Sandwell District – Feed-Forward
SANDWELL DISTRICT
Electronic / House / TechnoVintage Vinyl 12" Clear + 7" / 240 EUR
Media NM / Sleeve NM
Karl O’Connor (Regis), David Sumner (Function), Juan Mendez (Silent Servant), and Peter Sutton (Female) will need little introduction, but if you’re not au fait, they’re basically the vanguard of contemporary, dark and electronic dance music. ‘Feed-Forward’ was originally conceived by Juan Mendez as a fanzine showcasing his artwork found on the SD tumblr site, but the idea expanded into a full length LP featuring contributions from each of the label’s core members, whose collective work has formed one of the most important, principled, and disciplined bodies of techno music in the last decade.
The scope of their mission is divulged in the three opening movements of ‘Immolare’, gliding in from blank-eyed coldwave ambience to a passage of body-throbbing bunker techno and fading out to glacial strings. Those strings are a prominent feature for much of the set, adding an elegant balance to the robust, ERP-on-2CI sweep of ‘Grey Cut Out’ and imbuing the album’s emotive peak ‘Falling The Same Way’ with an utterly sublime sense of dancefloor suspension. We’ll leave the rest for you to discover but we’ve gotta be a little bit sly and say that two of the best tracks appear on the limited edition 7″ included. The two sides of ‘Readymade’ drop the beats to leave awe-inspiring feats of resonant kosmic 2010 ambience, the likes of which you’re never going to hear anywhere else. Sorry! In all, this is a milestone for pure and uncompromised electronic music and comes strongly recommended – blink and you’ll miss out.