This is sketch, a work still in progress, but I wanted to post something today…

Andrew Weatherall’s on the radio. Kiss 100. 1 – 3 AM. I’m lying in bed, drinking cheap wine. Listening on headphones. Surrounded by all I own. A short rail of clothes. Two metal shelving units, that look like Meccano, that I’ve pinched from work. These are leaning Tower of Pisa-like from the weight of the records on them. Books are stacked on the floor by the window, and there’s a small leather suitcase of photos pushed under the bed. It’s a Wednesday night and I’m just straight enough to think about the weekend again. Drum Club tomorrow, then Friday’ll be Sabresonic at Happy Jax. Weatherall playing a mixture of Detroit Techno, European Trance, and pitched-down Drum ‘n’ Bass. My membership is No. 303, which I’m quite pleased about. I can’t relax because I’m taping the show, and obsessively attempting to remove all the news and ad breaks. I can stretch out and reach the pause button, but I can’t just lie here and listen. In between the tunes the DJ shouts out to those bugling ’til dawn….

There’s a rush running up from the bottom of my spine. A cool calm that tingles with promise. Me and The Lizard are high. We’re practically the first ones in here. We always arrive everywhere early, for fear of being knocked back. The place is empty. Tribal drums are pounding. Slow. Ceremonial. The arch we’re in is dark, but there’s a bar on one side of the hall, providing a welcoming wall of light. We’re trying to act normal. Both of us are wondering what’s gonna happen next. The Lizard is laughing. He’s always laughing at the state we manage to get ourselves in. Stupidly, perhaps subconsciously on purpose, putting ourselves at a disadvantage. This making everything more difficult has made for many adventures. He’s laughing because this is just the start, and it’s “Here we go again. Will we never learn?” “What are we doing. Where are we going now?”

Yellow Book, Flying, and Ophelia, man, I used to get dressed up. Paul Smith, Michiko Koshino, white 501s. Tonight I’m in a second-hand jean jacket and an old Benetton t-shirt, with spliff blims in it. Sporting Converse again. The Lizard’s a little more elegant. Knitwear. Something Italian looking. Probably from The Duffer Of St. George. My hair is lion-like and goes all the way down my back. It’s not been cut for what must be six years. When I dance, I’ll close my eyes, and swing this mane about, further separating me from our surroundings, further removing me from reality.

We put our bottles of lager on an upturned oil drum. Silently noting the post-apocalyptic decor. Mad Max would like it here. Neither of us is speaking. Knowing that the other needs a minute to adjust and acclimatise. Not wanting to spoil the buzz. Then The Lizard asks, “What’s this?” “Bandulu. Invaders. It’s on the LP.” It seems to go on forever, and part of both of us wishes it would. It sounds so good. Time stands still while it spins.

We find a spot and plot. Firmly plant our feet. For the next few hours we’ll hardly share a word. Only glancing at each other in either nods of recognition, or “What the fuck?” moments, as a new tune comes on. Tomorrow, we’ll travel into the West End, to shops like Tag and FatCat, and see what we can find from tonight’s soundtrack. Pop into Riki Tik for a few pints, perched on their uncomfortable stools.

I have to crash at The Lizard’s. There’s no way I can make it home alone to South London. High, high, high, in a basement on Almeida Street, we’ll drive his neighbours crazy trying to mix Underworld’s Rez over the top of everything. Ten minutes of electrified juice harp jive that has Sabresonic going bananas. The Lizard, lucky fucker, picked one up, on a pink 12” promo, from Reckless on Upper Street. The couple upstairs, the poor guy having to knock and ask us to keep it down. He’s always polite, and we always oblige, but of course, we’re wasted and the volume always climbs back up. It’s a miracle that he’s never called the Old Bill. If he did we’d be done for.

Chimes ring out, and hardware drones like a didgeridoo. A constant kick keeping drum circle bongos and congas in check. Techno tempos race, and then drop to a digi-dub steppers, a lovely, rubbery rhythm. I’m surrounded by swirling effects that make my head spin. Genres blend and boundaries blur. The trouble with pigeon-holes is that they’re full of pigeon shit.

We’re moving, all 600 odd of us, to this rapid, hydraulic pumping. A beat like a heart about to burst. Dancing to a deep subterranean rumbling like blood rushing through arteries and veins. Acid house where the ghost of Timothy Leary is your guide for the trip. This is the Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia. Disciples of The Temple Of Psychic Youth. Genesis P-Orridge and his Austin Osman Spare sex sigils. A 12 titled Exit 23. I bought my copy in Warp, up in Sheffield. I was supposed to be at a work conference, but I bunked off. It’s actually pretty fucking scary on microdots. So much so that I’m sure that they must have taken something to make it. Tim and the rhythm are already an overload, but then there’s throat singing and angry elephant roars.

