental part of the song used to run on a loop while Bob Wilson reflected on how the scores of the day had impacted the League Tables towards the end of the Grandstand Saturday afternoon programme. Men and boys hung around electrical shop windows while their wives/mothers wondered where they'd got to...

More recently - in July 2024, in fact - it got a Balearic update courtesy of those cheeky Psychemagik chaps, who produced a dubbed out calypso instrumental version... https://psychemagik.bandcamp.com/track/the-way-it-is For me, there's no topping the original extended mix. The tune itself manages to combine melancholy, joy and nostalgia in a gloriously simple roller of a tune that just keeps going and you never want to end!

Psychemagik's edit was new to me and I love it too- a gloriously chilled end of night version with steel can drums carrying the melody. Maybe there will be more from Spencer on an ad hoc basis.

The Way It Is is as ever lyrically topical, Bruce Hornsby's song about the civil rights struggle by African Americans in the 1960s. The third verse goes like this...

'Well, they passed a law in '64
To give those who ain't got a little more
But it only goes so far
'Cause the law don't change another's mind
When all it sees at the hiring time
Is the line on the color bar, no, no'

The USA and the UK are both facing a massive right wing backlash at the moment with racial issues front and centre. No matter what the so- called 'patriots' say about the reasons for hanging flags and painting roundabouts it seems pretty clear to me that it's actually about defining Englishness and Britishness as white and that it's also designed to intimidate those people who aren't white, to make them question whether they belong. The march in London on Saturday was the 2020s successor to those by the National Front and BNP in the 70s and 80s, racism dressed up as patriotism. Patriotism is always a dangerous game to play, flags are always a dangerous piece of cloth to hide behind. They almost always lead to nationalism- and English nationalism is always racist. These things have ebbed  and flowed over the last half century and previously. Bruce Hornsby's line, 'That's just the way it is/ Some things'll never change', is maybe not enough right now. 

Monday's Long Song

Sabres Of Paradise have re- issued the pair of albums they originally released in the mid 90s (Sabresonic in 1993 and Haunted Dancehall in 1994). They played a handful of gigs in the summer (Fabric in May, Sydney Opera House a few days and half a world away and then two festival appearances- Primavera and Dekmantel) and have rrecently announced a UK tour for late November with gigs in Bristol, Salford, Sheffield, Leeds, Brighton and London. 

The two remaining members of Sabres, Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns, have done several interviews to accompany all this Sabres activity, three decades on from the last time they played live and released records. This interview at Ransom Note is a short one but very illuminating- Jagz lists and explains eight records that him, Gary and Andrew Weatherall were listening to when they made Sabresonic, the tracks that fed into the sound they were creating back in 1993. Andrew was DJing nationwide at the time and doing his monthly Sabresonic club night in Crucifix Lane, London Bridge station. The eight tracks include some earsplitting, seminal mid- 90s techno, the huge dub techno masterpiece that is Killing Joke's Requiem (A Floating Leaf Always Reaches The Sea Mix),  a legendary Plastikman drum machine massacre, Dub Syndicate and Colourbox, the hip hop production/ rap skills of Cypress Hill and Beastie Boys and this fifteen minute ambient epic...

Ob- Selon Mi- Nos (Repainted by Global Communication)

Mystic Institute was a one man outfit, Cornwall's Paul Kent. He pitched up in Mark Pritchard's studio and wrote and recorded two tracks. Global Communications' Tom Middleton was invited round and built an entirely new track around a third Pritchard track that took on a life of its own. Time stops, space expands, the clock hands tick and tock, synths play everlasting melody lines, the heavenly choir's voices drift in and out... 'pure blissed out distortion' as Jagz describes it. 

Twenty One Minutes Of Two Minute Tracks

I had an idea that I would do a Sunday mix of all those short electronic/ ambient tracks that appear on albums, the intros and outros, the bridging tracks, found sounds, brief ambient pieces and short one minute ideas that never got worked up into a full track but that the artist clearly liked. I realised that to make it forty minutes long would require at least twenty tracks and time constraints this week meant that I started the mix but haven't got anywhere near forty minutes- it's just shy of twenty one minutes, fourteen tracks from a variety of sources. I need to give it more thought really and gather together some more and either do a part two or expand this one out but in the meantime, here it is...

