For A While

This is the delicious shoegaze, psychedelic swirl of The Third Sound, an Icelandic band resident in Berlin. For A While came out back in 2013 on their second album, the catchily titled The Third Sound Of Destruction And Creation, and sounds like the darkness falling but in a way that's going to make everything alright.



The album is available at their Bandcamp page.

I'm So Tired

Events are moving very fast at the moment- the government is reactive, constantly running to catch up with the virus. The announcement about schools yesterday means we'll all be at home from after school tomorrow. I don't feel any elation about this, there's no real joy in having time out of work under these circumstances. I feel some relief- it's been difficult coping at school this week as staffing numbers have fallen and those of us in school have been more and more stretched. Staff and children feeling anxious with an impact on the behaviour of some. Not an easy situation to manage.

Record Shop Day 2020 has been put back from April to June, another casualty of the Coronavirus. One of the announcements I was interested in from the initial lists was this single from Jennylee, Warpaint's bassist- a cover of Fugazi's 1999 song, a piano ballad from a band who played hardcore US punk. 'I'm so tired the sheep are counting me' Ian MacKaye sings before checking out with a bleak final line. Jennylee doubles the length of the song, picking out the melody on the bass and the two voices, hers and another, entwine around each other.



Back in January Warpaint sneaked a new song out on the soundtrack to a film called The Turning. The Brakes seems to be evidence that Warpaint are still a going concern and harks back to the sound of their early records, sparse and brittle but with that liquid, rolling groove and slightly stoned vocals they do so well.

The Brakes

Jennylee sang on a song on Trentemoller's album last year, a very mid- 80s synth pop homage, Depeche Mode and New Order via Copenhagen and L.A. in the 21st century. I hadn't heard this until I heard the RSD cover (or the soundtrack song) so I got three new Warpaint related songs in one go. Which is nice, as that man on The Fast Show used to say.

Habbanera

I found this track somewhere on the internet recently, I can't remember where, but I keep coming back to it. The creators of the original track are an Italian ensemble called 291out, a group who roam around the wide open spaces of jazz, funk, Italian prog and soundtracks- and fusions of all of those- rejecting logic, limits and reason. For this release which came out this time last year, a 12" vinyl only four track e.p., they are remixed by Italian Balearic veterans Leo Mas and Fabrice who turn in a suitably laid back but at the same time quite intense remix- rubbery bassline, head nodding rhythms and a splendidly 70s guitar solo. Dreaming of the summer.

Deep One Perfect Morning

This coming Saturday we were supposed to be going to see The Jesus And Mary Chain perform Darklands at Manchester's Albert Hall. Darklands is/was their 1987 album, a record that saw them replace the departed Bobby Gillespie with a drum machine and abandon the feedback drenched treble- fest of Psychocandy with an album that split opinions. Some Mary Chain fans saw it as an exciting next step, an album where you could hear the songs, and audibly make out the guitars not just the overloaded amps, an album with a stripped back, dark sheen but undoubtedly a poppier sound. Some saw it as a sell out. I've got a lot of time for Darklands- the hit single, too pissed on Top Of The Pops to stand up straight buzz of April Skies, the William sung title track and gloom of Nine Million Rainy Days and On The Wall, the sweet sting of Cherry Came Too, the buzzsaw pop of Happy When It Rains and this one...

Deep One Perfect Morning

The gig and tour has been postponed, a response to Coronavirus and the restrictions placed on gatherings of crowds in many European cities. It seems most un- Mary Chain like to be laid low by a virus. The Reid brothers of 1987 would have slagged it off in the music press, sneered at it, compared it to Bono or John Lydon and then got pissed and fallen over. While playing the full twenty five minutes of the gig.

The whole Coronavirus situation is becoming increasingly scary. I was in a meeting after work last night where we planned for the possibility of having to close the school and how we'd deal with and prepare for years and classes preparing for exams. The exam season starts on Monday 11th May, what scientists are saying could be the peak of the epidemic. If we have to close there will be classes who won't have enough time to complete GCSE or A level courses. The tone of the government's briefing last night was very different from the one on Friday and I'm guessing that school closures are moving into when not if territory although the government's advice is contradictory- avoid pubs and restaurants but feed hundreds of children in school canteens, avoid social gatherings but put thousands of children into the same building every day. In the meantime we have both children and staff in self isolation and expect numbers to increase as the week goes on. On top of this our eldest child Isaac is in the vulnerable group and so now moves into a situation where he is to be in self isolation for twelve weeks. We are in very strange times and they're getting stranger.

