W.R.F. - APPARENTLY SOLO VOL 2

After the “Bum Dungeon”, it’s time to unleash the ferrets!
Following April’s launch of the Apparently Solo EP series for Andrew Weatherall’s 60th birthday, his long-time studio partner Nina Walsh rummages deeper into her colossal vault to excavate three more previously unreleased nuggets in the “oompty boompty” style loved by devotees but of a slower nature than its predecessor.
If the maiden voyage rang with the peak power of one of her late W.R.F. collaborator’s more having it late period DJ sets, this new collection drops its trouser tempo to between 102-112 bpm - dubbed “the drug chug” by Andrew in retaliation to “a world of increasing velocity.” After recent weeks of celebratory cavorting, Nina felt some slower grooves would provide the perfect post-party glide down; “a leveller. They were all winter tracks recorded when everything was a bit more chilled.”
Maybe it was in Facility 4’s bunker but Nina’s studio was situated in a perilous modern times urban hell situated in a rundown broken-cobbled “mews” in the no man’s land between Streatham and Mitcham before it turns into Croydon. Her and Andrew had to navigate Asian and Somalian drug gangs to get to their oasis of creativity located in a cesspool of parched humanity where rivers of bloodied water flowed Styx-like from a nearby butcher’s shop.
“It was hell,” affirms Nina. “Facility 4 definitely had a different edge compared to my previous studios and this shithole we were attempting to work in could influence our general mood for that particular day. We’d be in a particularly banging mood if somebody had attempted to mug me or set light to my car. In the summer it would be much smellier as we were directly facing the back of a butcher, plus there was all the trash people had thrown out. In the winter it really was a lockdown into the bunker as the gangs would be hanging around more then, a lot of dealing going on. I think a lot of the chug was us calming ourselves down too; ‘Can’t handle much above 102 today!’”
Dating from November 2018, cryptically titled ‘This Whole Fandango’ slow burns at 112bpm like a sinuous rhythm-snake up the trouser leg, its sliding textures and subtly intricate percussion underpinned by swinging Godzilla scrotum bass lathered by bubbling cosmic drainage rising from rotten gutter to spangled galaxy.
One of the first tracks constructed at Facility 4 in November 2016, the insidiously pulsing ‘Heat to Meat Ratio’ sheds ten bpms to lace a spectral Basic Channel-meets-acid house motif with deftly percolating percussion, 80s electro stabs and crafty little warp effect pebble dashed by flatulent astral molecules.
Most evocative of these heady scoops from Nina’s alchemical cauldron, ‘We Two’ came to life around the time she and Andrew remixed legendary US electronic trailblazers Silver Apples in February 2019. After a cavernous dream-like intro, the track sinks its astral plunger into the heart of cosmic disco wonderland with glacial Moroderish synth themes and infectious Arabian melodies rearing over its acid-flecked robo-nutsack shuffle. Demonstrating the mix-and-match nature of the creative process, a time-suspending drop ushers in the sighing synth melody from Nina’s ‘All Is Not Lost’; like the whole EP, all slow and deceptively spaced; cool and deadly.
Once again, as our friends The Clash proclaimed on ‘Know Your Rights’; “This is a public service announcement.” And as Andrew’s beloved Jim Dickinson once said, “This spirit will not be gone as long as the music lingers.”
Kris Needs (“a ‘journalist’”)

Fifty per cent of all profits will be donated to Shelter, one of Andrew’s favoured charities