Twenty One Minutes Of Two Minute Tracks

I decided early on that two minutes was the cut off (although there are a couple here which just tip over that time). I was going to go totally beatless but that didn't work out. It's almost completely without vocals too. I wasn't sure it all worked but playing it back last night I was pretty happy with it. An expanded edition/ part two is definitely on the cards. 

• A Man Called Adam: Easter Song (Gospel Oak FX)
• Two Lone Swordsmen: Tiny Reminder No. 1
• Four Tet: This Is For You
• Sewell And The Gong: MYND
• The Orb: Snowbow
• Ultramarine: A Year From Monday
• A Man Called Adam: Easter Song (Hi- Tech)
• M- Paths: Calm
• Polypores: Mystery Energy Score
• Aphex Twin: Avril 14th (reversed music not audio)
• Pandit Pam Pam: Interludio
• Daniel Avery: First Light
• Sydney Minsky Sargeant: Intro
• Andrew Weatherall: Intro

A Man Called Adam's Easter Song is one of their best, a triumphant piece of optimsitc, life affirming Balearica. In 2017 the duo put out a special edition on Bandcamp to celebrate the song's 20th birthday which came with two new very short versions, the found sound intro of Gospel Oak FX and the ambient with beats of Hi- Tech. Both appear on this mix. 

In 2000 Two Lone Swordsmen released their electronic triple disc opus Tiny Reminders, Weatherall and Tenniswood's pursuit of  techno/ bass purism followed through to its end. Each of the three disc opened with a burst of static/ quiet noise called Tiny Reminder and numbered 1, 2 and 3. 

Four Tet's Sixteen Ocean's was a 2020 highlight, three sides of vinyl that soundtracked those early days of lockdown in March/ April 2020 of that year. This Is For You is one of five short tracks on it- the others are Hi Hello, ISTM, 1993 Band Practice and Bubbles At Overlook 25th March 2019- any/ all of which I was going to include here and didn't.

Sewell And The Gong's Patron Saint Of Elswhere is one of my favourite albums of 2025, a Balearic  folk/ motorik beauty with MYND a short one minute fourteen seconds of sound sandwiched between much longer excursions. 

The Orb tend to do long tracks. Snowbow is from 2005's Okie Dokie It's The Orb On Kompakt, an album I only found recently and have been enjoying. Snowbow is the closing track, two minutes and fourteen seconds.

A Year From Monday gave me the idea for this mix. It's on an album of Ultramarine recordings from 1997/ 8 that sat unreleased until this year. I posted it a few Monday's ago and listening to it in the car I wondered how it would work with a load of other very short tracks around it. 

M- Paths' Calm was on their album Hope, released on Mighty Force in 2023, a rippling melody line and drums. 

Polypores released an album in June, Cosmically A Shambles. I posted a song from it on Friday. The slightly hyperactive and bleepy Mystery Energy Score is in the middle of the album and this mix. I couldn't decide if its energy was a good change of pace or not and nearly took it out. In the end I thought it just about worked.

Aphex Twin's Avril 14th is his most streamed track, a Satie like piano piece smothered in reverb. THis version, the music reversed not audio version, is from user18081971's Soundcloud page, widely acknowledged to be Richard D James' outlet for all manner of unreleased music. 

Pandit Pam Pam is from Sao Paulo, Brazil. Interludio is from Dot, an EP from January this year, six tracks recorded while caring for a young baby, Diogo. 

First Light is the opening track on Daniel Avery's Song For Alpha, a 2018 album that was the start of a run of outstanding albums that isn't over yet. One minute and forty seconds of wodnerful ambient drones. 

Sydney Minsky Sargeant's album Lunga came out last week, an autumn 2025 highlight. Intro is the opening track (obviously), a short ambient piece that eases us into Lunga. And out of this mix.

Andrew Weatherall's Intro was the very short first track on Convenanza. 'I seem to have got in with the wrong crowd', the voice says, setting Andrew's stall out. 

Soundtrack Saturday

We have a recently launched boutique cinema open in the shopping precinct near us, The Northern Light, in what used to be WH Smith. It shows all sorts of films and also puts on some interesting one offs. Chris Massey runs Sprechen, his Manchester based label that has put out records by Psychederek, Causeway and Steve Cobby this year and is celebrating ten years of action with a compilation called Ein Null. That's Chris in the photo above DJing in the cinema in Sale last week. 