Genesis P. Orridge

Genesis P. Orridge died on Saturday aged seventy sending further ripples through social media,tributes to another important figure from the fringes of popular culture gone. Genesis leaves a complex legacy. The work left behind is important, it changed the way many people saw the world and inspired them to do things themselves. Genesis as the founder of COUM Transmissions in Hull in the early 1970s making radical, confrontational and subversive art. Throbbing Gristle's back catalogue and their influence on post- punk, industrial, acid house and beyond is widely acknowledged. They were castigated as 'wreckers of civilisation'. The four-piece group- Genesis, Cosey, Sleazy and Chris Carter- made pioneering music, using synths, homemade devices, FX, noise, samples, found sounds, spoken word, all aspects that became commonplace. Psychic TV were an group who wanted to unite music and video art, leftfield pop and psychedelia and in Godstar, Genesis' tribute to Brian Jones, made one of those records that was always floating round the ether in the second half of the 80s.

Godstar

Genesis played a key role alongside Richard Norris in making Jack The Tab, an album that is often seen as the first British acid house record. Andrew Weatherall said that the arrival of house and techno didn't surprise him at all because he'd already heard Throbbing Gristle, he knew from their records what the future sounded like.

This track is a live performance from San Francisco in 1981, their final show before their initial break up and released on an album called Mission Of Dead Souls.

Persuasion U.S.A.

This one, a just over a minute of distortion and noise, was from their debut album in 1977, The Second Annual Report.

Industrial Introduction

In her autobiography Cosey Fanni Tutti makes several accusations about Genesis's abusive behaviour, accusations he denied. She says he threw a concrete block off a balcony at her while she was sunbathing, again something he denied. At the very least he doesn't come across as a very nice person, moody, controlling and manipulative. Cosey and others have questioned his business practices, which often left them out of pocket to his benefited. Maybe this isn't the time to go through all of this. The deaths of people who are flawed and complex can be difficult to get a handle on. RIP Genesis.

God's Waiting Room

This is two hours of records being spun by David Holmes a week ago, under the guise of his regular God's Waiting Room night but this time with a sub-title The Songs Andrew Weatherall Taught Us. Spanning Peter Perrett, The Handsome Family, Chris and Cosey, Neu!, Crocodiles, Edwyn Collins, Wire, Gin Gilette and loads more, this is guaranteed Sunday gold while you sit in your bunker and wait for the coming apocalypse. Tracklist.

Roooksack Boogie, Belching Smoke

Back in the early 90s this was how Andrew Weatherall appeared in an article in The Face, his long Screamadelica- era hair cut short and a sort of punk /rockabilly/techno look that seemed to be more where things were going. A bit tougher and with an edge. The Sabres Of Paradise released their Sabresonic album in 1993, a record taking in lengthy ambient tracks that took up an entire side of vinyl (Clock Factory) and Still Fighting, an extension of Primal Scream's Don't Fight It, Feel It that the Scream passed on as being too techno but which opened Sabresonic with intent, the thud of the kick drum setting out their stall. There was sublime dub techno (RSD, Red Stripe Dub) and two takes on fairly abstract club music (Ano Electro Andante and Ano Electro Allegro). There was also Smokebelch I, a pacey leftfield tune with a synth intro and reverb laden sounds bouncing around. The rattling hi- hat and then later on the strings set the heart racing and take me straight back to then.

Smokebelch I

Darren Price, DJ and friend of Weatherall put this tribute on the internet yesterday, a re-working of Smokebelch II, The Belching Smoke Salute, a version that finds new beauty in old grooves and lasts for a perfect eight minutes and eight seconds.



From 1993 to 2019 and a pair of new- to- the- internet Andrew Weatherall mixes, a pair in two halves, an hour each and sent to Mr John Minney by Lord Sabre himself in June 2019. Perfectly paced, throbbing, chuggy delights, Arabic influences and ALFOS style disco- house, percussion breakdowns, robotic voices and sections of swooshing, uplifting dance music. The DJ sets and Sabres sounds of 1993 are present here and there, echoing drum sounds, rattling snares, acidic squiggles and pumping basslines, the forward momentum although the tempos are definitely pitched down. Plenty to enjoy in both of these, especially the space age, cosmische stuff that's going on.

