Forty Five Minutes Of Sunday Songs

It seemed too obvious for a while but then a few things came together and a Sunday mix of Sunday songs was staring me in the face. I managed to give it a kind of narrative too with a beginning and an end. Not to mention plenty of good music in the middle- Sunday likes its ambient and its electronics. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Sunday Songs

• Kris Kristofferson: Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down
• Kevin McCormick: Sunday Farmway
• Sabres Of Paradise: Blackfriars Sunday (Peel Session)
• 10:40: Sunday's Cool
• Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve: Sunday Morning Sun- g
• Sonic Youth: Sunday
• Perry Granville: Cleveland Sunday
• Justin Cudmore: Sunday Lemonade
• Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds: Frogs

Kris Kristofferson is the starting point for this mix. He died in September at the age of 88. Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down was written in 1969 and was been recorded and released by Johnny Cash and Ray Stevens. Kris' version is the best though. He wrote it and he lived it and felt it. 'Well I woke up Sunday mornin' with no way to hold my head that didn't hurt/ And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad, so I had one more for dessert'. Then he finds his cleanest dirty shirt and heads out. There are cigarettes, cans being kicked, frying chicken and 'the disappearing dreams of yesterday'. 

Kevin McCormick is from Manchester and in the early 80s made some wonderful but very lost and overlooked ambient guitar music. Thankfully, Kevin's albums have been rediscovered, dusted down and re- released recently and they are very much worth diving into. Sunday Farmway it from Sticklebacks and you can get it here. I reviewed the latest one, Passing Clouds, at Ban Ban Ton Ton last month- you can read that here. 

In March 1995 Sabres Of Paradise recorded a Peel Session that has never been officially released, three tracks also never appearing anywhere else- Duke On Berwick, Stanshall's Lament and the one here, Blackfriars Sunday, the sound of the Sabres Sunday service. Next year the reformed Sabres Of Paradise live band will perform at Primavera and then hopefully in the UK and elsewhere. 

Sunday's Cool was on of the tracks on 10:40's Transition Theory, one of my favourite albums of 2023. The album was intended as a whole piece, each track segueing into the next and containing the seeds of the next one. Removing Sunday's Cool from its moorings didn't feel completely right but it fits nicely into its new surroundings here too. 

Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve marry 60s psychedelia with acid house, Richard Norris and Erol Alkan experts at both. Sunday Morning Sun- g is from a fairly rare 12" from 2007.

'Sunday comes alone again/ A perfect day for a quiet friend', sang Thurston Moore and Sonic Youth in 1998. Sunday was the only single from A Thousand Leaves. Full on Sunday guitar vibes.

Perry Granville's Cleveland Sunday is from a 2022 EP, a take- no- prisoners acid thumper. Get it and a pair of remixes here. Sundays spent dancing and warding off the horrors of Monday morning. 

Justin Cudmore's Sunday Lemonade came out on New York label Throne Of Blood, as part of a series of releases in 2022 to celebrate their sixteenth birthday. Sunday Lemonade is all bleeps, filters and FX with a kick drum thundering away underneath. Messy Sunday mornings. 

Frogs came out this year, the second song ahead of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds' Wild God album. It has followed me round all year, soundtracking my daily life, one of this year's best songs and one of Nick's best too. In Frogs a couple (him and Susie I assume) are walking home in the Sunday rain, having heard the story of Cain and Abel. Nick becomes aware of the Sunday rain and the natural world around him, the sheer aliveness of everything, frogs in the gutter and Nick 'amazed of love and amazed of pain/ Amazed to be back in the water again'. Kris Kristofferson walks by kicking a can, in a shirt he hasn't washed for years, and there we are, back at the beginning. Happy Sunday. 

An Hour Of Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown And Downtown

Hardway Bros (Sean Johnston) and Monkton (Duncan Gray) DJ and remix together. In both cases there's something about the partnership that pushes both to do something that's different from what each does on their own. Their remixes as Hardway Bros Meets Monkton reference the seminal Augustus Pablo album King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown and as a result you'd be right to expect lots of dub percolating through the sounds cooked up in the remix studio. Dub, bass, echo, melodica- all are present. So is plenty of glorious chug and the wide spaces of cosmic disco. Cosmic, psychedelic, dub disco. The remixes also tend to be long, usually going up towards ten minutes, so this mix was always going to be a long one. 

