An Hour Of 2025 Dub/ Dance

A follow up to my New Year's Eve mix which was an ambient/ downtempo and largely instrumental hour of music. This one starts out dubby and then heads in Balearic and dance directions, getting increasingly thumpy with a three tune Belfast detour before finishing with the voice of Andrew Weatherall. As maybe all mixes should. 

There were a lot of things that I couldn't find room for here, not least Four Tet's Into Dust (Still Falling)- maybe there's time for one more 2025 mix next Sunday to see that year out. 

An Hour Of 2025 Dub/ Dance

• Adrian Sherwood: Spaghetti Best Western
• Soft Cotton County: The Future's Not What It Used To Be (Justin Robertson's Five Green Moons Remix)
• Rude Audio: No Sleep
• Escape- Ism: Last Of The Sellouts
• Daniel Avery ft. Cecile Believe: Rhapsody In Blue
• Jezebell: Movimento Lento
• Puerto Montt City Orchestra: ...And We'd Be So Happy
• Pandit Pam Pam: The Senator
• Le Carousel: We're All Gonna Hurt
• Factory Floor: Tell Me
• Black Bones: Voodoo
• The Light Brigade: Shuffle The Pack

Adrian Sherwood's The Collapse Of Everything was one of my favourite albums of 025, a solo album that becomes a mystical sonic adventure, Sherwood reaching out from dub into soundtrack territories and beyond. Spaghetti Best Western's guitars are worth the price of entry alone. 

Soft Cotton County's Coward Of The County Fair came out in January 2025, a single backed with a pair of Justin Robertson dubs (wearing his Five Green Moons hat- and the Five Green Moons Moon 2 album should have showed up here too). SCC are an indie/ dreampop/ shoegaze duo from Richmond- upon- Thames. This is lovely, laid back folk/ dub. 

Rude Audio are a South London dub/ dub techno specialists under the leadership of Mark Ratcliff. The Strange Phenomenon EP was a 2025 highlight, premium grade Dulwich dub. 

Escape- Ism's The Charge Of The Love Brigade was one of my 2025 peaks, a ten song trip inside Ian Svenonius' world, the last man in the business to sell out. 

Daniel Avery and Cecile Believe's Rhapsody In Blue was the most 80s teen drama, pop moment on Tremor (and came with a Midnight Version too, dirtier and tougher). It still hits the right spots now, six months after its release.

Jezebell's second album, Jezebellearic Beats Volume 2, pulled together some further remixes and productions together with some new material- this track, Movimento Lento, and the closer Turn It Yes, were a perfect pair of bookends. 

Puerto Montt City Orchestra's ...And We'd Be So Happy came out on Brighton's Higher Love label, the home of many fine modern Balearic releases. A spoken word family trip to the seaside in the pouring rain. 

Pandit Pam Pam is from Sao Paulo and makes uneasy ambient music. The Senator is the most dancefloor friendly thing in the Pandit Pam Pam back catalogue, dynamic and lively but still a little unpredictable and the horn that floats above the drums is a thing of beauty. 

Le Carousel is Phil Kieran from Belfast. We're All Gonna Hurt is full on, pulsing, electronic dance music, uplifting but shot through with heartbreak, like all the best dance music is. 

Factory Floor's 2025 return saw them come back with more bone shaking beats and face melting synths, on a pair of singles, Tell Me and Between You. Stephen Morris added some drum programming touches to Tell Me. Experimental, machine music with a random human heart. 

Black Bones are also from Belfast. They released an album across a variety of vinyl formats, dark industrial basement music- acidic, technoid, dubbed up Belfast rave. 

The Light Brigade are David Holmes and Keith Tenniswood. Shuffle The Pack is a righteous acid house record, a call to arms and positivity and very much part of Holmes' 'music as an act of resistance' vision that fades out leaving Andrew Weatherall's voice talking about music, smoke, coloured lights and acid house as gnostic ceremony. 

Memories

A week of new music comes to a close today- this week's posts have featured KiF's Still Out, a pair of new tracks from 100 Poems, new singles from The Charlatans and The Orb, and Richard Sen's remixes of John Grant (from 2016 admittedly but unreleased until now). Today we start off with two new releases on Brighton's Higher Love. The first, out yesterday, is from Polish duo Jazxing whose Pearls Of The Baltic Sea album was one of 2022's best albums, a blur of dub, indie, cosmic disco, Balearica and pop. 

The new Jazxing single is Memories, a full on 80s pop song with a lyric looking back at youth. Imagine Cupid And Psyche era Scritti Politti glazed in honey but with a hefty slice of 2025 production, laced with a shot of regret and nostalgia. There is a much longer alternate version, the Full Disco Purrefection Mix, that breaks it down and stretches it out, starting with percussion, disco strings and some congas and then building, snatches of vocal drifting in, a choppy rhythm guitar, sequenced bassline and more synths. Memories is at Higher Love's Bandcamp. 

