An overflowing Clyde that's dragging up all manor of the treasures of incredible 12"s that are submerged in the shelves of the Rubadub warehouse...
Friday 23/04/2024 8.18am on the train on route to work //
Mother - Live '23 [FELT]
There are some tunes that in my mind just absolutely perfectly capture a time and place like no other, tunes that could almost be scraped out of the air of a time and of a place as much as they could be scraped out of my memories fading backwards. When Lee Gamble's Girl Drop came out on PAN it was an instantly perfect and forever constant soundtrack to the environment where I was living, a cheap room in a flat share right on Dalston Junction. It’s swirling foggy ambient drift with the sudden left and sharp right turns in my mind just fitted the endless spring (in my memories this 5 or so years it seemed to always be spring, a time of sudden adventure just around the corner) perfectly, more than any other records I played in my bedroom in that flat it seemed to like no other capture the drifting sounds floating up from the street outside constantly day and night, an ambient haze of traffic, random shouts snatched from people charging about outside on the street, fridges being dumped outside my building and other equally falling apart and cheap to rent blocks of flat shares, the endless police siren call (it was always referenced by whoever was on the line that it soundtracked every phone call I made from Dalston in that era) to the endless buffet of jam sandwiches sprinting between Hackney Central and Highbury Corner. Whenever I play that tune no matter where I am, its instant transportation and in so many ways even photos can't even refresh the memory and the atmosphere in my loaf of that time/flat/era like that recording. Rewind back a bit to Round Five & Tikiman Na Fe Throw It, an equally perfect place capturing sound of our post teenage years on cheap as chips summertime jollies exploring Berlin and endlessly searching for life changing white label techno records (WAX, EQD, Sound Stream, MDR, Klockworks, Do Not Resist The Beat!, Sleeparchive, Traversable Wormhole etc) no 12” single in or tune can transport me back to those hazy daydreaming drifts through a city where our minds were lost in a maze of Hard Wax techno, Low drone & the endless yet ending excitement of Feed Forward while thinking that everyone we walked past in every district must be buzzin' they are in the city that gave us Basic Channel. Fast FWD a good few years and we are living in a tiny flat in Highbury, a few steps down the road to the bottom of the hill where the studio space where Talk Talk recorded in complete pitch black Laughing Stock, an album that's front cover had a tree on that’s roots grew up the street into and all around our autumnal tiny 1 bed flat After The Flood, the record spinning would often cause the leaves to fall from the trees outside the flat windows while the feeling of a future change in the air drifted through the cracks with all the possibility and weight of late October rain. Ending with the winter and entering the sounds that are deeper than the London underground that I've been spinning through (due to train detours etc) this week is the next level soundtrack Live '23 by Mother. This recording completes my personal season cycle of time and place capturing music/energy that shall stay locked in place forever. These infinitely combined dub, techno, drone, ambient grime sounds sound so good it feels like listening to Live '23 now on the train to work for the uncountable time as if it's set to hotwire my brain for the very first time each time every time the static sparks alight in the opening moments. What has really struck me about Live '23 is having recently spent a few disparate weekends charging about in Glasgow up to all sorts of exploring and seeing and meeting top pals, is the depth and vastness of these recordings, much like the city where they were recorded, these two singular yet instantly familiar landscapes are a near perfect translation of the vast, crumbling megaliths of my minds winter soaked view of Glasgow, a city like no other and a true limitless land of excitement, mystery and opportunity because/as it is so far away from the endless looping dull age chaos of London and forever cloaked in (I dream/imagine) a winter chill that you can only get the further north you travel (growing up in Manchester in the 90s/00s it was forever downpour rain, but Glasgow is always for me cloaked in a sparkling frost, Ryan Ehlke my partner in GRIME [Iceman Junglist Kru etc] recently moved up the road and often texts snaps of the city in the mist of cold rain, my dream of endless bliss!). Live '23 is the sound of this rain on the pavements turning to ice, of empty drifts around the warehouse district, under crumbling railway arches and that vast expanse of green open space along the Clyde as you head West from the Central Station bridge towards The Peoples Museum (well worth a visit if you are ever to pass up that way, sort of like a museum version of No Mean City, an endless referencing point for me for the Glasgow of my mind) and through the architectural gothic grip of the central station bridge over the main road running through