In partnership with Richie V, Chris has being doing a series of events where they re- score silent movies from the 1920s with a pair of turntables, a mixer and a laptop, DJing a new soundtrack to German Expressionist films. In the summer they did Metropolis and Nosferatu. I missed both due to other commitments but last week they screened and re- scored The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari and I was able to go. 

The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari is a 1920 film directed by Robert Wiene and tells the story of a hypnotist, a somnambulist and a murder in a small German town. The film's writers- Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer- were scarred by their experiences with the military in the First World War and deeply distrustful of the authorities. Dr Caligari is not only one of the earliest cinema films, it's also thought to be the first with a twist ending. The film's sets are jagged and surreal, doors and windows at strange angles, and all very claustrophobic. The sleepwalker, Cesare, is played by Conrad Veidt...

Chris and Richie soundtrack the film's eighty minute running time with a variety of instrumental music, cutting, mixing and cross fading as the scenes and action changes. They squeeze a lot in, some of which I recognise (but I wish I'd made some notes immediately afterwards as I can't remember it all now). Michael Rother's unmistakable guitar sound glides in at one point, a neat cultural link between Weimar Germany and '70s krautrock. There is ambient and trip hop and towards the end a huge proggy guitar solo track blasts in. 

This is Fortana di Luna from Michael Rother's 1978 album Sterntaler which I'm sure wasn't what Chris and Richie played but it could easily have fitted in with their new score to The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari

Fortana di Luna

It made me more annoyed that I missed both Metropolis and Nosferatu. Chris and Richie are tackling The Passion Of Joan Of Arc next, a 1928 French silent film. 

Back in 2017 Factory Floor re- scored Metropolis and released their version of the soundtrack as a double CD/ four album box set. The project was commissioned by the London Science Museum to mark the 90th anniversary of the film's release and they performed their score live at the musuem's IMAX. Factory Floor are the perfect group to do Fritz Lang's film, their synth futurism the ideal match to the futuristic sci fi/ 20th century machine industrialism of Metropolis. Heart Of Data

Heart Of Data

Back in 1998 I saw Andrew Weatherall DJ live to a screening of Nosferatu at Manchester's Cornerhouse (it seems apt that DJing new scores to films was something that the pioneering Mr Weatherall was doing nearly three decades ago). It wasn't particularly busy. Andrew was set up at the front with two turntables and a box of records. On screen Nosferatu: A Symphony Of Horror played, black and white vampirism directed by F.W. Murnau with Max Schreck as Count Orlok bringing a plague to a small German town. Andrew's score was all weird ambient and massively pitched down trip hop and illbient and downtempo tracks. At some point many years alter some of us managed to identify that one of the tracks was from Leila's 1998 album Like Weather but I can't now recall which track. Let's have this one...

Space, Love

The screening and Weatherall re- scoring of Nosferatu was memorable for another reason. Lou was fairly heavily pregnant with Isaac and at one crucial point in the film, as the images and music reached a crescendo, it clearly affected the unborn Isaac and one of his limbs, a hand or foot visibly bulged and moved in a wave like a shark's fin across Lou's stomach. 

Cosmically A Shambles

Polypores is a one man outfit from Preston, the work of Stephen James Buckley and a modular synth. In June this year Polypores released an album, Cosmically A Shambles, which I've been catching up with recently. The modular synth is an unpredictable instrument and that unpredictability seems to be built into the music, a whirl of bleeps and clicks, rhythms and spinning patterns, drum machines and melodies that never sit still, a constantly changing and seemingly organic sound The album opens with Lungs And Limbs and closes with Hazy Dazy, In between those two there are seven further slices of psychedelic electronic instrumentals. Whorl is skittish and expansive, the modular synth melody lines oscillating as the drum machine patters away beneath. 

Whorl

The rest of the album is just as good, the same but different- and endlessly inventive. You can find it at Bandcamp. Polypores performed live in one take for The state51 factory a year ago, nineteen minutes of modular synth joy. 

Polypores has been asked to play at the Harmonicon festival in Todmorden in October- my discovery of Cosmically A Shambles and a soon to come appearance in Todmorden is surely a cosmic coincidence that can't be ignored. Polypores is playing at the Unitarian Chapel on the Staurday night. Across the rest of the weekend, a celebration of 'stones, drones, folklore, walks and talks' Polypores is joined by The Transcendence Orchestra, writer David Keenan, Bridget Hayden and Jacqueline Anderson at various venues including (obvs) The Golden Lion. 