An Hour of Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown And Downtown

• Jack Butters: Shake It Off (Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown Version)
• Electric Blue Vision: Other Skies (Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown Version)
• Perry Granville: Sailing Ships (Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown Version)
• Fjordfunk: It's All Black (Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown)
• GLOK: That Time Of Night (Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown Dub)
• Psychederek: Screamadereka (Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown Downtown Remix)
• Phil Kieran and Green Velvet: Enjoy The Day (Hardway Meets Monkton Downtown Remix)

Jack Butters is from Stoke- on- Trent, a city fmaous for consisting of five towns, its historic past as the centre of pottery and ceramics, and for it's football team Stoke City (the old ground, the Victoria Ground, was a fairly fearsome awayday in the past). What Stoke should be famous for now is Jack's music, not least this dubbed out Hardway and Monkton remix. I heard this played by Sean at ALFOS at The Golden Lion last summer and it sounded immense.

Electric Blue Vision is Jesse Fahnestock of 10:40 and Jezebell with singer Emilia Harmony. Other Skies came out last November, a 2023 highlight with three great remixes- this one plus remixes by Tambores En Benirras and Balearic Ultras. Sean and Duncan's remix is more majestic melodica led dub, a complete reconstruction of Jesse and Emilia's song.

Perry Granville's Sailing Ships becomes a metallic- dub- by- way- of- post punk- and- acid house trip in the Hardway Bros and Monkton hands, noises rattling round and ricocheting as the bass pushes on and thunder rumbles. There are stuttering vocal sample and pulverising synths, drop outs and re- entries and always underpinning everything, huge, live sounding bass. 

Fjordfunk released It's All Back in 2020 on the Tici Taci label, an eleven minute cosmic disco tune remixed into an eleven minute cosmische dub disco tune by Hardway and Monkton with a squealing guitar line dropping in and out and an ultra- distorted voice saying things that are impossible to make out. 

GLOK is Ride's Andy Bell. Since 2019 Andy's released several albums and singles as GLOK, experimental cosmische/ synth songs and tracks. That Time Of Night was on 2021's Pattern Recognition and features the voice of Shiarra Bell, Andy's wife, talking about the pleasures of being lost on a dancefloor, 'just one person, one part of the whole mass of people.. the heat and the light and the flashing...'. Hardway and Monkton take the track and turn it into a sleek, propulsive, krauty trip, a keening guitar line running through it with a booming, metronomic kick drum.

Psychederek is from Stretford, just up the road from me, and has recently released one of this year's best EPs, Alt!. In August 2021 he released the Space Arcade 12" on Chris Massey's Sprechen label, with the very ace Screamadereka coming in double Hardway Monkton remix form- the Downtown remix and Disco Dub version. The Downtown Remix is a glorious sunlit thing in two halves, the first half dubby psyche and the second a chuggy, pacier, cosmische glide. 

Phil Kieran and Green Velvet's Enjoy The Day came out in late 2022. Phil is a Belfast based DJ and producer. Green Velvet is from Chicago. Enjoy The Day is full on, four four drums and techno bass, chopped up and FXed vocals, 'you got it', and a piano line that is the definition of happy/ sad. 

How Rude

A pair of remixes from Rude Audio to bring some deep dubby/ disco to Tuesday. The first is a remix of Sweet Spot by Perry Granville (previously available in unremixed form on the Higher Love Vol. 2 compilation from Brighton's Higher Love label). The Rude Audio remix (buy/ listen at Bandcamp) is ten minutes of low slung dub- chug, the railway- like rhythm thudding away slowly at goods train speed with all manner of dub FX. A fragment of wordless vocal floats in and out. Laid back, hypnotic and meditative, and very good indeed. 

The original, from last autumn, is three minutes shorter, an ambient/ Balearic excursion (probably by boat across a deep blue sea to an island somewhere hot). It's a very persuasive and evocative six minutes forty seconds of music.  

Meanwhile over at Leeds' Paisley Dark label Rude Audio have remixed James Rod as part of a seven track EP release titled Synthetic Glory, out at the end of last week. The Rude Audio remix of Arabiklan is a more dancey affair, starting out with bleeps and space. A drum machine kicks in followed by Arabic strings and some of those tumbling timbales- six minutes of dark Middle Eastern acid disco business. James Rod's original tracks, Arabiklan and the title track, are joined by remixes courtesy of Man Power, Mindbender, Hogt I Tak and Hunterbrau. The whole package is available at Bandcamp. 

