Not Sleeping

The Twilight Sad’s No One Can Ever Know came out in 2012 and is about to be re- issued. It came with the line that it had been ‘anti- produced’ by Andrew Weatherall. I was never absolutely sure what this meant but according to the internet he gave the group some advice about analogue synths and some words of wisdom. He had apparently been lined up to produce the album but for whatever reason this didn’t happen. Several years later, in 2018, a remix by Andrew of their song Videograms appeared, a seven minute piston- powered drum machine excursion with a huge synth riff and early 980s New Order/ Depeche Mode vibe. Lovely stuff.

Back to 2012. No One Can Ever Know was paired with a remix album release, nine reworkings of the songs from the album by sympathetic remixers such as Liars, Com Truise, The Horrors and Optimo. The remixes are club based, pushing the darker, more industrial sound the band were experimenting with further. Tom Furse of The Horrors took them to a sleek, cosmische place, somewhere in the spiritual vicinity of West Germany in the 1970s.

Not Sleeping (The Horrors Dub Mix)

JD Twitch fired up the kick drum and sent them out onto the floor in the early hours.

Alphabet (JD Twitch/Optimo Remix)

Wahre Liebe

Factory Floor’s live soundtrack to Fritz Lang’s 1929 Weimar sci-fi masterpeice Metropolis comes out today. I’ve been looking forward to this since the Heart Of Data/Babel 12″ came out back in February. Their score is film length, an hour and fifty minutes long, and is out on double cd or quadruple vinyl (and you can imagine how much that costs).

In 2011 Factory Floor’s Real Love single was remixed by Glasgow clubbing veteran JD Twitch, a controlled collision of analogue synths and digital drum machines.

Real Love (An Optimo Espacio Mix)

I was showing some young people (16-17 year olds) some clips from Metropolis earlier this week as part of their studies of Weimar Germany and its culture. I don’t think the jawdropping special effects or the look of the film or its technical genius of the film was lost on them although some of the acting is very hammy 90 years later. They were equally if not more impressed with Nosferatu which they found genuinely freaky. And then one of them mentioned they already knew Nosferatu from this…

Brass Shaker

Some sort of unholy trinity of artists going on here mixing up a classic house-acid brass delight. To clarify- Jeremy Deller’s acid brass cover version of Voodoo Ray remixed by Optimo’s JD Twitch, out on vinyl on Monday. And worth every penny I’d say.

Beachcomber

I found this recently at Just Press Play blog, an always reliable source of good leftfield electronic stuff, and it is a cosmic belter- Beachcomber is fourteen minutes of New York veteran Peter Gordon and Factory Floor making some beautiful links between stellar bass, wonky synths and post-punk sax. Out soon on Optimo.

Nosferatu

More Weatherall- yawn. Wait though, there’s other stuff here too.

In November 1998 I went to Manchester’s Cornerhouse Cinema and Arts Space to see Andrew Weatherall play records as a soundtrack to FW Murnau’s 1929 silent film Nosferatu. It was very, very good and very, very spooky. Mrs Swiss was heavily pregnant with our unborn firstborn and the scary soundtrack obviously affected pre-natal I.T. At one point he moved, a limb causing a shark’s fin to arc visibly over Mrs Swiss’s belly. Bizarre.

The Youtube poster of the entire film says this of Nosferatu-

1929 silent film by F.W. Murnau tells the story of a young man who leaves his bride and travels to see a mysterious count in order to sell a house. He finds that the creature he encounters is not of this world. This version of the”Dracula” tale remains one of the best and rightfully claims it place in cinematic history.

This Weatherall- Dracula event was pre-internet, pre-mobile phone recording. Neither Andrew Weatherall nor the Cornerhouse recorded it (unless they did and it’s never been released). I think it was a one-off and there is almost nothing on the internet about it. A Weatherall event with no internet record- double bizarre. 

The song here, vampire link ahoy, is Destroy Yourself by Michael Dracula, remixed by JD Twitch from 2009. Michael Dracula are or were, I think, a band from Glasgow. Ms Dracula (above) sings

‘Wake up 
Be happy 
Stay in
Save your money 
You’ll be dead a long time honey’


 After that things go a bit mental in Optimo style.


Destroy Yourself (Twitch’s Optimo Mix)