Following Directions

New from Reverb Delay, following directions, a three track EP drawn from the archives, with an aversion to capital letters. Lots to enjoy here- machine techno in the Basic Channel/ Berlin vein with the feel of a lo- fi 90s Underworld. The first track, closing the gap, is all hiss and echo, the hint of a kick drum thudding away and a synth topline that sounds like an FXed wah wah guitar. At six twenty one the hiss suddenly drops out and its like stepping outside- then it re- appears, along with the hiss, and a car horn honking/ single keyboard note stab. 

Track two is berlin underground (u-bahn mix), starting with sounds from that transport line and then several minutes of swirling ambient noise, drones and more trains coming and going, a two note sound, everything eventually disappearing into hiss. Noise and sound as music. 

Finally, the title track, a computer generated voice intoning directions to the nightclub Tresor- hence following directions- and more deep, ambient techno, shadows of pulsing drums, dark synth sounds, radio static, more swirling drones, the voice explaining how to get to Tresor, endlessly, ... nineteen minutes of it and even that doesn't seem enough.

Get it at Bandcamp, free/ name your price. 

Define, Take A Minute And The Ghosts Of Dawn

Friday this week is a bumper post, new music from three artists old and new- OBOST, James Hardway and Reverb Delay, between them all showing electronic music- techno, acid, dub, house, whatever- is in good health and flourishing. 

The very young and very talented Bobby Langfield, who records as OBOST, released an album and some singles/ EPs last year and played live at The Golden Lion in March. Today sees the release of a two track EP- Define/ Redefine. Define is led by a robotic stutter and squiggle, a voice, distorted toplines and piano kicking in and out. The vocal eventually reduces to the title, just the word 'define' repeated as keyboard notes rising and falling. 

Redefine is a tougher, muckier and heavier take on the original, some serious acid techno at play, the rhythm thundering away, the sequencer caught in an endlessly addictive groove and the vocal several octaves deeper. Define/ Redefine are both available at Bandcamp.  

Half the world away in Los Angeles David Harrow has resurrected his James Hardway persona for brand new tune and an eight track EP packed with versions and some remixes courtesy of the very much in  form Rude Audio. Take A Minute appears in DnB version, a TikTok Mix, a 3Step one, the Footwork Mix and here as the House Mix where it feels like a crossover, some long lost futuristic 90s house playing in the  third decade of the 21st century, the vocals by DangerRed beamed in from the aftermath of a party. 

Rude Audio's remix reworks the tempo and the rhythm, dropping the vocal down (as OBOST did too) and adding some typically South London dub to the LA dubstep. All eight versions/ mixes/ remixes are at Bandcamp. 

Reverb Delay is Marcus Farley whose EP Horizontal Rain came out on Mighty Force last month. A new thirteen track album, The Ghosts Of Dawn, is out today, an album that is in part a tribute to Berlin, its techno and dub sounds- for Marcus, the album is about the thrill of 'chasing the dawn', the ride on public transport to the centre of the city, entry to the clubs, immersion in the dancefloors, and then the journey home. 

The Ghosts Of Dawn starts as it intends to go on- with an eight track dub techno excursion, rattling drums and gliding synths called Into The Night. As well as the music of Berlin, Detroit is very much  present as is the Birmingham techno scene much loved by Marcus, Sandwell District and Surgeon, plus the mid 90s speaker shaking sounds of Bandulu. On One Four the kick drum hammers onward while synth stabs and arpeggios dance away at the top end. 

The title track comes into the second half, a sense of calm and space, a slight lessening of the tempos and tension. Underground Overground is a nine minute wait for the train home, the night's adventures still running the mind and then Train Three brings station announcements, train noise and ambient techno chill. It's very much an album to be listened to in full, a piece and not just a collection of tracks, a journey into and through the night- you can find it at Mighty Force. 

A Mighty Force Indeed

I don't know how Mighty Force manage to keep the quality of their output as high as the quantity of their release schedule but it's good for all for all lovers of electronic music that they do. Mighty Force was originally a label and record shop, based in Exeter from 1990 to 1995, then moving to London until 1999. In 2019, after a twenty year gap, label boss Mark Darby started up again and since then has put out umpteen digital and physical releases including albums by Long Range Desert Group, KAMS, Boxheater Jackson, Golden Donna, Fluffy Inside, David Harrow, Yorkshire Machines, M- Paths, SubDan and Myoptik to name but a few as well as a series of outstanding samplers and compilations. The entire post- 2019 back catalogue is at Bandcamp. Dive in and pick one- you really can't go wrong. 