Well Some People Try And Treat Me Like A Man

I read an article about Devendra Banhart's 2005 single I Feel Just Like A Child a few days ago, a song and artist that hadn't crossed my path for at least a decade. I always liked I Feel Just Like A Child, the acoustic T- Rex rhythm guitar and percussion and Devendra's dippy lyrics...

I don't have much of Devendra Banhart's back catalogue but my curiosity was piqued and I went back to what I do have. In 2013 he released his eighth album Mala, fourteen songs, pretty focused and well executed, some sung in his mother's native Venezuelan Spanish, loose and laid back but not all over the place, the freak folk dialed down a little. Mi Negrita was one of the Venezuelan ones, one of my favourites and came with a very nicely done edit from Daniele Di Martino which kept all the South American feel and added some early 2010s deep house sounds...

Mi Negrita (Daniele Di Martino Edit)

Before that in 2009 Devendra contributed a cover to a Kath Bloom tribute album...

Forget About Him

Since Mala Devendra has released another three albums, most recently one in 2023 with Cate Le Bon. 

Wednesday Trio

Some mid- week electronic/ dance music/ techno to shake the speakers and rattle the window frames- in three parts. 

First up Boy Division and their new single, Lazarus, a slice of laser beam focused, Italo disco/ cosmic chug. A resurrection one might say. The production is slick, the guitars neatly post- New Order, the piano straight out of Rimini and the controls set for the heart of A Love From Outer Space, a space the Boy Division chaps know very well. Out now on Tici Taci. 

Next, South London dub/ house/ chug suppliers Rude Audio have a new EP out at the end of October, seven tracks and forty five minutes of excellence titled Strange Phenomena. It's led by an advance party, the seven minute long MGB1, and sees Rude Audio slide out of the dubbed out shadows to the strobe lit dancefloor with some gorgeously lit up wonky leftfield disco.  The video is worth sticking around for too. 

Lastly we go back to Belfast and Deeply Armed, a trio I posted a couple of weeks ago. Their debut single The Healing is a 2025 must have, and on release earlier this year came with a couple of remixes (Andrew Innes with Brendan Lynch and former Swordsman Keith Tenniswood). The Richard Fearless remix came out recently. The Death In Vegas main man doesn't so much remix The Healing as completely strip it down and rebuild it. Driven by one of Fearless' thumping kick drums, the ghostlier elements of the original song forma  backdrop of synth waves. Matches on a tea tray percussion. Deeply distorted acid squelch. Reverb and delay. A certain amount of techno disquiet. Lovely stuff indeed. 

Make Something Of All The Noise

Back in the 00s there were a lot of two person bands,  some maybe inspired by the sudden ascent of The White Stripes who proved that less could be more (and put a lot of bass players out of work perhaps). One of them were The Kills, formed in 2001 by singer singer Alison Mosshart and guitarist Jamie Hince. Between 2003 and 2011 they put out four albums- Keep On Your Mean Side, No Wow, Midnight Boom and Blood Pressures. In 2016 they released a fifth, Ash & Ice. I dipped in and out and can't remember what the first thing I heard by them was but I think it came from a music blog- they always strike me as an early days of music blogs band.

The Kills were dark and messy, four track/ eight track recordings, garage blues and Velvets sounds, Jamie's gnarly guitars and basic drum machine programming and Alison's chain smoking vocals. In 2011 I heard this song and it became one of the songs of the year for me...

Baby Says

Jamie's guitar playing is superb, the tone and ringing, fuzzy lead line endlessly brilliant. Alison comes in with one of those gutter punk love song lyrics, instantly conjuring the Chelsea Hotel, leather jackets and dirty jeans, a life shot in grimy black and white- 'Baby says/ A howl of romance I'll get/ From all your sleeping dogs/ You thugs of God/ I'll get one yet'. Eat your heart out Allen Ginsberg. 

They released The Last Goodbye as a single from Blood Pressures too which had a cover of Pale Blue Eyes on it- so many bands have covered The Velvet Underground's Pale Blue Eyes but The Kills bring manage to something of themselves to it, a scratchy, lo fi, rickety version.

