Asphodells, The

Asphodells, The

Remix Lp

Rotters Golf Club

***Andrew Weatherall never wakes up in the morning and decides to start a new album that day. Instead, recording music is a continuous process usually working with different collaborators and seeing where the muse takes him. Somewhere down the line the rewards of a collaboration will coalesce into a body of work between thirty minutes and an hour long and he will put a call into the Rotters’ team to say he has a new release ready to go.  We were visiting the studio catching up on new tracks in various states of readiness when he offered up some remixes of tracks from his recent “Ruled by Passion…” he’d been sent by fellow musicians. Tim Fairplay, Andrew’s partner in The Asphodells, Sean Johnston from A Love From Outer Space and Scott Fraser live and work in the area and all popped in at various points. Andrew’s black book reads like the who’s who of contemporary music but rather than plunder it for remixers he’d let drop the idea of a remix with friends and neighbours. These plus a couple a swaps with musical friends who were new to the concept of remixing, gave Andrew an hour of music he thoroughly enjoyed listening to.  It goes without saying none of the tracks are duds but our ears always prick up when Justin Robertson’s take on “Beglammered” ups the heart rate or Daniel Avery’s own unscrewing of “… the Axis” ruffles the neck hairs. We’ve stopped arguing in the office...

Asphodells, The

Ruled By Passion, Destroyed By Lust

Rotters Golf Club

***On this album ANDREW WEATHERALL has partnered with TIMOTHY J. FAIRPLAY as THE ASPHODELLS. Their friendship goes back to Tim’s time with BATTANT in the latter part of the 2000s with Andrew helping out on production. Tim has been responsible for a number of independent tracks variously on Astro Lab Recordings, World Unknown, Bird Scarer, Emotional Response and Magic Feet. He has played live across Europe including at Fabric in London and Robert Johnson in Germany and DJs at regular Glasgow night Crimes of the Future with Scott Fraser. Musically the album’s yet another game changer. Andrew has left behind the rock and roll leanings of Wrong Meeting and A Pox on the Pioneers and looks back over his shoulder to the purer electronics of the Kraftwerk-inflected TWO LONE SWORDSMEN but without the sparse introspection that characterised those times. Now the music is saturated in repetitive beats overlaid with sinuous melodies played out over whole tracks. Songs still feature but sound haunted, guitars still ground the tracks but are more resonant. John Betjeman’s ‘Late Flowering Lust’ sits surprisingly comfortably alongside A.R. Kane’s ‘A Love from Outer Space’ but ultimately it’s Weatherall and Fairplay that imbue the album with it’s own sense of a journey through a time and space that only dimly reflects our own.