From Slough To San Francisco

Out today, remixes of five tracks from Duncan Gray's Five Fathoms Full album which came out last year, a chuggy cosmic disco delight from the heart of Slough. Five Fathoms Further is the hundredth release on Tici Taci which is an achievement in itself. The remixes take Duncan's sound and colour palette as the starting point and head outwards. Meat Katie remix the title track, adding a vicious kick drum, a throbbing bassline and some haste to proceedings. 

Bagging Area favourites Number (an extra- curricular outfit for Red Snapper's Ali Friend and Rich Thair where they get to explore punk- funk/ dark disco) take on Hot Jupe and send it to early 80s New York, the rubber band bassline sounding like it's been listening to ESG and ACR and the sampled voice could straight from an NYC radio station. Lovely post- punk bump and grind.

Jack Butters remixes In The Attic, high calibre machine funk bringing distorto guitar, tabla and fuzz synth bass. Mr BC's version of Greenville heads for the cosmic- disco after party, widescreen, robotic synth action. Finally Justin Drake takes on Shark Bumps, thudding kick drum and rumbling bass suddenly lit up by synths and sparkles. There are excerpts at Soundcloud and the full Five Fathoms Further can be found at Tici Taci. 

Over in San Francisco DJ, musician and producer Cole Odin has launched a new project called Joy Theatre, a label and a production house for the Bay Area. The six track album opens up with an already released piece of music, the seven minute majesty that is Psychemagik's remix of Cole's Dawn's Approaching- blissed out SF cosmische that never stops giving with chuggy drums, angelic vocals, big piano chords. Cole wrote Dawn's Approaching as a tribute to Underworld's Rez and when the synth squiggle appears in the third minute you'll hear why. A welcome re- release. 

There are five further tracks on Joy Theatre. Babylon Black is a dark disco delight from two Bay Area producers, Buna Babillions and Corey Black. Evil Eyes is bass led party music. Jesse Fahnestock is well known round these parts as one half of Jezebell and all of 10:40. In the 90s Jesse lived in San Francisco and DJed at Bulletproof, an influence on Cole. Jesse appears on Joy Theatre under his own name, Jesse Black Fahnestock, with a track called Quienes Son, eight minutes of dub- disco with snakey horns working their way in and some of Jesse' signature production sounds. 

Over on side two there are more Bay Area tracks and artists- D- Freq by Sweetdique starts out like the theme from an 80s teen movie but when things have gone very dark indeed and then turns into a deep, slo mo joyride. The Arturian gives up Break Free, shimmering cosmic sounds with thudding drums and bass, flashes of synth blazing across the skies. Finally Jamel Lee closes the album with I Remember The Sun- the sound of children playing, deep house drums, synth chords always looking upwards and a spoken word vocal about the sunlight. 

Vinyl available here. 

Some Things'll Never Change

Two weeks ago reader and internet friend Spencer sent me a message abut a track with some enthusiastic words. In the past Spencer has been the starting point of several posts and for a while as eries of songs/ tracks he sent me became a series. The one he sent two weeks ago was more than enough to prompt a guest post. Here it is...

One of the 'Old School Balearic Classics': Originally released in 1986, it became a regular final tune of the night on the White Isle...

The Way It Is

In 1990, the piano instrumental part of the song used to run on a loop while Bob Wilson reflected on how the scores of the day had impacted the League Tables towards the end of the Grandstand Saturday afternoon programme. Men and boys hung around electrical shop windows while their wives/mothers wondered where they'd got to...

More recently - in July 2024, in fact - it got a Balearic update courtesy of those cheeky Psychemagik chaps, who produced a dubbed out calypso instrumental version... https://psychemagik.bandcamp.com/track/the-way-it-is For me, there's no topping the original extended mix. The tune itself manages to combine melancholy, joy and nostalgia in a gloriously simple roller of a tune that just keeps going and you never want to end!

Psychemagik's edit was new to me and I love it too- a gloriously chilled end of night version with steel can drums carrying the melody. Maybe there will be more from Spencer on an ad hoc basis.

The Way It Is is as ever lyrically topical, Bruce Hornsby's song about the civil rights struggle by African Americans in the 1960s. The third verse goes like this...

'Well, they passed a law in '64
To give those who ain't got a little more
But it only goes so far
'Cause the law don't change another's mind
When all it sees at the hiring time
Is the line on the color bar, no, no'

The USA and the UK are both facing a massive right wing backlash at the moment with racial issues front and centre. No matter what the so- called 'patriots' say about the reasons for hanging flags and painting roundabouts it seems pretty clear to me that it's actually about defining Englishness and Britishness as white and that it's also designed to intimidate those people who aren't white, to make them question whether they belong. The march in London on Saturday was the 2020s successor to those by the National Front and BNP in the 70s and 80s, racism dressed up as patriotism. Patriotism is always a dangerous game to play, flags are always a dangerous piece of cloth to hide behind. They almost always lead to nationalism- and English nationalism is always racist. These things have ebbed  and flowed over the last half century and previously. Bruce Hornsby's line, 'That's just the way it is/ Some things'll never change', is maybe not enough right now. 