Pale Blue Eyes

Last week Thurston Moore released his own Velvets cover to mark Sterling Morrison's birthday, a version of Temptation Inside Your Heart. Debbie Googe (ex- MBV) plays bass on it. Thurston's been playing the song live for ages and its probably about time he committed it to tape...

Thurston plays that riff like its all that matters and his NY drawl is perfect on this. The Velvets version didn't come out until 1985 when it was on the VU album and is one of my fvaourite VU songs- Lou is all the place vocally, funny asides, laughter and goofy lines thrown about. Lou starts off saying, 'somebody shut the door', and, 'somebody get her out of here'. Later on he chucks out, 'electricity comes from other planets', and there's more nonsense at the end- 'the pope in the silver castle'. The 'wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong' backing vocals are a joy too. Sterling and Lou's guitars are locked into each other in a way that makes the Velvet Underground in 1968/ 9, the perfect guitar band. 

Temptation Inside Your Heart

Alison Mosshart turned up last week too on the latest preview from Daniel Avery's forthcoming album Tremor. Greasy Off The Racing Line is dark electronic blues, a grimy, overloaded bassline, synth noise explosions and Mosshart back at the mic, ten chain smoked cigarettes in and falling down a deep hole. 

Monday's Long Songs

A new EP from Andres y Xavi came out last Friday, four tracks all named after cities- hence the title of the EP, Cities. All four are lovely pieces of work but two in particular stand out and both are well over eight minutes long. The first is Lagos, which rolls in with tumbling piano chords and the chk chk chk of a shaker. Then there is bubbling, Afro- funk bass and the thump of the kick drum, both chilled and hot. Halfway through there's a breakdown, stuttering synths and the start of a chant and then on four minutes a vocal works its way to the front, a lovely combination of Afro vocals, Balearic piano and dancefloor shuffle. 

New York and Chicago are two of the other three other cities the tracks are named after. Lastly there is Sant Antoni, eleven minutes of Mediterranean facing electronic beauty, a long into with synth chords, bleeps and rising ripples. The bass turns up eventually, prodding, and then a Soul II Soul drumbeat kicks in. Late evening down by the waterfront. At six minutes it all drops out to just the piano and an ambient synth sound, the bleeps and then just the piano on its own, gently heading towards what seems to be the end.... and that drum break kicks back in and we're off again...

Cities is out now on Higher Love at Bandcamp. 

Four Hours And Twenty Minutes Of Rude Audio And Richard Fearless AT STP

Apologies if it feels a bit like every third post at Bagging Area at the moment is related to Sounds From The Flightpath Estate Volume 2 but there's been quite a lot going on. On Tuesday this week BBC 6 played the previously unreleased Sabres Of Paradise track Lick Wid Nit Wit, a track that has been sitting undisturbed in the vaults at Warp for three decades and which is out now on our album, Jagz Kooner, Gary Burns and Andrew Weatherall at the mixing desk with twelve minutes of sinuous dub/ downtempo, a serious Jah Wobble- esque bassline and the prototype Wilmot horns running through it. 

Jamz Supernova was sitting in for Lauren Laverne and played it in full- leading to a flurry of sales from the Golden Lion Sounds website and Bandcamp. The numbers available online are dwindling fast and soon the only copies available will be those in record shops- Stranger Than Paradise, Piccadilly Records, Phonica, Shake The Foundations and Lovebeat. The power of national radio! The photo above was sent to me by a friend who happened to be driving and tuning in at the time- he pulled over the took the picture and sent it to me. The radio show can be caught at the BBC 6 website for the next twenty four days here. Jamz plays Sabres about two hours and five minutes in but there are several references given to it, The Golden Lion and our album throughout. 

Two weeks earlier there was a lunch party at Stranger Than Paradise in Hackney with The Flightpath's own Baz and Rude Audio/ Mark Ratcliff at the decks and then a three hour set by Richard Fearless. STP have uploaded the recording of Mark and Richard's sets at their Soundcloud page, four hours and eighteen minutes of top quality music kicking off with some very dubwise selections from Mark, then gathering pace with some electronic chuggery and spaced out weirdness. Fearless arrives with a masterclass in DJing- the selections, the flow, the mixing, its superb stuff. He does dub techno, slow and low, and crunchy distorted acid/ dub/ techno tomfoolery, robot funk, thumpy techno and more besides. You can listen here. 