Perry, Dexter, Lumux, Cleveland, Grain And Ships

Perry Granville continues to roll through 2022 at a rate of knots. Back in July he released Lumux and before that the still heavily played round here splendour of Dexter In Dub (and the joyous Bedford Falls Players remix). I've posted Dexter In Dub before and make no apology for putting it here again, six minutes of sunset seeking Balearica.

At the end of August Perry let Cleveland Sunday loose, a juddering acid house/ techno bleepfest complete with a supercharged Pete Bones mix that sets out for the outer limits. You can listen and buy at Bandcamp. Perry followed this with an end of September release called Grain Underground that wears Perry's formative influence of hip hop on its tracksuit top sleeve, a breakbeat led track with squiggly acid lines and cymbal splashes and melange of voices. Richard Sen provides a rib rattling remix, bassline and rimshots, and then after several minutes some gorgeous rippling synth lines while keeping the funk flowing. 

Back in 2020 Perry released Sailing Ships, a long, transportative, dancefloor oriented track with samples from U.S. TV news about the origins of house music, a screwed acidic bassline, some massive synth riffs, chopped up stuttering backing vocals and a thumping big drum track. 

The remix EP is about to make its appearance on vinyl, with some heavyweight names on remix duties- Hardway Bros meets Monkton Uptown (Sean Johnston and Duncan Gray) and Justin Robertson's Deadstock 33s. You can order it here if the sound of that floats your boat/ sails your ship. 

Tak Tent Six

Tak Tent is an internet radio station broadcasting out of Scotland. Last year The Wire magazine included them in a round up of radio stations worth listening to. A couple of years ago I was asked if I'd like to submit an hours' worth of songs for transmission and since then have been back several times. Last week Tak Tent put out my sixth Bagging Area mix, one that is made up almost exclusively of songs from this year and all from artists that are very familiar to this blog. You can listen to it here. 

Tracklist

• Pye Corner Audio: Let’s Emerge Pt. 1
• Reinhard Vanbergen and Charlotte Caluwaerts: They Do Not Care
• Sheer Taft: Requiem For Pablo
• Mark Peters and Dot Allison: Switched On
• 10:40: Coat Check
• A Mountain of One: Star (Glok Starlight Dub)
• Perry Granville: Dexter In Dub (Bedford Falls Players Remix)
• Unknown Genre: Elevator Ride (The Orielles Ambient Remix)
• Coyote: Home Grown
• The Summerisle Six: This Is Something (Rico Conning Mix)

Dexter And Lumux

Last November I posted a track from a Higher Love compilation, a record label based in Brighton, a five minute slice of dubby euphoric house called Dexter In Dub by Perry Granville. 

In May this year Dexter was remixed by Bedford Falls Players, a seven minute reworking that takes Dexter into entirely new places, starting out blissed out and then getting chuggy, long synth chords and rattling drums and an echo- laden voice, building intently. At three minutes thirty six it explodes into controlled chaos, beats and chopped up vocal before a piano returns to take us down again. Things go back and forth over the next few minutes as BFP pull out all the stops, twisting Perry's melon all over the place. Dexter In Dub (Bedford Falls Players Remix) is available at Bandcamp, name your own price.

Perry has a new track about to press all your acid house buttons, an intense and pumped up piece of hypnotic Friday night, dancefloor mayhem called Lumux. Echoes ricocheting around, acidic squiggles, 303 bassline, voices muttering in the flashing of the strobe, drums clattering about. It's heady stuff. Lumux is also at Bandcamp and at the end of the month the full release comes with remixes from Peza and Exildiscount, neither slowing down or taking it easy.  

Dexter In Dub

The summer compilation from Brighton's Higher Love Recordings, the musical outlet for the Balearic Ultras, a twelve track sampler called Higher Love Vol.1 continues to reveal magic and treasures well into the autumn. This week's drive to work has been enriched by Higher Love Vol 1 and the standout (other than Jesse Fahnestock's 10:40 end of night tearjerker Kissed Again) has been this slice of euphoric, dubby acid house called Dexter In Dub by Perry Granville (a pseudonym for Brighton resident Dave Sibley). Dexter rides in on an undulating synthline and some whooshes. Rimshots rattle around and a distant voice whispers about dreams, just within earshot. Melodies that echo The Grid or Love Corporation in the early 90s are beamed in and an  organ takes up reins. Six minutes of bliss.