Sandwell District – Where Next ? 12-track compilation of singles from the collective’s history
SANDWELL DISTRICT – WHERE NEXT ?
12-TRACK COMPILATION OF SINGLES FROM THE COLLECTIVE’S HISTORY – FEATURING TRACKS BY FUNCTION, SILENT SERVANT, REGIS & MORE
OUT 23 FEB – VIA THE POINT OF DEPARTURE RECORDING COMPANY
LISTEN TO ‘SILENT SERVANT – SAMPLER 1 B1 (REGIS EDIT)’
PRIMAVERA SOUND PERFORMANCE IN JUNE
“… the music they released has cast a long shadow… Look to the shadows” – The Wire
“…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 triumph of vivid moods, this really is essential listening” – Electronic Sound
SANDWELL DISTRICT will release a new 12-track compilation on 23 February 2024, featuring tracks by Function, Silent Servant, Regis and more. WHERE NEXT ? is out on double vinyl and digitally via The Point Of Departure Recording Company: https://ffm.to/sandwelldistrict-wherenext
The compilation, explains Regis, “is the purest hit of the SD sound”. He goes on to explain, “Sandwell at that time was all about work, work. It was at such a rate that we often we had music available that didn’t fit the moment or release schedule, but was none the less important and found its home on limited releases. We now have had the time to fully realize and compile what we consider the essence of the Sandwell District.”
Listen to Sandwell District & Silent Servant & Regis – Sampler 1 B1 (Regis Edit): https://youtu.be/iWDGtCj9A1M
WHERE NEXT ? follow’s the reissue of 2010’s album Feed-Forward in 2023. The 3-disc box set, described by Electronic Sound as an “essential release”, was one of The Quietus and Juno’s Reissues of the Year, and sold out almost immediately.
Sandwell District – Peter Sutton (Female), David Sumner (Function), Juan Mendez (Silent Servant) and Karl O’Connor (Regis) – was 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, 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, throughout the 2000s the collective had a powerful mystique. Its records sell and its reputation swells by word of mouth alone – and for a long time it revels in being faceless, opaque, impenetrable. After a move to Berlin, Sutton and O’Connor intensify their time in the studio, while Function is a resident and Regis and Silent Servant become regular guests at Berghain, giving the collective a key test-laboratory. Mendez meanwhile overhauls the visual identity of the label, giving Sandwell an outlaw style all its own – techno has never seen anything quite like it – and the music itself deepens and darkens 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 with Feed-Forward, which sold out immediately after its release, 3 days before Christmas in 2010.
Sandwell District continued for another year after the release, before disbanding. 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.
2023 saw Sandwell District come back together 2024 for several festival appearances that included Berlin’s Atonal, and Japan’s Rural festival, and they are set to play Barcelona’s Primavera Festival on 1 June this year.
SANDWELL DISTRICT – WHERE NEXT ? (PODR011LP)
Sandwell District & Function – Reykjavik
Sandwell District & CH-Signal Laboratories (8003 Lucerne) – Hypnotica Scale (Original Mix)
Sandwell District & Kalon & Regis – Haiku (Regis Edit)
Sandwell District & Function – Disaffected
Sandwell District & Silent Servant & Kalon – Violencia (Kalon Mix)
Sandwell District & Regis – Man Is The Superior Animal (Regis Original 12” mMx)
Sandwell District & Silent Servant & Regis – Sampler 1 B1 (Regis Edit)
Sandwell District & Silent Servant – Mad Youth (OD Edit)
Sandwell District & Silent Servant – Discipline (OD Edit)
Sandwell District & Function & CH-Signal Laboratories (8003 Lucerne) – Variance Variance (CH-Signal Laboratories Edit)
Sandwell District & Function – Ember (New Mix)
Sandwell District & Function – Inter
Pre-order: https://ffm.to/sandwelldistrict-wherenext
High res artwork & press photograph: https://we.tl/t-vG9AVLXNuR
PRAISE FOR FEED-FORWARD
“It is, unquestionably, one of the great Berlin Albums…” – The Quietus Reissue of the Week
“Dark, paranoid and seductive, this new three-LP box set proves that its heft hasn’t diminished by a single ounce” – 4/5* MOJO
“…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
“…a defiant techno statement that feels as utterly singular and unconcerned with trends as it is undeniably contemporary and relevant.” – FACT