This is yesterday's long song, delayed to Tuesday by my daughter's birthday. Reinhard Vanbergen has become my go to Belgian musician over the last year with 2020's bumpity- bumpity Balearic/ house/ disco Rheinzand album, this year's album celebrating a restaurant in Ghent with Charlotte Caluwaerts and now this eleven minute instrumental.
Cosmic Silence is out on Kenneth Bager's Music For Dreams label, a digital compilation called Copenhagen 21. Starting out slow and ambient and bringing a gently rippling synth sound in before a violin drifts in, long keening sweeps of the bow against the strings- I have to be say that the violin is not my favourite instrument usually but here it is very special indeed, all the pieces in place building gradually and filling the room. Quite the trip.
Copenhagen 21 is at Bandcamp and Cosmic Silence, one of nineteen tracks on the album, is here. In 2019 Rheinzand remixed fellow Belgian Mugwump's No Trepidation, a very swish piece of electronic music with a couple of unexpected turns.
I found this track at the weekend (while looking for the Intastella one) and it's struck a deep chord with me over the last few days. In 2017 Geoffroy Mugwump released a compilation album called Moving House with tracks from himself and like minded friends including Roman FlΓΌgel who contributed this one- some chilly and emotive electronics, pulsing bass, a rattling snare and sweeping synthesised strings. Plenty of Kraftwerkian vibes going on. Moving house indeed.
This track is from an ep that came out last month, is really good but is also likely to freak you out if played through headphones late at night. Eyes Of Others is an Edinburgh based musician/producer and remixed here by Sordid Sound System, dubbed out post-club music with backwards, slurred, reverb drenched vocals and a ton of bass.
The Geoffroy Mugwump version is worth a look too, a bit more direct and aimed at the floor of a Belgian indie-disco. The beat and looped vocals work really well alongside the Vangelis Bladerunner style synths.
Let's not do that old chestnut about famous Belgians. This (above) is Eddy Merckx. And this (below) is Geoffroy Mugwump. The song is off an e.p. Belgian producer Mugwump put out last September and is a total joy- squelchy bass, piano house.
About two years ago I posted a snippet of an Andrew Weatherall remix of a Mugwump track called Until You're Worth It. The remix was a deep, bubbling, bass-led affair with the man himself adding a vocal line, intoning 'under the water, under the water'. It sounded like it could have been remixed in an undersea kingdom.
The original is a much lighter affair, funky but understated, with a falsetto vocal reminiscent of Prince. Both have finally been released this week and after forty eight hours of being unable to log in to Beatport due to password issues I now have it. I can't find an embeddable version of the Weatherall remix currently (I think it's a Beatport exclusive) and can't really give it away as a download so soon after release, so you've just got the original to listen to here.
Today, April the 6th, is Lord Sabre Day, Andrew Weatherall's birthday- and today he turns 50. The top picture shows him djing in the early 90s. I'm fairly certain it was taken at Cream during the Sabres Of Paradise tour (note gear borrowed off Sandals).
Two decades later...
Having followed him since his earliest vinyl adventures, I've spent a fair amount of time over the last twenty odd years tracking down, buying, listening to, and more recently surfing for, his music. I think he's one of British music's genuine mavericks, always interesting, always on the move and always worth listening to- on wax and in print. Always looking forward but with the past in view. His remixes from the last few years are among the very best stuff he's done and The Asphodells album is a contender for album of the year so far. This is a bumper selection of fairly randomly chosen Weatherall tracks from my hard drive to celebrate his half century...
Any brief internet/magazine biography always links Weatherall and Screamadelica. When the Scream put their collective boot on the monitor and released Give Out But Don't Give Up many felt that it was a backwards step. It was. But proving you can make a dub purse out a sow's ear, Weatherall reworked their Stonesisms into a heady twelve minute dub excursion that goes a little Screamadelica-esque in the final few minutes of this Sabres remix of Jailbird.
Similarly you get all the references to the artists he remixed in the early 90s. This one took that main keyboard refrain from James' second best known song and sent a thousand indie kids sprawling across the dancefloor. Confusingly there are two different names for this remix but they are I think the same mix.
Lino Squares was one of many aliases and pseudonyms Weatherall used during the late 90s, outside Two Lone Swordsmen. As Lino Squares he put out a six track vinyl pack of minimal, electro-oriented music. These days it's more linocuts than Lino Squares.
The first piece of vinyl to bear the Weatherall name as a solo artist was an e.p. entitled The Bullet Catcher's Apprentice- the lead track Feathers was sold to sell cars, the Ford Tipp-Ex according to Weatherall. This song featured vocals from Weatherall and lists many things that are possible- but how one should never make disco without a Stratocaster.
And he followed it with a wonderful solo album- A Pox On the Pioneers- a couple of years ago, drawing on glam, rockabilly, and post-punk. This was a dub of Fail We May, Sail We Must (from the Japanese version of the lp).
Two years ago he remixed Clock Opera. I'm not sure I know much about Clock opera but remember reading a so-so review of their album. In fact I'm not even sure I've listened to the original track despite owning the 12". But the Weatherall remix is a gem, one of many remix gems from recent times. This is a superb piece of electronic music, crisp beats, lovely synths and a fantastic repeated bit where everything goes all wonky.
In the last few years there have been a shedful of podcasts and mixes on the internet. This one, for Fact Magazine, remains one of the best, joining the dots over the course of an hour between (amongst others) CircleSquare, Dum Dum Dum, Bert Weedon, Wayne Walker, The Monks, Stockholm Monsters, Mogwai, Durutti Column, Dennis Wilson and The Mighty Wah! Proper stuff this.
Weatherall and Fairplay's Asphodells lp, Ruled By Passion, Destroyed By Lust, has been sent out to the remixers. This one sees their cover version of AR Kane's A Love From Outer Space get remixed by Mugwump- spaced out.
That should be enough to keep you going. I could have doubled the size of this post and still only scratched the surface. I don't what a luxuriantly bearded, Edwardian clothes-wearing, heavily tattooed, dancefloor and leftfield legend does for his 50th birthday but I for one will be raising a glass in his honour tonight, somewhere in a caravan in north Yorkshire. Happy 50th birthday sir.
This is a picture of Andrew Weatherall (centre) with Luke (left. Or right) and Rusty (right. Or left). Luke and Rusty hold a radio show, Luke and Rusty's Rodeo, a beatnik, punk rock, rock 'n' roll, garage shindig with guests.
This is a two and a half minute excerpt from Andrew Weatherall's remix of Until You're Worth It by Mugwump. It looks like being another blinding Weatherall remix. I know I bang about him here a bit but he's in a very rich vein of form at the moment. This one has a dirty bassline, submerged vocals, that gas-powered drum machine and all kinds of bubbling noises. No idea on release dates or anything but I'm keeping my eyes peeled.
This is a Mugwump track, which I think I found at the excellent Just Press Play blog (link in the blogroll down to the right), a Manchester based blog with regular lashings of dirty, funky stuff.