Part One...



And part two...

Found

I thought this piece of music might be good to bring things home this week and round off a week of excursions into a largely ambient, instrumental world. Penguin Cafe Orchestra's Music For A Found Harmonium was recorded in 1984, the work of PCO founder Simon Jeffes who found a harmonium on a pile of rubbish and bits of wood in Kyoto, Japan while on tour there with his avant- pop- folk ensemble. He took the instrument to a friend's home and wrote the music. It came to wider attention when it was featured on 1994's Cafe del Mar compilation, a double vinyl record with tracks chosen by legendary Ibizan DJ Jose Padilla. The harmonium and the repetitive tune sounded perfect next to the ambient house and down tempo dance music of the first half of the 90s. This song is one of the sounds that immediately reminds me of the flat I lived in for a couple of years near Altrincham c.1994.

Music For A Found Harmonium

The Orb remixed it and their version, with found sounds, tabla and a dubby ambient haze, appeared on a Penguin Cafe Orchestra primer called Preludes, Airs and Yodels in 1996 and an Orb remix compilation (Auntie Aubrey's Excursions Beyond the Call Of Duty Volume 2). The original music is so simple and so strong I think it could probably be reworked and remixed in all sorts of ways and guises without suffering.

Pandaharmonium

From Fort Beulah To Facility 4

Fort Beulah N.U. project was a secretive Andrew Weatherall project that started in 2017, a series of five one sided 12" singles, with hand stamped centres and numbered and signed sleeves. Yes, I bought all five. Cottage industry dub, detours into ambient and semi- techno areas, weird meditative tunes with strange vocal samples. I'm not sure exactly who the players and contributors are but the wonderful Nina Walsh was involved and various other people in the Woodleigh Research Facility orbit. I'm not usually one for copying and pasting press releases but in the absence of much else to go off will do so this time. This was issued prior to the release of 001 by Mr Weatherall:

''Fort Beulah N.U. is a collective of singers, players, sonic research operatives and Gnostic adventurers affiliated to the Woodleigh Research Facility. Fort Beulah N.U. would like to thank Heidi Barker for her vocals on F.B. 001…… Peace and unity is easier to achieve than those that profit from the lack of it would have you believe….”
Andrew Weatherall. June 2017.

The five Fort Beulah tracks are sequenced in order below by a kindly Mixcloud uploader and are a fine way to spend forty minutes.



Back in September 2017 this short video came out to promote 002 which seems to have been called Alain.



Another piece of the jigsaw (maybe)... Fort Beulah is a place in Vermont, the town at the centre of Sinclair Lewis' 1936 novel It Can't Happen Here, a satirical account of a demagogic politician taking the Presidency by storm in the 1930s with promises of American values, patriotism and a return to traditional values (written against a  backdrop of actual fascist dictators being in power in Europe). Whether this shadowy musical collective is named after the Fort Beulah of Sinclair Lewis' novel and is therefore a sideways comment on Trump I don't know. But it seems plausible.

Today is the day of Andrew's funeral. In the words he'd use to sign off some of his messages and missives Jah bless to all his family and friends and all those attending. Rest in peace Lord Sabre.

Midnight Friends

Hull's finest outfit Fila Brazillia, formed in 1990 by Steve Cobby and David McSherry, have a new e.p. out, five new songs recorded and released after a sixteen year hiatus. As chance would have it (and I'm blogging very much on the fly this week) the second track fits in very nicely with Monday's and Tuesday's tracks (Monday- Manika Kaur dubbed out by Youth. Tuesday- Daniel Avery and Alessandro Cortini). It's a sort of making a blogtape. This is Midnight Friends, a haze of shimmering chords, echo- laden piano or organ, repeating melodies and riffs, building and falling away for a good seven and a half minutes, some ambient sounds and bass part coming and going, tickling the nape of your neck.



The other four songs on Fila's MMXX are worth splashing out for too, there's some jazzy future funk and the spacey electronic dance of The Silver Scale is a wonderful piece of music.