This year Mark has seen the release of several albums already. In January D3's Acid Love came out, a nine track tribute to the life affirming and regenerative powers of acid techno, an album with huge bass, thumping machine rhythms, acidic toplines, a love letter to 303 and 808 madness. Follow Me opens the album, a  statement of intent. Acid Love is here. 

In March Virgo's Starta Waves saw the light of day. Virgo is Yakasuta Sato- the album is twelve tracks of superb electronic music, a heady combination of acid, techno, ambient and IDM, music created for home listening/ driving/ headphones, a journey into lush synth sounds, drum pads, throbbing bass and dancing acid melodies. Fictional History cuts the tempo and sets the controls for the heart of the somewhere far from here. Track titles Rift In Time, Days Of Exploration and Zoetrope all perfectly match the sounds they were named for. Strata Waves is here. 

The most recent release is brand new this week, an EP of three new tracks and three remixes of Horizontal Rain from Reverb Delay's album from last year, The Storm Has Passed. The trio of remixes all take the original into new dimensions, launched from the same starting point- Reverb Delay's Detroit and Birmingham inspired dub techno- and firing off into other areas. Paddy Thorne's remix raises the bpms and the intensity while colouring everything with beautifully rich synth washes and chords, atmospherics and rhythms together. 

Reverb Delay's Marcus Farley brings a pair of his own remixes, the Parallel Mix and the Ar Right Angles Mix, rapid fire drums and psyched out synths, the latter a ten minute version. The three new tracks are: Sisters & Brothers, Martin Luther King being deployed in a 2025 techno protest against the forces of Trumpism; Escape Pod which sets out tense and dramatic, then finds itself becoming more light and airy, all the while the drums rattling away; and Shadow Dance, a frantic dance into the dark. The Horizontal Rain EP is here. 

M- Paths By Name, Empaths By Nature

M- Paths released two albums on Exeter's Mighty Force, a label reborn after a post- 1999 hiatus. Label boss Mark Darby released the first Aphex Twin 12" and pulled together an array of talent for the second life of the label, including M- Paths and Reverb Delay. Those two outfits are two different sides of producer and DJ Marcus Farley, M- Paths an optimistic ambient/ techno, electronic side (M- Paths by name, empaths by nature is the tagline) and Reverb Delay a heavier dub techno affair, inspired by Basic Channel and the techno sounds of Detroit. Marcus has set up a Bandcamp page called M- Paths Recordings to release new tracks and experimental sounds throughout 2025, a calendar of releases.

I posted January's Shapes And Patterns at the end of last year here. February's release, Love Is On Your Side, came out yesterday, an off kilter track with a naggingly superb topline and the ghost of backing vocals drifting by. It breaks down and the female voice sings 'let your heart be your guide', before the rhythm kicks back in, synths and spring noises joined by strings. Reverb Delay's February release, Super Being is Reverb Delay in Dub, an excursion in echo and space that sounds like it comes from offworld. 

We started communicating via messenger and email, mainly musical tip offs and recommends and also our mutual despair at the current state of Manchester United Football Club, but also realised we'd both grown up in/ around Manchester, shopped in the same record shops and probably attended the same gigs and nights. Between us the idea for an interview came up and following a bit of back and forth and a lengthy email trail, this is the result...

Adam: What's your background?

Marcus: I really do believe that our environment moulds the music we like and the music we make.  I was born in Wandsworth in 1970.  As a baby my parents moved to the Peak District, near Macclesfield.  Our nearest city was Manchester and I spent my youth in Affleck’s Palace, Piccadilly Records and Eastern Bloc and was a regular at the indie nights at the Ritz and 42nd Street. 

There was something about the North, particularly Macclesfield, Manchester and Salford in the 1980s.  These were not the thriving towns and cities we see now, they were gloomy and gritty and had an edge. I agree with Tony Wilson when he famously said of my favourite band, that Joy Division is the sound of Manchester.  It is also the sound of Macclesfield, with Ian Curtis and Stephen Morris growing up there and attending King’s School like I did. 

Adam: What's your sound? Where does it come from?

Marcus: As Victor Hugo said, 'Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.' It sounds like a contradiction in terms, but I think it’s the sound of uplifting melancholia- music and lyrics that make you feel better, despite being about heartache or malaise. Love will Tear us Apart is a good example - heart wrenching lyrics, yet the music is uplifting, and no matter how bad things may have been, Ian was in a far more terrible place, and by default, that lifts you out of your own gloom. I took my daughter to see the mural of Ian on the main shopping street in Macclesfield recently. She's a fan, too. It was a really good experience, as I felt so proud of Ian, and the town I grew up in.  