An Hour For Tak Tent Radio

Last Sunday Tak Tent Radio hosted an hour long mix of mine, my tenth for the radio station. You can listen to it at Mixcloud and or at Tak Tent. It's mainly made up of music from 2023 with a couple of older (but still fairly recent) ones, almost all having featured at this blog at some point in the past. The Jezebell track is unavailable elsewhere and was sent out to people who pre- ordered the double vinyl edition of Jezebellearic Beats Vol 1(and although Jesse and Darren said the track would never be made available from them they were happy for other people to share it- I thought this mix was a good place for it and luckily Jesse and Darren agree). The Khidja track has become a minor Bagging Area obsession- this is the third mix its appeared on, previously making it onto my end of 2023 mix and the David Holmes at The Golden Lion one a few weeks ago.  

• CLAIR: Body Blossom (Extended Mix)
• Psychederek: Test Card Girl
• Andy Bell and Masal: Tidal Love Conversation In That Familiar Golden Orchard (Edit)
• Coyote: We Got Lost
• Justin Robertson’s Deadstock 33s: Golden Twilight 23
• Cole Odin: Dawn’s Approaching (Psychemagik Remix)
• Jezebell: A Dangerous Side
• C.A.R.: Anzu
• Khidja: Do You Know This Record Marius?
• Bedford Falls Players: Marmite Marimba
• Four Tet: Bubbles At Overlook 25th March 2019

 

Monday's Long Songs

Earlier this year Marshall Watson released an EP called Foothills. Marshall is nineteen years into a career as an ambient/ Balearic writer and composer and the five tracks on Foothills (four new ones plus a Seahawks remix) are just the ticket- long instrumentals, long synth chords that allow the listener to have that sense of drift, with textures added by pianos and guitars, everything covered in a warm glow. It's music that seems to be the very opposite of a grim Monday morning in November in North West England but maybe that's exactly why it strikes such a chord for me. The EP can be bought here. 

High Desert

Also this year Marshall recorded a track with San Francisco's Cole Odin, a DJ and producer equally fired up by dance music and life affirming rock 'n' roll. The song Just A Daydream Away was a perfect slice of sunshine indie dance,  the sound of summer 1989 wrapped up for 2023. The Just A Daydream Away EP came with two versions of the song and three remixes, two from Sean Johnston's Hardway Bros and one from Joe Morris. Chuggy rhythms, chunky bass, glistening psyche- folk guitars and whispered vocals. This is the Space Flight version, seven minutes of blissed out magic. Buy the whole package here. 

Last week's Psychemagik post prompted me to dig back through my folders and nudged slightly by Jesse I went back to this, a 2019 Psychemagik remix of Cole Odin's Dawn's Approaching. Almost eight minutes long and not a second wasted Psychemagik bring everything in their bag to this, gentle building, expansive, vocals drizzled in warm waves, a beautiful flow of synths and drums and then just when you think it not going to change Psychemagik press the button marked Rez and it all goes off in fine style. Buy it here.  

Psyched

I've posted a few odds and ends by Psychemagik previously though nothing since 2017. Back then I posted this track, Triumph Of The Gods, a piece of music first released in 2017, that is epic in scale, starting with piano, then drums and sweeping strings, and which has the feel of a major 1960s film soundtrack with undertones of  David Axelrod. 

Triumph Of The Gods

In late 2021 there was a 12" release with two remixes of Triumph Of The Gods, one by Richard Norris and one by Prins Thomas- a 12" I found recently while going through my records and had forgotten I owned. Given everything that was going on then, there are probably quite a few things from late 2021 that I missed. Both remixes are very good and neither seem to be on the internet so you'll have to take my word for it for the time being. 

A year ago Heavenly released volumes 5 and 6 of their remixes compilation series. On Volume 5 was the Psychemagik dub remix of Mildlife's Automatic, another huge sounding piece of music that is cinematic in scope and full of spine tingling and hair raising moments. 

Magik

There is an absurd amount of music to explore at Psychemagik's Soundcloud page and their Bandcamp page (where they've just archived eight years of tracks for a fiver).  Like Steve Cobby's recent six disc re-issue of How About Some More Ether? it's a question of getting stuck in and seeing which ones make the ears prick up the most and then getting to know the rest better over time. This song, Chimera, is very good, a laid back blend of drums and strings...



And I'm also quite taken with this remix the duo did for Roisin Murphy two years ago, a throbbing synth led dancefloor thing...

Triumph Of The Gods

This should have been posted this morning but it didn't happen. My fault.

Here is something epic and funky to welcome Tuesday. Epic and funky are two very overused words but in this song's case both are accurate. Psychemagik came up with this spirit raising, smile inducing instrumental for a Phonica sampler back in 2014. Two internet friends put me onto it last week for which I am very grateful.

Triumph Of The Gods

Creation Magik

Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve are shaping up for what is promising to be one of the summer's best releases (album The Soft Bounce due soon). I've already posted the beauteous single and remix of Diagram Girl. The follow up, Creation, has vocals from Jane Weaver and Hannah Peel and has been remixed and stretched out here by Psychemagik in a lovely, percussive and spaced out manner.