Swim 黑胶唱片和CD

Review: When it comes to crafting memorable electronica, Malka Spigel and sometime Wire member Colin Newman are old hands. The duo released their first album as Immersion way back in 1994. This fourth full-length follows on from 2016's critically acclaimed Analogue Creatures Living On An Island and shares some stylistic similarities. Like that set, Sleepless contains numerous nods to 1970s krautrock (particularly Tangerine Dream and Popol Vuh), alongside detectable looks in the direction of laidback ambient techno, shoegaze, tactile downtempo grooves, melodic Balearic moments and the kind of hybrid analogue/electronic soundscapes that defy easy categorization. Throughout, the duo push mood and melody to the fore; as a result, the album is deliciously soft-focus and dreamy, even at its' most full-throttle and up-tempo.

Review: First released in 1997 as his sixth and final LP project, Colin Newman's Bastard came to the innovative "post-everything" label Swim a good while after the Wire member and electronic experimentalist had already made several splashes in the mitts of the infamous Cartel, the arch-distributor and de facto trade guild giving rise to labels like 4AD and Beggars. Keeping in close knit to such sonic romanticists helped propel Newman's sound into dreamier realms over the years, and this seven-tracker functions as the pinnacle of this tendency. First coming across as a more convincing analogue to contemporaries like Lush, Newman's sound here is less polished and thus more "authentic"-seeming, basking in militant breaks and techstep entrainments and which come blent with incredible pad and amped-up guitar washes. In the in-betweeny moments, we're also met with trip-hop delights resting on the lower-ends of the spectrum; the alien middle finger on the cover says it all, a veritable "fuck you" gestured by an early subject of dance music, a genre that Newman recalls was a misunderstood, much-maligned genre at the time.

Review: The last album by Colin Newman, Bastard came almost a full decade after his establishing panhandle of albums, released across Beggars Banquet, 4AD and Crammed Discs. A driving left turn into dance music, Bastard hears Newman come into his own, not only hearing him embrace then-emergent styles like trip hop and breakbeat for the first time, but also breaking through as the first full-length effort for his very own record label, Swim, established after a parallax-shifting abandonment of conventional song formats and welcoming a new, largely minimal/ambient electronica posse; the likes of Lobe and Silo. The tracks on Bastard reflect an early embrace of dance music in a time of ambivalence towards the arch-genre as a whole, reflecting the wilful keeping-ahead-of-the-curve that Newman and his partner Milka Spigel had by then cultivated.