Which is a long way of saying that I think you can hear Joy Division's influence in M-Paths. You can also hear 4AD bands like Dead Can Dance, Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, and two of my musical heroes, Talk Talk (particularly for the ambient parts of their last 3 studio Albums and Mark Hollis’ solo album), and Susumu Yokota (particularly his Sakura, Boy and Tree and Grinning Cat albums).  

Adam: I'd never heard any of Susuma's music before and can now thoroughly recommend Sakura, an ambient album released a quarter of a century ago and filled with a certain kind of timeless beauty. Listen to Sakura here. 

Adam: What came next? 

Marcus: I have a Philosophy Degree. In my early 20s I went to Birmingham to do social work training- and this is the essence of M-Paths by Name, Empaths by nature, as I have been a social worker for 26 years. 

Like a lot of people, it was The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays and Weatherall’s work on Screamadelica that got me interested in electronic dance music. Then the pastoral tones of Aphex Twin really drew me into that world.  But when I moved to Birmingham, I discovered the newly formed House Of God techno night. Birmingham is similar in a way to Detroit, a then dying and now dead car industry with large industrial wastelands. The DJ and producer Surgeon, and the producers Regis and Female developed what we now call Birmingham techno on the Downwards record label. Uncompromising, hard techno that has both a funky swing in a Chicago House way, and a locked groove influence from Jeff Mills and Robert Hood, with an added ingredient of industrial music. But I had a real epiphany moment sometime in 1993 at the House Of God when I  first heard Basic Channel’s Phylyps Trak and the Maurizio remix of Vainqueur’s Lyot. Everything came together for me. I had to make dub techno. Something that took almost 30 years, as Reverb Delay, for me to get round to doing. House of God still has the same core DJs over 30 years later - Surgeon, Sir Real, Terry Donovan and Paul Damage.  Each is superb in their own right with their own style and selections.

Adam: How did you start releasing your music?

Marcus: My friend Spotter suggested that I try signing for Mark Darby’s Mighty Force.  Mighty Force famously released the first Aphex Twin 12" and the first music by Tom Middleton (of Global Communication) and Matthew Herbert. Mark Darby has become a good friend.  He worked for Rough Trade also, working with labels such as 4AD, so we have a shared history musically of what we have liked.  

Adam: I'm always interested in how people actually go about creating music, how it happens. What's your creative process? What comes first, rhythm or melody?

Marcus: I  always start with kick drum and hi hats for the Reverb Delay stuff as they're the basis for dub techno that everything fits around so I like to get a groove going first. With M-Paths I always start with pure ambient pads and chords then add the rhythm in sections. 

Initially I set out to make really hard dancefloor techno, but it's really hard to get right - it’s like punk - seems simple enough, but that is often harder than something more grandiose to do as there are less elements and they all need to be absolutely on point. Without really thinking, it kind of happened by osmosis that I ended up making ambient and more home listening stuff as M-Paths, the pads and chords just became really ambient naturally and I love breakbeats so I do a lot with slow breakbeats. I loved dub and when I first heard Basic Channel I knew I wanted to make dub techno but didn't know how it was done.  As my skills developed I realised it was driven mostly by the effects, done very subtly. Atmosphere can happen not by adding stuff but by taking elements out, particularly drums, even just removing the hi hat in sections, or removing claps and rides. I like most electronic music from house to techno to jungle to ambient, and can listen to gabber at breakfast. I don’t think I create music due to my mood. I generally have a few songs on the go at once for different projects. But I definitely listen to music dependent on mood. Apart from Joy Division, Susumu Yokota and Talk Talk- I can listen to in any mood, any time. 

Adam: gabber?! Now there's a largely forgotten musical scene, Belgian and Dutch 90s hardcore techno. 

Marcus: I'm a big fan of Dutch techno, particularly the stuff from the Parkzicht club in Rotterdam where Speedy J was a DJ with DJ Rob and others. 

Adam: back in the early/ mid 90s I was a big fan of Speedy J. My then flatmate and I used to love Beam Me Up! and the album Ginger, proper space age ambient techno from The Netherlands. It seemed so futuristic. Speedy J was on Warp too and in 1994 everything Warp released was worth listening to. 

Beam Me Up!

Marcus: They play Speedy J at every Feyenoord home game! United have The Stone Roses, they have Speedy J!

Adam: a question for the kit and equipment nerds. What do you use in the studio?

