Sandwell District: Listen to a previously unreleased track – Feed-Forward, reworked with unreleased material
SANDWELL DISTRICT
LISTEN TO A PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED TRACK ‘GREY CUT OUT (EXTENDED VERSION)’
FEED-FORWARD, THE COLLECTIVE’S ELUSIVE 2010 ALBUM – REWORKED WITH UNRELEASED MATERIAL – OUT 28 JULY 2023
RELEASED AS A VINYL BOX AND – FOR THE FIRST TIME – DIGITALLY
VIA THE POINT OF DEPARTURE RECORDING COMPANY
NEW DATES ANNOUNCED – INCLUDING BERLIN ATONAL
“…techno at its most stunning, a glistening, artful collection of tracks with an appeal that went far beyond the dance floors it soundtracked.” – Resident Advisor, one of their albums of the decade
“…few have melded the textures of the past with the mood of now with such brutal, immersive efficiency”
– The Quietus, one of their albums of the year
“…a defiant techno statement that feels as utterly singular and unconcerned with trends
as it is undeniably contemporary and relevant.” – FACT
“… solidifies a Sandwell aesthetic that synthesises and subverts a number of fashions in Techno.” – The Wire
SANDWELL DISTRICT have shared an unreleased extended version of ‘Grey Cut Out’, one of the stand out tracks from their era-defining 2010 album Feed-Forward – out on 28 July 2023 via The Point Of Departure Recording Company. The sold out 3-disc box set (limited to 1,000 copies) will see the vinyl available for first time since its original pressing, alongside the album’s first digital release.
Sandwell District – Regis, Function & Silent Servant – have a series of dates confirmed for 2023 including Berlin’s Atonal in September. Full dates below, with more to be added.
The original print of Feed-Forward, described by RA a decade later as “the final transmission from a collective whose influence still colours music today”, was effectively a private press that sold out on impact – three days before Christmas, with no accompanying promotion – and, despite it changing hands for up to four figure sums, it has never been repressed until now.
Listen to ‘Grey Cut Out (Extended Version): https://youtu.be/tERFQwC5oBU
Sandwell District were originally Peter Sutton (Female), David Sumner (Function), Juan Mendez (Silent Servant) and Karl O’Connor (Regis) – a label, a collective, an impulse, an in-joke, a suicide mission, a gang, a point of view. An amphetamine-fuelled fever dream, a group psychosis, and an out-of-hand piss-take which happened to reinvent techno in its own bleakly modernist image.
Growing out of the Downwards label that Sutton and O’Connor established in 1993 – celebrating its 30th Anniversary this year – throughout the 2000s the collective had a powerful mystique. Its records sold and its reputation grew by word of mouth alone and for a long time it revelled in being faceless, opaque, impenetrable. After a move to Berlin, Sutton and O’Connor intensified their time in the studio. Function was a resident and Regis and Silent Servant become regular guests at Berghain, giving the collective a key test-laboratory. Mendez meanwhile overhauled the visual identity of the label, giving Sandwell an outlaw style all its own – techno had never seen anything quite like it – and the music itself deepened and darkened, as if to meet the challenge.
The first O’Connor hears about a Sandwell District album is when Sumner refers to it in an interview. He calls him up. “Dave, what are you talking about!? There is no album!”
“Now we have to make it, man.”
It was a huge task: to distil the essence of this sprawling project but also take it somewhere new. To seamlessly interweave the contributions of its four members, creating something which does justice to their ferocious club incarnation but which can also be listened to from start to finish: at home, in the car, under the covers with your eyes closed. They manage all this and more.
No previous Sandwell release can prepare you for Feed-Forward’s technical and emotional achievement. It is supple, sensuous and utterly widescreen. Driving, infinite-horizon techno – vectors of pure energy – slashed with concussive polyrhythms and draped in swooping strings and a haunted, melancholic musicality only glimpsed on the preceding 12”s, if it was there at all. Above all it is a powerful concentration of atmosphere, its morbid romanticism drawing subtly on influences from post-punk, industrial and the early ‘80s avant-garde and culminating in a breathtaking final third of eerie concrète and beatific synth sequences. Feed-Forward is one of the great, elegiac evocations of Berlin, minting the future but grieving and ghost-filled; the offspring of Bowie’s Low and Basic Channel.
Sandwell District continued for another year after the album’s release, before disbanding. Today that world, that vertiginous sense of emptiness and possibility, feels entirely vanished, irretrievable. An imaginary world that only Feed-Forward can give us access to. Its influence in the 2010s and beyond has been colossal, if not always duly credited; those reverberations are still being felt. And this timely reissue gives us occasion not only to celebrate Sandwell District as it was, but to ask what it might still be, what it might yet become.
SANDWELL DISTRICT – LIVE
16 July – Rural Festival, Niigata (JP)
8 Sep – Atonal Festival, Berlin (DE) – live A/V
9 Sep – Draaimolen Festival, Tilburg (NL) – live A/V
10 Nov – TBA Barcelona (SP) – live A/V
Sandwell District – Feed-Forward
1. Immolare (First – Main – Final)
2. Grey Cut Out
3. Hunting Lodge
4. Falling The Same Way
5. Svar
6. Double Day
7. Speed + Sound (Endless)
8. 7” Untitled (1)
9. 7” Untitled (2)
Feed-Forward is out on 28 July as a limited edition 3LP box set and digitally: https://ffm.to/feedforward
Listen to Grey Cut Out (Extended Version): https://youtu.be/tERFQwC5oBU
Listen to previously unreleased track, ‘Surrender to the Unknown’: https://ffm.to/surrendertotheunknown