Enter Exit

Picking up where yesterday's Youth remix of Manika Kaur left off and heading into a world of drones comes the second trailer from the forthcoming Daniel Avery and Alessandro Cortini album Illusion Of Time. Spectral noises, ambient buzz, dischord, layers of sound with some feedback on top, both unsettling and rather beautiful. I suspect played loud on a proper system this is going to sound huge.

Monday's Long Song

Not long after writing Friday's post which featured Jah Wobble and Youth a further Youth excursion appeared on my internet. This is a long dub remix of an Australian singer and songwriter, Manika Kaur, whose Punjabi Sikh heritage has led her into making devotional music. Her 2015 album was produced by Talvin Singh and she's worked with Scottish folkie James Yorkston. On this one Youth extends the original track into a 2020 ambient dub tour de force, a journey in which, to quote Martin 'Youth' Glover himself, 'to build invisible bridges between ancient tradition and the modern world'. Eternal bliss indeed.

Somewhere Else

We're in one of those periods where there's a flurry of new releases and news about upcoming releases and there seems to be a wealth of good new music in the air. Norwich's Sink Ya Teeth are a two woman duo who make eminently funky post- punk dark- disco. They've been on tour with A Certain Ratio. They sound like there should have been boxes of their singles wrapped in beautiful and enigmatic Peter Saville sleeves at 86 Palatine Road. This is the second single, Somewhere Else, ahead of their second album, Two. It's a banger.

Exotic Avengers

Some top quality dub disco from 1983 via Jah Wobble and his Invaders Of The Heart and a track named after the band or vice versa. Wobble's bass is the bedrock around which everything else revolves. Lots of eastern influences to the fore in this the 3rd mix off the 12"- eastern scales, instrumentation and vocals, and a tune that unfolds entirely at its own pace. The trombone solo is a joy.

Invaders Of The Heart (Exotic Decadent Disco Mix)

Wobble has a new out imminently with Youth, an album called Acid Punk Dub Apocalypse, with Hollie Cook and Alex Paterson on board. Wobble and Youth have got previous not least the rather excellent Dub Trees project from 2016- this one, a dubbed out mix of their own work, came from Youth's garden studio in South London.

King Of The Faeries (Avengers Outer Space Chug Dub)

Youth is someone whose work is woven through my record collection, from his beginnings as bass player in Killing Joke through his long standing work with The Orb, in the 90s as Blue Pearl, his various works as producer and his more recent collaboration with Woodleigh Research Facility. The recordings with Andrew Weatherall and Nina Walsh were done around the same as the Dub Trees e.p. this version is from, possibly all stewed in the same pot.

Barely Alive

Brand new and retro- futuristic, Kris Baha's Barely Alive remixed by Timothy J. Fairplay, a chilly, detached crawl through the early 1980s with 808 and ARP synth- this probably needs a new tag in classic Fairplay style, 2020 chill wave or nu D.D.R. synthpop. Ghostly and physical at the same time. The original mix is pretty smart too.

Just Imagine

Just imagine, just what the doctor ordered, just in time. Sonic Boom returns with a song ahead of an album in June (All Things Being Equal), waves of sound, layers of dreamlike warmth, multi- tracked vocals and the faintest hope that actually everything might be alright after all.

Weatherdrive and Weatherdub

Last week there was a minor internet kerfuffle surrounding a Facebook page that I'm one of the admins of- The Flightpath Estate. It was set up several years ago as a place to share appreciation of the work of Andrew Weatherall and news about releases, DJ nights and so on. It trundled along quietly with a few hundred members. One of my co- admins Martin set up a resource called the Weatherdrive, an online dump for recordings of DJ sets, radio shows and mixes, over 700 hours worth of listening in total. In the aftermath of Andrew' untimely death MixMag, the dance music magazine, picked up on the Weatherdrive and published a short article about it (which included a link to this blog). The article broke the Weatherdrive as it was deluged with people wanting to download mixes and the Flightpath Estate has since more than doubled its membership. MixMag then got back in touch to see if we wanted to write an article pointing readers in the direction of the ten best Andrew Weatherall mixes on the Weatherdrive. With some hugely appreciated support from Martin and Mark I wrote that article (stretching the definition of ten to twelve and reviving McGuire, the fictional figure from Weatherall's sleevenotes to Haunted Dancehall, something I hope he wouldn't mind). The article was published on MixMag's website yesterday. You can read it here. It takes in twelve mixes/ sets recorded between 1991 and 2019 and on their own contain a huge wealth and variety of music. Hours of fun plus some words written by me.

