There was by no means meant to be a Sandwell District album. Actually the thought had by no means crossed Karl O’Connor’s thoughts – and wasn’t he in cost, sort of? He had impulsively minted Sandwell in 2002 as a German-distributed offshoot of his Downwards label, however he had no grand plans by way of what to do with it. Over the course of that decade he guided its metamorphosis into one thing else totally: not only a label correct, however an artists’ collective, a laboratory for the post-minimal techno experiments of 4 battle-hardened producer allies: David Sumner (Perform), Juan Mendez (Silent Servant) and Feminine (Peter Sutton) and Regis (O’Connor himself). By 2009, and by phrase of mouth alone, Sandwell District had come to be revered by the worldwide techno underground; every of its sporadic, imperious 12″ releases feverishly anticipated and slavered over. Why would they wish to do one thing as old style as make an album?
However then, in 2009, individuals began telling O’Connor how excited they have been in regards to the LP. Sorry, what? He was directed to {a magazine} interview with David Sumner through which he alluded, unambiguously, to a forthcoming “Sandwell District album”. He referred to as Sumner, extra perplexed than pissed-off. “What are you speaking about, Dave? There isn’t a album.” “Properly, man,” Sumner replied. “Now now we have to make it.”
A 12 months later, I used to be in David Sumner’s residence in Prenzlauer Berg throughout a go to to Berlin. I ended up being the primary individual exterior of Sandwell personnel to listen to that album – entitled Feed Ahead, it was launched in December 2010, in an obnoxiously restricted version of 500, vinyl-only copies. Addled and antsy, I wasn’t actually within the temper for a severe listening session, however I did my greatest to focus. The second I heard the mournful air-raid-siren and staccato phaser-stun of ‘Immolare’, it was apparent that this album wasn’t going for the jugular. It felt psychological, inward-looking, wilfully isolationist. However because the booming kickdrum made clear, it was additionally very a lot techno. Feed Ahead’s mechanism is one in all gnawing nervousness meets pure propulsion.
Within the nook of the room was Sumner’s modest studio set-up, scene of a lot toil within the previous 12 months or so. Feed Ahead was a gaggle effort, with Mendez and Sutton contributing remotely from their respective bases in LA and Birmingham; but it surely was steered by O’Connor and Sumner, who each lived in Berlin and will work obsessively collectively on tracks over dissolving days and nights. “We misplaced the plot,” O’Connor instructed me that evening in 2010, but to return down from the expertise. “Dave would make me drive throughout city simply so he may play me a tone he’d give you on the synth. A fucking tone!”
The three-part ‘Immolare’ reaches its conclusion: a wrecked Mercedes, gleaming and groaning, spitting blood and glass. ‘Gray Lower Out’ rides the sort of coiled, concussive breakbeat sample that Regis and Feminine pioneered with their Downwards co-conspirator Surgeon within the early 2000s, however we’re a world away from British Homicide Boys: the swooning strings draped throughout ‘Gray Lower Out’ are nearer in spirit to Detroit techno at its most weak (“O’Connor: “Dave wished all the pieces to sound like Carl Craig”).
“What do you assume?” Sumner requested me, point-blank, as solely a local New Yorker may. O’Connor was pacing the room, joking, dissembling, however nonetheless curious. On the desk was an empty bottle of prescription Adderall, the gas that drove Feed Ahead to its completion. What did he need, a overview? He’ll have to attend 13 years for that. I attempted to lighten the temper: “Yeah, I prefer it. It is good… for techno.”
We listened to the tip of the album and so they ejected the CDR, invited me to carry onto it. I by some means mislaid it earlier than I would even bought again to London. Per week later they bought in contact to inform me that they’d misplaced the recordsdata, and the one copy of the album-as-intended is that CDR. So what was finally launched as Feed Ahead is considerably completely different, but it surely would not matter: the temper is constant, and anyway, no Sandwell observe was each really completed. They have been topic to limitless reshaping, within the studio and on the highway, looking for a perfection by its nature at all times simply past attain. The Feed Ahead 2LP was adopted by a CD version with a considerably completely different tracklist; then got here an additional digital launch of alternate variations, formally titled Sandwell District; numerous ‘Take a look at Session’ 12″s provided additional remixes and edits of album tracks. This was a mission extra about course of than product.
Skip ahead just a few years to 2013. Sandwell District have been about as huge as an underground techno act might be: approaching after Bryan Ferry to shut out the principle stage at Barcelona’s Sonar competition, contributing the sixty-ninth instalment of Material’s banner combine CD collection, commanding eye-watering DJ charges, usually basking in glory. Feed Ahead was hailed by many as an instantaneous traditional, its hallowed standing not precisely hindered by its shortage. However at that time, the perma-touring Sumner and O’Connorresembled nothing a lot as a jaded rock & roll band: all black sun shades, black leather-based, black denim, black moods. On-stage, they delivered the products; back-stage it was drink, medicine, clashing egos, mood tantrums, burn-out. There have been fistfights in enterprise lounges. An arrest by the Dutch navy after they invited your entire membership again to their resort room for an afterparty. A lifetime ban from Air Berlin for smoking on-board. All through all this they remained professionally succesful. However like several operation propped up by tablets and powder, it was solely a matter of time earlier than the entire thing crashed to the bottom.