Out in early August on Higher Love is a single from Puerto Montt City Orchestra, And We'd Be So Happy. More nu disco/ Balearic musically, an insistent rhythm, prodding bassline, hints of guitar and piano, all very chilled and lovely and on top band member Tim's daughter's spoken word piece, more memories, describing days out to the seaside, the simple pleasures of amusement arcades, penny falls, piers, car picnics and having fun despite the rain as all the while the guitar line floats away on top. There's a second version of And We'd Be So Happy too, The Cruel Mistress Mix, that slows it down, adds some dub space and echoes of early 90s Saint Etienne. And We'd Be So Happy is sounding like one of the singles of the summer round these parts. It'll be at Higher Love on 6th August

Coming from a similar place but a bit hazier is an EP from ddwy called Beaming Backwards, four slices of dreamy electronic Balearica with a Cocteau Twins/ One Dove feel, ethereal but with a pulse running through it, more early 90s influences and sounds, the feel of those songs that made up Creation's 1991 Keeping The Faith compilation, bands like Hypnotone, Love Corporation and Sheer Taft. The title track is a joy, forwards momentum with some backwards sounds and a distant vocal. 

Stars, Stars is led by a very mid- 80s Cure/ Cocteaus/ New Order guitar line and then a low slung bass. Peak Smile pushes on, aiming for the dancefloor, with a bleepy topline and crunchy synths. The EP finsihes with Hueldro'r Haf, a hazy, blissed out song with piano and viola. Buy/ listen to the whole EP here.  Like me, you may keep going back to it. 

Another Bagging Area Mix For Tak Tent Radio

I've done another mix for Tak Tent Radio, an internet radio station broadcasting out of Scotland for several years now and host to a wonderfully diverse and obscure selection of music. This is my twelfth mix for Tak Tent, an hour of tunes entirely music from 2024 and focussing very much on the dubwise sounds before pitching things up at the end with a pair of twisted dancefloor bangers. Listen to it at Tak Tent or at Mixcloud.

Tracklist

•          Coyote: OMG
•          Five Green Moons: One Lost Moon
•          The Jonny Halifax Invocation: The Mountain Dub
•          Richard Norris and Jon Carter: Ceefax (Jon Carter Due South Dub)
•          Puerto Montt City Orchestra: Hey You (10:40 Remix)
•          Pandit Pam Pam: Pass A Wish (Jezebell’s 50 Ways Mix)
•          100 Poems: Come, Hear Me Now
•          Fat White Family: Bullet Of Dignity (Beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve Remix)
•          Acid Klaus ft Philly Piper: Aerodromes (David Holmes Remix)

Fifty Minutes Of 10:40

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

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

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

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

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

10: 40's Bandcamp is here. 

Fifty Minutes Of 10: 40

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday/ Saturday Bandcamp Bonanza

Bandcamp Friday yesterday dropped a ton of new music into my Inbox and while today is a day late in terms of the benefits the artists get from the monthly Bandcamp Friday (Bandcamp waive their fees for one day a month) it's still worth posting some of the highlights- and yesterday was packed full of highlights.

We'll start with a 10: 40 remix of Puerto Montt City orchestra, a song called Hey You, out on Brighton's Higher Love label. By his own admission Jesse's work as 10: 40 has been an ongoing mission to make music/ remixes that channel Spiritualized and this one takes that to the nth degree- cue up Jason Spaceman's Lay Back In The Sun either before or after this and enjoy the sun drenched, blissed out ride....

                                                 

The song is a cover of 14 Iced Bears' Hay Fever, an 80s indie classic. You can get buy the 10: 40 remix of Puerto Montt City Orchestra at Bandcamp.

Next, another murky, underground, radiophonic, analogue synth missive from Pye Corner Audio, the first one for a few months, this one titled Texture Reels. Four minutes and forty five seconds of subterranean, kosmische reel to reel intensity. Get it at Bandcamp, pay what you want. 

Thirdly, Emma. Matty Ducasse records as Skylab. His Skylab International offshoot released a new single onto Bandcamp yesterday, a cover of Hot Chocolate's Emma. Mat plays and produces, Zoe Filthy- Rich songs. The drum machine pitter patters, chunky machine rhythms. The synths ping and blip. Hot Chocolate's mid- 70s pop- soul hit is darker than you might think. Producer Mickie Most asked singer Errol Brown for 'darkness and depth'. Errol gave him lyrics about lost childhood and suicide, a film star 'who can't keep living on dreams no more'. Mat and Zoe dredge up all of the pain and darkness that Errol piled into his lyrics. The EP is at Bandcamp, remix, edit and instrumental.

Lastly, Richard Norris whose Oracle Sound dub project has become essential listening. Richard has recorded three albums of dubs, available digitally and on vinyl via his subscription service. Recently he hosted his friend Jon Carter, who DJed at the Heavenly Social in the 90s and recorded as Monkey Mafia as well as under his own name. Richard wanted to show Jon some new kit. They ended up making a dub track called Ceefax- rocking drums and bass, space echo, melodica and an Ampp Freq live dub machine. The results come in three parts- Ceefax, a Norris dub and a Carter dub. All three are at Bandcamp. As I keep typing. 

You can buy all the music above for less than the price of a pint of lager in central London (and some central Manchester pubs). And while the lager may look briefly colder and more enticing, the music will last longer.