Marcus: I have had some great synths and drum machines, but I would say that now my go to is Roland Cloud, where I can access all the Roland drum machines and synths that I need whilst taking up zero extra space. My studio is by default in the smallest room in the house and most of the space is already taken up with records, CDs and decks. Within Roland Cloud, my go to is the Space Echo effects unit, used a lot with my Reverb Delay stuff and also in M-Paths. I have always used echo units, as well as delay and reverb. The echo units in Ableton are decent, and so is Replika by Native Instruments. The Space Echo has been used by lots of bands over the years but I wanted it as that is what Basic Channel and Vainqueur use. 

Adam: what are you into at the moment? What's the last album you bought?

Marcus: The new Sandwell District album, their first music as Sandwell District in over 10 years and the first since Juan Mendez (Silent Servant) sadly died. They have put up one song for preview and it's absolutely immense.  It was started by Karl O’Connor (who records also as Regis also and runs Downwards), Peter Sutton (Female), Juan Mendez and Dave Sumner  (Function) and is named after Sandwell where Karl O’Connor grew up.  Brilliant name, brilliant label.  Other than that, I mainly buy old vinyl stuff I stupidly got rid of on vinyl years ago!  

Hidden by Sandwell District, eight minutes of squelchy and thumpy 2025 acid techno. 

The Storm Has Passed

There are all sorts of explanations going round for Trump's victory in the US presidential election last week, some that try to boil things down to very simple ones. As ever with history and current affairs, things are multi- causal; Trump offered something that Kamala couldn't- change. He strikes a chord with people who have been told that the economy has been doing better but whose grocery bills have risen by 20%. His swaggering, macho bluster finds favour with American men who could not bring themselves to vote for a woman (and a Black woman at that). There are many Americans who see Trump as an outsider, someone who tells it 'as it is' and they see him as giving the elite a kicking. Some Americans have not forgiven the half of the nation who elected a Black president, Barrack Obama, twice. The assassination attempt that brushed Trump's ear gave him the single most important image of the campaign. The weaponising of 'the war on woke' and identity politics seems to have been a factor, the anti- immigrant narrative too.  Kamala's warnings of impending fascism were dismissed. There are studies that suggest that in any democratic society there are approximately 30% of the adult population who are happy with authoritarianism, who want strong leaders who get things done and are content with limits and curbs on democracy. All these things and more may help explain last week. For many Americans a binary choice led them to Trump. One thing is sure- in 2016 people might not have known what they were getting. They cannot say that this time around. It's completely clear what Trump is- and people voted for it. He will have few brakes on him this time around. It will be fascinating and terrifying seeing what happens over the next four years, potentially watching a democracy unravel in real time.

One of my most played albums recently has been on Mighty Force, a label which has had a resurgence in recent years, and 2024 especially. I've written before about M- Paths, an ambient/ techno outfit on Mighty Force. M- Paths Submerge came out earlier this year. Now, Marcus from M- Paths has released an album as Reverb Delay. It's not a side project or an offshoot, M- Paths and Reverb Delay are different parts of Marcus' music. M- Paths are calming and chilled. Reverb Delay are less so. Reverb Delay are dub techno in the 90s tradition- thumping drums, faster bpms, less friendly maybe but totally  absorbing, an intense and metronomic ride, reminiscent of Basic Channel and the sound of Detroit techno artists like Carl Craig and Juan Atkins.

The album, The Storm Has Passed, is fourteen tracks long, and is in part about Trump and MAGA. Unfortunately the storm is not passed, it's in some ways not even begun, but Reverb Delay are here to soundtrack the end of 2024. It's sequenced as a proper album, a short intro with the sampled voice of Mario Silvio in 1964 speaking at a sit- in in Berkeley. Third track Eating Echo Chambers uses the voices of ground control and the Apollo mission as they approached the moon, rattling snares and a thumping kick, ominous synths and acres of dub space. 

It's followed by Embrace which is long, dark and hissy, Berlin basement techno. Horizontal Rain has rapid fire beats and salvos of synth noise. On Maldek a crazed voice bursts in, railing against Jimmy Carter and a one world government. Track 11, Weaponizing, is grimly prophetic, sampling a Trump supporter talking about Biden weaponizing the FBI and how Trump will win again before the thud of the kick drum and juddering synths take over. 

The final pair of tracks, She and Verb, keep the tension high, train- like drum tracks pounding ever onwards, synth chords, a disembodied voice bringing the human element to this machine music. The Storm Has Passed ends in spooky style with Verb, dub space, the crackle of radio static, underwater bleeps and bubbles, and just audible the recently declassified sound files of US navy pilots describing their efforts to keep up with UFOs they've spotted. It's highly recommended and you can listen and buy it at Bandcamp.