To celebrate here are two dub obscurities from Andrew Weatherall's back catalogue, both from the mid 1990s and neither currently available digitally as far as I can see. The first is a Sabres Of Paradise dub track. Ysaebud is a monstrous piece of dubbed out splendour, a unholy shotgun marriage of side six of Sandinista! and King Tubby. It came out as a one sided 7" single with an etched B-side and was released in 1997, a couple of years after Sabres split, and was credited to S.O.P (From The Vault). According to Curley, who worked in the Sabres office, the track was rescued from a safe in the office on Dean Street and the single was mastered directly from cassette.

Ysaebud

Two years earlier the War Child Help! compilation was released, a record largely populated by Britpop aristocrats plus Johnny Depp and Kate Moss and some people from the dance music world (Portishead, Massive Attack, Orbital, Stereo MCs, The KLF under a pseudonym). Help! was intended to provide aid for the young inhabitants of war torn Bosnia and Herzegovina and ended up raising over £1.5 million. The idea was that everyone would record their contributions in a day, mix them the following day and then the album would come out a week later. Tucked away fairly anonymously towards the end was a track by the Planet 4 Folk Quartet, their one and only recording. Planet 4 Folk Quartet were Andrew Weatherall and David Harrow. Message To Crommie is a gorgeous piece of piano- led dub, ticking percussion and a softly padding bassline, pausing for a beautiful melodica breakdown, before the bass takes over again.

Message To Crommie

I Just Can't Help Believing

A song from 2004 that lives on through music blogs, popping up every now and then. Johnny Boy were a male/female duo from Liverpool. Their 7" single You Are The Generation Who Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve comes in like a 21st century Phil Spector, a shimmer of piano, guitars, bells and sound effects over those crashing, overloaded drums, The Ronettes had they come from Bootle rather than NYC, and singer Lolly's vocals. James Dean Bradfield is on production duties- the other half of Johnny Boy was Davo who was the Manic's guitar tech.

You Are The Generation Who Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve

A critique of consumerism, drug abuse and entitlism as far as I can see.

'Burberry Beamer beakheads
Leaving Adidas sleek mystique reversed
Without a dream or scream between 'em
Believing time does reimburse

So for all we are receiving
There's an evens key to turn
You was the generation that bought more shoes and you get what you deserve'

Monday's Long Song

Kelly Lee Owens remixed by Prins Thomas in 2018, a seventeen minute Diskomiks that stretches her song Bird out into new places and new shapes. Six minutes in the kick drum takes over as everything else falls away. There's a wobbly bass note and then some ace bongo/congas work and then it all starts to build again. The last minute or so has some moody, reflective strings to round the journey off. Long and worth investing in. If you're short of time or attention span there's an eight minute edit version, which is still pretty long.



Kelly has a new album out in May, Inner Life, and trailed it last week with the whip-crack smart techno of Melt! Her debut album in 2017 was one of my favourites of that year. I played it recently to see if it still was (and it is). Modern, moving, intense electronic music. Promises to be a good 'un.

Y2K

On U Sound have a long tradition of budget priced label samplers, a series called Pay It All Back, dating back to 1984. In March 2019 they released Volume 7, eighteen tracks from recent years with Adrian Sherwood at the controls including some previously unreleased tracks and some alternate mixes. It's a fantastic record with heavy dub, roots and reggae vibes from Lee Perry, Roots Manuva, Horace Andy, Denise Sherwood, Mark Stewart, LSK, Congo Natty, African Head Charge, Little Axe and loads more. This one is the one that caught my ear when I was playing it recently.

A'- Live In Dub

Fast, heavy rhythm, crashing noises, strings being stretched and bent, distortion, cymbals echoing and bouncing round, rim shots- five minutes of exhilarating, motorik, dubwise chaos. The group is Nisennenmondai which meant nothing to me at first. On digging a little deeper I discovered they are a Japanese trio, three women, formed in Tokyo in 1999 and named after the Japanese word for Y2K millennium bug.