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. 

Monday's Long Song

Arthur Russell's In The Light Of A Miracle is exactly what I need to start an August bank holiday, thirteen minutes of giddy, expansive, New York avant- disco/ proto- house, a song unreleased in Arthur's lifetime but first seeing the light of day via Phillip Glass in 1993. Dream music. 

In The Light Of A Miracle

Back in May JD Twitch of Optimo was invited to play at The Barbican at an event celebrating the life of Arthur Russell and launching a book, Travels Over Feeling by Richard King. Appropriately enough, JD opted to play a set consisting of nothing but Arthur Russell records. That set, an hour and thirteen minutes long, went up on Soundcloud a week ago and it's a thing of beauty and wonder- Arthur's space age, New York cosmic disco music, those spectral melodies and his floaty voice over crisp drums, percussion and all that s-p-a-c-e that Arthur built into the production of his songs. You can listen here. 

This, as a bonus, is Instrumentals Volume 1 (Part 1) from 1975, five minutes of cellos and sax, percussion and drums.

Instrumentals Volume 1 (Part 1)

Saturday Live

If we're accepting that a DJ playing records in a club- selecting a set that builds, mixing and cutting between decks, adding FX and making something new out of existing older music- is a live performance as much as a band playing a gig with instruments (and I am) then DJ sets qualify for this series as much as any other kind of live show. The only cheat with this post is that the set was not played live in front of an audience but is a recreation of those live club sets. In this case, this is an attempt to recreate the DJ sets by JD Twitch from Pure in Edinburgh back in the early 90s. This was originally released on cassette in 2021 and has just recently come out digitally as two downloads, forty five minutes each, and titled Raise Your Hands If You Understand. 

Twitch's set here is ninety minutes of sublime ambient house/ ecstatic electronic music, a counterpoint to the faster, more hardcore sounds played elsewhere at the time. Twitch sees this as E- Musik, a spacey blend of ambient, house, new age, utopian, tripped out, edge of trance, turning tribal music. The first half opens with a long ten minute wash of warm synths, joined after a while by a voice and then a eventually a heartbeat tempo drum kicks in. 'Come together in peace and harmony', the voice says as the rhythms pick up a little, the bass throbs and piano runs tinkle in. It's wonderfully evocative and progressive stuff. The two halves of the tape are available at a Free/ Pay What You Like deal but any money raised is going to the Glasgow food bank so every little helps. The cassette version from two years ago currently change hands for somewhere in the region of £30. You can get them here. 

Ten years ago JD Twitch turned up at the Parisienne website I'm A Cliche, a music label that gave away free edits. Twitch's gnarly, stompy, acidic version of Bill Callaghan's America was a highlight, the gritty guitar line running through it like an oil spill in a river.

Edit Service 22 (JD Twitch)

As half of Optimo Twitch remixed Jeremy Deller's version of Voodoo Ray. In 2013 Deller exhibited at the Venice Biennale, part of his ongoing exploration of rave culture. Twitch's remix of Voodoo Ray is a joy filled, hands- in- the- air version, the sleeve emblazoned with the hook from the vocal sample, 'Ooh- oo- hoo- ah ha ha yeah'.

Voodoo Ray (Optimo Remix)

Not Sleeping

The Twilight Sad's No One Can Ever Know came out in 2012 and is about to be re- issued. It came with the line that it had been 'anti- produced' by Andrew Weatherall. I was never absolutely sure what this meant but according to the internet he gave the group some advice about analogue synths and some words of wisdom. He had apparently been lined up to produce the album but for whatever reason this didn't happen. Several years later, in 2018, a remix by Andrew of their song Videograms appeared, a seven minute piston- powered drum machine excursion with a huge synth riff and early 980s New Order/ Depeche Mode vibe. Lovely stuff.



Back to 2012. No One Can Ever Know was paired with a vinyl only remix album release, nine reworkings of the songs from the album by sympathetic remixers such as Liars, Com Truise, The Horrors and Optimo. The remixes are club based, pushing the darker, more industrial sound the band were experimenting with further. Tom Furse of The Horrors took them to a sleek, cosmische place, somewhere in the spiritual vicinity of West Germany in the 1970s.

Not Sleeping (The Horrors Dub Mix)

JD Twitch fired up the kick drum and sent them out onto the floor in the early hours.

Alphabet (JD Twitch/Optimo Remix)

Wahre Liebe

Factory Floor's live soundtrack to Fritz Lang's 1929 Weimar sci-fi masterpeice Metropolis comes out today. I've been looking forward to this since the Heart Of Data/Babel 12" came out back in February. Their score is film length, an hour and fifty minutes long, and is out on double cd or quadruple vinyl (and you can imagine how much that costs).



In 2011 Factory Floor's Real Love single was remixed by Glasgow clubbing veteran JD Twitch, a controlled collision of analogue synths and digital drum machines.

Real Love (An Optimo Espacio Mix)

I was showing some young people (16-17 year olds) some clips from Metropolis earlier this week as part of their studies of Weimar Germany and its culture. I don't think the jawdropping special effects or the look of the film or its technical genius of the film was lost on them although some of the acting is very hammy 90 years later. They were equally if not more impressed with Nosferatu which they found genuinely freaky. And then one of them mentioned they already knew Nosferatu from this...

Brass Shaker

Some sort of unholy trinity of artists going on here mixing up a classic house-acid brass delight. To clarify- Jeremy Deller's acid brass cover version of Voodoo Ray remixed by Optimo's JD Twitch, out on vinyl on Monday. And worth every penny I'd say.

Beachcomber

I found this recently at Just Press Play blog, an always reliable source of good leftfield electronic stuff, and it is a cosmic belter- Beachcomber is fourteen minutes of New York veteran Peter Gordon and Factory Floor making some beautiful links between stellar bass, wonky synths and post-punk sax. Out soon on Optimo.

Nosferatu

More Weatherall- yawn. Wait though, there's other stuff here too.



In November 1998 I went to Manchester's Cornerhouse Cinema and Arts Space to see Andrew Weatherall play records as a soundtrack to FW Murnau's 1929 silent film Nosferatu. It was very, very good and very, very spooky. Mrs Swiss was heavily pregnant with our unborn firstborn and the scary soundtrack obviously affected pre-natal I.T. At one point he moved, a limb causing a shark's fin to arc visibly over Mrs Swiss's belly. Bizarre.


The Youtube poster of the entire film says this of Nosferatu-

1929 silent film by F.W. Murnau tells the story of a young man who leaves his bride and travels to see a mysterious count in order to sell a house. He finds that the creature he encounters is not of this world. This version of the"Dracula" tale remains one of the best and rightfully claims it place in cinematic history.



This Weatherall- Dracula event was pre-internet, pre-mobile phone recording. Neither Andrew Weatherall nor the Cornerhouse recorded it (unless they did and it's never been released). I think it was a one-off and there is almost nothing on the internet about it. A Weatherall event with no internet record- double bizarre. 

The song here, vampire link ahoy, is Destroy Yourself by Michael Dracula, remixed by JD Twitch from 2009. Michael Dracula are or were, I think, a band from Glasgow. Ms Dracula (above) sings

'Wake up 
Be happy 
Stay in
Save your money 
You'll be dead a long time honey'


 After that things go a bit mental in Optimo style.


Destroy Yourself (Twitch's Optimo Mix)