Needle Time

  Ultramarine - Folk [FOAW 001 UK 2020 24-Bit FLAC] Hopefully most will recall A Primary Industry and their sterling work on Sweatbox Records, including their album Ultramarine . At the end of the eighties, they upped from their Essex roots, changed their name to Ultramarine and recorded an album & single for Les Disques Du Crépuscule in Brussels with the same line-up.  Original copies of Folk in excellent condition are tricky to track down (I only bought the CD at the time), so I was pleased to encounter this 2020 re-pressing which sounds pretty damn good. Ultramarine intuitively mix hard-edged indie-funk with samples, clarinets and an accordian with great results. The band splintered shortly afterwards before returning as duo releasing a number of excellent albums on Rough Trade and eventually Blanco Y Negro, where they became electronic pioneers, but still kept their folk interests alive when working with Robert Wyatt. The band remain relevant to this day an...

A Primary Industry - Ultramarine [SAX 015 UK 1986 24-Bit FLAC] When I was working with the files which became my recent Dif Juz post, the similarities between that album and Ultramarine by A Primary Industry became highly evident. Again a mostly instrumental record, it is the arrangements and drum patterns which stick out. I decided that new improved rip for the end of 2019 was needed, so please consider this as a major upgrade to my ESWA blog post from March 2015. There is a tiny foreign object embedded in the vinyl grooves of Body Blow which should only now be noticeable to those using headphones as I was able to work on the resultant pops in detail with Audition. A Primary Industry left us with a sweetly crafted mix of bass heavy indie-funk, noisy feedback guitars, an ethereal female voice and a distant sax before their final release, a cover of Blondie's Heart Of Glass ...they were eventually to metamorphosize into electro-knob-twiddling pioneers Ultramarine. Th...