the city centre and the enclaves below it, or really every corner of every street which for me offers adventure and an exciting unease as the best city's always do, Mother's two live recordings offer a similar not sure what's coming next but I know it's going to be good searching feeling while the electronics uncoil and the sounds grow. The synapse snapping pulse of the static and deepest dub Deepchords wired across each piece are almost like a hauntological field recording of the always circling city subway late at night, time travelling through the underbelly of the city where elements of all the great electronic records from Glasgow are given the space to snap, crackle, evolve and reflect on the underground sound and sound of the city from which they were created and will somewhere forever soundtrack. Glasgow has always mirrored to me the vast expanses of Berlin, the expensive streets offering the wonderer a space to think and listen to tunes, street sounds or your own hallucinations of future-shock techno and dub (most ideally Mother's Live '23 though) that is not clouded by ques at train station stairwells and the low quality headphone leaking of foil cloaked pop or replay Netflix phone streams and unadventurous audiobooks people in LDN often seem to charge about to (3 sat around me right now as I type). Live '23 is for a train ride to work (side A perfectly clocks my time to get from the manor to my office, a sedating soundtrack to chase away the anxious unease of pre-work hours email checking, while side B is the post work drift home, eyes closed, listening deep and absorbing all while hoping to not drift to far and miss my stop) a perfect length. As we all should I listen to a lot of music from Detroit and Live '23 really more than most captures the very best elements of the star gazing sci-fi of the very best motor city artists, this like that is music always made by an absolute pro with knowledge far deeper than most, yet here instead of motor city techno its a Friday night out in Glasgow drifting through the forever in my listening and mind wintery streets for a proper next level night out of proper tunes played by proper pros, proper! Released on the brilliant Glasgow label FELT, distributed by the best distributor in the game and all round Glasgow institution Rubadub and recorded in two Glasgow venues (had a proper great night out in one, the other is on the list to check next time I can reach!), this album/recording/document of place/event is for me the perfect encapsulation of all the myths and music I have loved about the city of Glasgow since I was a teenager, imagine if you will the dankest Echospace dubs left in a box outside the Rubadub warehouse on a damp weekend, Shinichi Atobe's Ship-Scope soundtracking a slow morning in the Lauriston, the regulars downing pints, pie and peas), Mika Vainio's Ambient City 1994 ime travelling to Glasgow City 2024 and you are hitting the right channel. Mother is of the very best DJs you can catch and his Concrete Cabin label with DJ Crud has released some of the very best cold snap spine spinning grime and sharp-edged jungle-techno 12"s of recent times (if you haven't span them by now go to Rubadub and score the Hamilton Scalpel plates right away and batter the fuck out of your speakers pronto!). The slow build and pulsing magnetic North gravitational pull/recording from the Old Hairdressers has all the slow-pulse and sparse rhythmic complexity of classic Playstation grime dubs circa early 2000s, a Slimzee set time stretched by Kevin Drumm, while the La Chunky session goes fully hard into a crumbling tenement that's being battered by shards of icy metal snow and rain crashing around and the darkest Northern nights noise drowning the city around it in an overflowing Clyde that's dragging up all manor of the treasures of incredible 12"s that are submerged in the shelves of the Rubadub warehouse. It recalls equal parts Demdike Stare Test Pressing series 6 & 7 if it was also given the Drumm via Vainio time stretching out to (vivid) oblivion. Given the scale of the city of Glasgow, its almost as if these two pieces could be a psychographical audio tour/round trip taking in all of the different districts and combining the atmosphere of all into an endlessly looping yet ever evolving journey, I've listened to them repeatedly for over a month solid now 2 plus times a day and I've yet to finish the drift through the always exciting otherworldly streets and district's that the music Mother has made in to somewhat map within my memories, Live '23 is a world unto itself and joins the springtime sounds of Girl Drop, summer city drifts of Na Fe Throw It & the autumnal gloom of After The Flood to be now and forever my coldest season soundtrack. Proper industrial music for a proper industrial city, listen deep, winter is coming…
Follow Mother »
https://www.instagram.com/mothermrk/
Follow Mother’s Concrete Cabin label ran with DJ Crud »
https://concretecabin.bandcamp.com/
https://www.instagram.com/concrete_cabin/
Follow FELT label »
https://f-e-l-t.bandcamp.com/
https://www.instagram.com/f__e__l__t/
Score limited edition Live ‘23 CS w/ DL »
https://rubadub.co.uk/products/live-23
https://boomkat.com/products/live-23