Soundtrack Saturday

A bit of a soundtrack detour today into the world of late 60s and early 70s children's TV, not a topic that gets much coverage round here. In 1969 the BBC began broadcasting The Clangers,  stop- motion animation series about a group of knitted creatures that lived on the moon who spoke by whistling and who ate only green soup and blue string pudding. The Clangers one of my earliest childhood memories. 

The Clangers ran from 1969 to 1972 and was made by Oliver Postgate, who wrote, filmed, animated and narrated the series. He also scored the soundtrack by drawing it out graphically and then had it turned into music by his friend  Vernon Elliott (a composer and bassoonist). They recorded it together in a village hall in Kent. Late 60s BBC English eccentricity at its finest. The music is classical crossed with kid's TV, the minor chord variations echoing minimalist composers such as Erik Satie

In 2001 Jonny Trunk released a CD of music from The Clangers, compiled with Oliver Postgate and containing lots of very short pieces, some only fifteen or twenty seconds long along with the intro music (with narration), some longer pieces, a self explanatory four minutes titled Useful Musical Sequences, another called Running Around Music and finishing with A Clangers Opera, Act One, an eleven minute libretto Postgate compiled from The Iron Chicken and The Music Trees. Enjoy.

Episode One/ Intro Music and Dialogue

Useful Musical Sequences

A Clangers Opera, Act One

It's Curtains For You

When The Stone Roses- The Remixes came out in October 2000 I was very much not interested in it.It seemed to be yet another Silvertone cash in on an album and a band they'd been bleeding dry for over a decade, by a record company the band took to court to part company with. Remixes of the songs from the debut album also seemed to me to be an inherently un- Roses thing. Sacrilege. Heresy. Those songs don't need anything else doing to them. Why would someone even think of it? 

I'm not a person who dislikes remixes either as has been well established over the lifetime of this blog- I often prefer the remix to the original track (depending on the remixer obviously). The Stone Roses- The Remixes also came at a time when it felt very unlikely that there was any involvement from the band in this. Squire and Brown weren't talking. Reni was whereabouts unknown. Mani was heavily involved with Primal Scream. Ian's solo career was well under way and they all seemed happy to move on. 

I've shifted my attitude to this album twice, once a few years ago when I heard the Justin Robertson remix of Waterfall out in a bar and found myself enjoying it. Justin didn't do anything too radical to it, a skippy acid house drum beat, some atmospherics and a xylophone, and then the guitar riff comes in with Ian's vocal, those lyrics about a girl dropping acid and boarding a cross channel ferry, leaving 'the filth and the scum/ this American satellite's won'. There's a spaced out and stripped down state to Justin's remix that I like now.

Waterfall (Justin Robertson Remix)

A few weeks ago my friend Spencer sent me a link to the Soul Hooligan remix of Shoot You Down. Curiosity won and I clicked through. Lots of reverb, the strum of a guitar isolated, a loop of brushed drums, Ian's hushed vocals, the hum of an amp switched on behind everything. Ian's line, 'I'd love to do it and you know you've always had it coming', gets looped up, the guitars pile up a bit, cymbals splash- it's nicely done and, again, not a radical re- working but different enough to hear the song anew.

Shoot You Down (Soul Hooligan Remix)

Soul Hooligan are/were Austin Reynolds, a producer from Essex. I played their remix of Shoot You Down at The Golden Lion last weekend. 

After finding that I enjoyed that one I went back in and have dipped in and out of the some of the rest. This one, Kinobe's remix of Elizabeth My Dear stood out...

Elizabeth My Dear (Kinobe Remix)

Ian and John's anti- monarchical ditty opens side two of the debut album, the circling Strawberry Fayre guitar part re- purposed with Ian wishing death upon the monarch, all less than a minute long. A statement as much as a song. Kinobe turn it into a sweetly 60s psychedelic folk song, looping, delaying and FXing it out for nearly five minutes. 

Liminal

Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe have an album out in October- Liminal. It's the third of a three album series. I missed the first pair- Luminal and Lateral- so have some catching up to do. Eno's very prolific isn't he? One of the pieces of music from the forthcoming one, Ringing Ocean, came my way recently and it struck me as being very beautiful...

