Saturday Shows

A pair of long form mixes for Saturday, one very recent and one slightly older. First up is David Holmes back at NTS for his monthly two hour residency, God's Waiting Room. The most recent edition went out last week and is available to listen to at Mixcloud. David's shows have been required listening for some time and this one is right up there with his best, a perfectly selected and sequenced two hours with music crossing genres and boundaries, an ambient, jazzy, blurry haze in the opening section that gradually takes focus in some fine electronic sounds, heads into dubbier areas and finishes with Imelda May's You Don't Get To Be Racist And Irish, a point being made to some people in Dublin. Along the way he weaves in music from Cosmic Neighbourhood, Dean Hurley, Laurel Halo, Wailing Souls, The Circling Sun and Khidja. 

David recently named Laurel Halo's album Atlas as one of his albums of the year and it's easy to see why- the track he plays on God's Waiting Room, also Atlas, is beautiful, drifting, weightless cosmic ambience from Los Angeles.

The second mix, once you've digested all of that, is from Coldcut and Mixmaster Morris, released in November 2021, a twenty nine track depth study of ambient and neo- classical recordings with artists including A Winged Victory For The Sullen, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Skee Mask, Sigur Ros, Steve Roach, Laraaji, Yak Herder and as a finale a new version of Coldcut's Autumn Leaves, retitled as Autumn Leaves Return by Irrisitible Force x Coldcut. The album, @0, is available as a compilation of single tracks and as an hour and sixteen minute long mix here. @0 is a weighty and contemplative way to spend eighty minutes but ultimately cathartic and optimistic. 

Twenty Five

Today, 23rd November, is Isaac's birthday. He would have been twenty five today had he lived. His birthday last year, the first since his death, was very difficult. I'm not sure if we thought it would get easier with time but maybe we hoped the second would be less rough than the first. First anniversaries are terrible, the loss hitting in new ways each time a date is reached. This second birthday since he died doesn't really feel any better, it hurts just as much, and the build up to it since November began three weeks ago and especially over the last week, have been just as hard. I broke a filling last week, caused by me clenching my teeth and jaw in my sleep. I wake up knowing I've been doing it. I've found myself doing it while driving and while typing. His birthday is massively overshadowed by his death, exactly a week later. They are tied together- and then it's straight into December, the anniversary of his funeral and Christmas. 

People who have gone leave themselves in those left behind in all sorts of ways. On Tuesday night I popped to the supermarket for some bread. I wandered down the crisps aisle and as I passed the tubes of Pringles could almost hear him next to me asking me to buy some for him. I picked up a tube of Sour Cream and Chives and headed to the drinks section and to get a blackcurrant Fruit Shoot for him too. For a moment it felt very futile, buying snacks and a birthday card for someone who has died, and I paused to wonder if I was being a bit stupid or sentimental, but I put them through the scanner and paid for them anyway. Walking round Sainsburys while fighting back tears isn't a great place to be either. 

Today we'll go to the cemetery to see him, wish him a happy birthday, and leave some offerings for him. I'm not sure what else we can do. Some day in the future his birthday may feel like a celebration for us I hope but two years on from the last one we celebrated with him, it still feels like a loss. 

This track by Laraaji is track number 25 on an ambient compilation put together by Coldcut and Mixmaster Morris called @0, released in November 2021 (the month of Isaac's 23rd birthday and the month he died- which I hadn't realised until I looked up the album's release date for this post so there's something providential or just coincidental about that). Illusion Of Time is a lovely, calming six minutes of ambient music courtesy of Laraaji, with piano and zither and probably other stringed instruments as well. Happy birthday Isaac. x

Illusion Of Time

Extra Bank Holiday Monday's Long Song

A very long song, or rather a mix of eight different songs, seamlessly joined together (including one, Massif, clocking in at seven minutes and another Medley #2 reaching nearly twelve), from a live DJ performance at The Brain in 1990. Live At The Brain 1990 was recently unearthed and pressed up on vinyl, the forty five minute long track is from The Irresistible Force aka Mixmaster Morris and Ramjac Corporation aka Paul Chivers. The pair present an ambient/ acid house masterclass, with drum machines, synths, programmed sounds, samples, keys and sequencers employed to create non- stop, semi- improvised, acid house/ rave/ psychedelia. IT pulses and flows, melodies and rhythms rolling on top of each other, sampled voices dropped in and out- 'This is joy that I'm feeling'. Live At The Brain 1990 is a time capsule, a life affirming slice at a point when the future was real and being made in front of your eyes. 

The Brain was a pioneering acid house night promoted by Sean McClusky (ex- Jo Boxers and IF?) and artist Mark Wigan, on Wardour Street in Soho, running between 1989 and 1992. The list of people who played there is a who's who of British club culture at the turn of the 90s- Weatherall, Orbital, Leftfield, The Shamen, Graeme Park, Norman Cook, A Guy Called Gerald among them- and the roll call of people who frequented it as customers equally impressive- Boy George, Gilles Peterson, Neneh Cherry, Paul Oakenfold, Mark Moore, Tim Simenon, The pre- Chemical Chemical Brothers, various members of Primal Scream, Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses, Rankin, John Galliano, Sheryl Garrett, George Michael, Christy Turlington, Matt Dillon and so on.... 

Autumn Leaves

While digging around the hard drive looking for yesterday's Coldcut meets The Orb collaboration I found this.

Autumn Leaves (Irresistible Force Mix)

Coldcut released Autumn Leaves in 1993. Mixmaster Morris remixed it into Balearic ambient bliss- waves lapping on the beach, strings and slow motion bleeps and then a vocal floating in on the breeze, 'but I miss you most of all my darling/when autumn leaves start to fall'. Autumn Leaves was written in 1945 by Yves Montand and Irene Joachim, a jazz and pop standard recorded by a host of artists from Nat King Cole to The Everley Brothers, Doris Day to Bing Crosby.

Then I remembered the photo I took and used for a blogpost last year and thought it would be perfect for this song. Round here the leaves have started to fall this last week, covering the pavement with faded greens and browns, rusty yellows and golds before the rain and feet turn them all to mush.

Autumn Leaves

My diary tells me it is now officially autumn. This Coldcut track remixed by the Irresistible Force and produced by Mixmaster Morris is a wonderful sprawling piece of ambient house (some use the phrase chill out but I can't bring myself to do it). At first it doesn't sound that autumnal but as it unwinds and the vocal comes in, the sense of seasons changing and the sun diminishing becomes overpowering.

Autumn Leaves (Irresistible Force Full Length Mix)