For Sumner the start of the tip got here when O’Connor agreed to a Sandwell cowl shoot for Groove journal, then determined to not present up, simply to make some extent. For O’Connor, the final straw was when Sumner determined to not present up for a gig at Material in 2013, probably additionally simply to make some extent. By this time O’Connor had grown bored with Berlin, and was within the strategy of relocating to New York (level definitively made). They would not see one another once more for ten years.
Feed Ahead was the making of Sandwell District, then, but additionally the catalyst of its undoing. Now, in 2023, UK label Level Of Departure, apparently inspired by a lower than apparent superfan, the late Mark Lanegan, has reissued the unique album as a 3LP vinyl boxset, together with a beforehand unreleased observe and a 16-page booklet of Juan Mendez’s iconic paintings. It is not fairly the Sandwell District field set I would hoped for – this would come with the very best of the Sandwell label’s essential pre-Feed Ahead 12″ releases, a run which started with Feminine’s mighty ‘Serverlan’ (SD3, 2005), and actually hit its stride with Silent Servant’s ‘The Silent Morning’ (SD05, 2006) and Perform’s ‘Anticipation’ (SD10, 2008): skulking and street-tough, austere and suspenseful, drawing deep on the Chain Response dub-techno sound, Jeff Mills at his sparsest and bleepiest, and the monkish, monotone chilly cuts of Sleeparchive and Mika Vainio.
By 2009 the Sandwell sound had turn into more durable, sooner and extra expansive: extra huge room. It is a shift attributable partly to Berghain, which within the late 2000s grew to become the worldwide focus of techno – and a daily gig for Silent Servant, Regis and Perform. Its hulking structure and the cardio endurance check of its Saturday-into-Monday Klubnacht referred to as for a mode of techno each monstrous and delicate, and Sandwell District’s productions naturally mutated to suit the invoice – see Feed Ahead’s brutally locomotive, concrete-pulverising ‘Looking Lodge’. Together with the early Ostgut choices of Dettmann & Klock (in 2009 Dettmann seems on SD13, whereas Perform and Regis remix Klock’s ‘Subzero’ to thrilling, scudding impact) Sandwell’s music presently offers a barely flattering thought of the Berghain sound, one it is tough to keep up as soon as you have entered the constructing and heard Len Faki mainly play the identical tune for eight hours.
There was no concern, although, of Sandwell District’s music turning into generic warehouse fodder. Its near-gothic focus of environment made positive of that. Juan Mendez’s darkish, heady, however at all times playful cut-and-paste paintings performed a large function in how the music was perceived: deftly collaging countercultural influences from Course of Church, Psychic TV, Kenneth Anger, rockabilly, bikesploitation motion pictures, Cabaret Voltaire… This has been maybe probably the most enduring, and least credited, legacy of Sandwell District. In 2010, the wedding of cutting-edge techno to this sort of psych-o-delic imagery was out on a limb, nearly scandalous. Mendez’s kinetic collages primarily reclaimed for dance music an aesthetic of rebel that had fallen away; all these exploding heads and shark-headed greasers and death-race chevrons repositioning techno as a music of alienation, disaffection, dissent.
Karl O’Connor moved to Berlin in 1999 to consummate a teenage fantasy of creative exile in Charlottenburg. Professionally, the lure was techno; spiritually it was Isherwood, Bowie, Neubauten and the remainder. Sumner adopted just a few years later, craving (and discovering) the bodily and psychological area to dedicate himself to music – an area now not current in Manhattan. Feed Ahead is an express celebration of Berlin’s waking dreamlife, and for O’Connor, a farewell to the identical. It’s, unquestionably, one of many nice Berlin Albums. The touchstone, after all, is Bowie’s Low, with its temper of existential enquiry and stopped time, its sonic language blurring modernity and a sort of vintage modernism. A stroll among the many ruins of the self.
I am not suggesting they’re equals, after all, however they’re intimately associated: each are merchandise of, and tributes to, Berlin’s potential for rebirth: a metropolis of disappearances whose empty, reverberant streets not solely allow however encourage you to remake, reset, or restore your identification – maybe by letting go of it altogether. And so probably the most astonishing music on Feed Ahead are the 2 coda-like items that have been annexed to a bonus 7″ accompanying the unique 2LP, however are reinstated as a part of the album correct within the 2023 boxset: haunted, beatless, crackle-wreathed summary items, bridging dewy ambient techno and suppurating industrial music. They rise, they fall, and finally eat themselves – burning up in a hearth of their very own making. They’re Feed Ahead’s equal of Low’s second aspect, dazed and elegiac, nostalgic for one thing which departed lengthy earlier than they – by no means thoughts we – arrived.