It's somewhere in the intersection between neo- classical, ambient and dream sequence music, very difficult to describe adequately but blissful, restrained, repetitive and hypnotic music that suggests rather than tells. Eno and Wolfe say it's liminal because it sits in the borderland between song and non- song. 

This one, The Last To Know, is from the same album and is evidently halfway between song and non- song, ambient drift and slow synths with a vocal that at first seemed quite out of place to me, the song and non- song colliding...

I suspect that over the course of an eleven track album it will all make perfect sense, the flow from one piece to another.

This seems the ideal time to re- post this track by Brian's brother Roger, a gorgeous but really quite melancholy ambient piece called Tidescape from October 2023 which I loved but never followed up (possibly because I thought an entire album might be a bit too melancholic). Roger plays piano and is joined by Alexander Glucksmann, Jon Goddard and Christian Badzura, between them contributing clarinet, electric guitar, organ, vibraphone and synths. Music in/ for a state of flux. 

Nothing's Changed I Still Love You

We were in a bar in Sale recently, early evening, fairly quiet, one of those new type of bars set up in a former shop unit. There were a few customers/ drinkers scattered round the edges of the bar, couples and a small group of friends. The bar staff (all ridiculously young) were busying themselves and selecting songs from an iPad. One of them cued up this song and as Johnny Marr, Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce crashed in, building to that micro- second pause before Morrissey starts singing it seemed to inject a jolt of electricity into everyone in the room. At several tables people were singing along or mouthing the words.

Stop Me If You Think That You've Heard This One Before

Johnny's guitar playing is immense, clanging and melodic, indie- glam played on a twelve string Gibson which gives it that huge sound and Morrissey, well, we don't like to talk about him any more do we but the lyrics are among his best, witty and clever, memorable and tailor made for singalongs. Famously it was lined up to be a summer 1987 single but the Hungerford massacre and the song's line about a 'shy, bald Buddhist' reflecting and planning a mass murder jinxed it- the BBC said they wouldn't play it and Rough Trade went for I Started Something I Couldn't Finish instead. Johnny also nails a guitar solo, something not many Smiths songs contain.  

Johnny is a big fan of the song, playing it live with his band- he did it when I saw him at The Ritz a few years ago. This clip is from The Tonight Show.

Thinkin' Bout U

Psychederek's new single, Thinkin' Bout U, came out last Friday, four versions of the track. The first- Thinkin' Bout U Pt. 1 (Mercury)- picks up where his cover of 808 State's Pacific State from last year's Alt! 12" left off, with sumptuous synth chords, birdsong, ambient house vibes and a killer saxophone line. 

Pt 1 (Mercury) eases us in gently. Pt 2 (Venus) adds drums, an insistent groove with a driving bassline, the sax a little lower in the mix, a Stone Roses- esque guitar line, shifting from ambient house to indie dance. Pt. 3 (Mars) is dance floor gold the drums and bass in A Certain Ratio territory, heads down and funked up. Pt. 4 (Jupiter/ Reprise) turns the sax line into an accordion, the vibe gone all Balearic. It's a wonderful EP that shows the possibilities in music, and that one version is never the only way to do something.Get it at Bandcamp. 

September Songs

Few months mark the start of something new as much as 1st September does, a real change in the seasons, change of mood, new phase of the year,  the whole back to school routine (which as someone who has worked in education since the early 90s is very much part of my annual rhythm). 

In 1984 Ian McCulloch tested the water for a solo career with a single released under his own name, outside the Bunnymen with a cover of Kurt Weill's September Song. Weill's song looks forward to autumn coming...

'But it's a long, long while from May to December
And the days grow short when you reach September
And the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
And I haven't got time for waiting game

And the days dwindle down to a precious few
September, November
And these few precious days I'd spend with you'

September Song (Long Version)

In 1987 David Sylvian released a solo album, Secrets Of The Beehive which had this song to open it, one minute and seventeen seconds of David and piano. For David, the inevitability of September and the changes it brings are shot through with melancholy...

'The sun shines high above, the sounds of laughter
The birds swoop down upon the crosses of old grey churches
We say that we're in love while secretly wishing for rain
Sipping Coke and playing games

September's here again'

September

Much more recently, in 2021, Chris Coco and George Solar released September On The Island, a tribute to Ibiza after all the tourists have gone home...

September On The Island (Dub Version)