I don’t know how we ended up at Sabresonic. We’ve been following Weatherall around since being shown a copy of Boys Own – the fanzine he co-founded –  at the end of `89, but we certainly aren’t plugged into any nightlife network. If there’s an elite, we ain’t in it. From Kazoo, to Flying and Gosh, Love Ranch, Sign Of The Times, and Kinky Disco… It was at Kinky that I first heard him play techno, and to be honest, I didn’t like it. Only what felt like weeks before, at a Yellow Book do, I’d been dancing with Bobby G, while Weatherall span favourites, like Dizzi Heights’ Would I Find Love? Then I was at Kinky, standing with Throb and Alison, at the side of the dance floor, all of us moaning. The days of the Balearic classic were well and truly over. I guess Weatherall had been dropping harder and faster gear for a while – stuff like Holy Ghost’s Mad Monks On Zinc – so if you’d been taking notice, and not totally off your nut, you’d have know that change was in the air. By the sounds of it most of the music at Sabresonic came from FatCat. I’d probably seen a flyer there. 

Pounding patterns of live percussive loops shower a soundsystem bass-line. Like a nuclear Nyabinghi. An industrial clanking keeping time.The vocals are screams, and snippets, spectres of Scott Walker quoting Norman Mailer. All the separate, odd, elements spiral in synergy. High velocity voodoo. Freaky filtering flipping things inside out.

It’s also possible that I’d seen the party mentioned, as footnote, below a Weatherall Top 10, in one of the music weeklies: Melody Maker, or The NME. It’s Kris Needs Tekno Prisoners column in Echoes, though, that’s quickly come to reflect the records revolving, worrying the sizeable Sabresonic system.

Home at the moment is a rented box bedroom in a shared house in South Norwood. When I finished Uni I’d moved in with my dad, but all we did was fight, and he eventually threw me out. Work’s in Beckenham, and on the walk back, once a week, I buy a bag of pills from an old school friend, who serves up to those who serve up. Sometimes I’ll neck one before heading over to The Lizard’s in Islington. I’ll run a hot bath, someone once told me that this was a nice way come up, and wait until the waves wash over me. I’ll be totally off of it by the time I arrive, and the sight of me’ll make The Lizard call me a cunt and demand that I hand him an E on the doorstep.

We’re well used to searching for dos in the middle of nowhere, wondering if we’ve got the right address, so we weren’t phased to find an iron-grilled doorway, on a dirty looking arch, on a deserted street, creepily called Crucifix Lane, under London Bridge.

A gamelan of bells and gongs. Military drums marching in from a distance, like a bionic batucada battalion. This is one of those tracks that everyone knows. They’ve been playing it everywhere. You can’t avoid it. Its analogue gear gurgling away. Its synths, like a sunrise, spirit-lifting.

Someone’s shouting “Bigger than god!” Riffing on John Lennon. Daring Heaven. It sounds like Johnny Rotten. Acid and bleeps, blips of Morse Code act as signals, elevating the tension… and the club explodes. Breakbeats battering a 4 / 4, and the whole room is stamping and stomping, side-by-side in unison, to its clarion call to arms. There must be something telepathic going on, because it’s so dark, that ahead of me all I can see is space. Heads bob about, but I register no faces, no bodies. Locked, lost, in my own world.

The fractal frequencies reach a frenzy. Snares slither like metallic snakes. Rimshots ricochet like bullets that pan around the place. The percussion could be knives being sharpened. The guitar, the shredding, a chainsaw. The ex-Sex Pistol’s shrieking like a tortured muezzin, or a better a Djinn. I know he hates Pink Floyd, perhaps he’s having a pop at Led Zep’s Immigrant Song. His mantra now “Burn, burn, burn!” Like a demon, summoning / calling down chaos. Anarchy.

Sirens blast. B-boy breaks collide. A 303 has everyone tight in its grip. I’m bopping in the black. No way back. All other senses saturated. Dancing. Uncaring. Shit, no one is watching. An ethereal angel sighs, and then screeches as she’s sucked backwards. The music tapping into something primal. A portal. A release.

There are sitars. Shades of the `60s, The Beatles, and The Maharishi. Native Americans shout and chant. Machines clap and kick.The whole of Happy Jax jumps and leaps. Raising a robotic raindance. The party’s playing out like a ritual, where the energy rises, peaks, plateaus, and peaks again. Serious sonic shamanism. Mad musical medicine. Here we shake off bad spirits, the shit of the week. The Lizard grabs me, and I’m forced to re-focus. “Do you want a drink?”

The bar is never busy. Everyone’s pilled to the gills. There was this one time when Weatherall himself was propping it up. While completely in awe, me and The Lizard, were also cranked with chemical confidence, telling him what big fans we are, what a diamond he is. Chuckling, no doubt, used to such fawning, such displays of devotion, he said, “You chaps are everywhere I go. Let me buy you a beer.” We must have shown those bottles to the entire club. I joked about having mine bronzed.

Piano pinpoints sweeten scything cymbals. The Apache break is sliced and diced. The bass is seismic. The stripped back sound is incredible on this system.* The handful of elements filling the space. “Who’s the badman? The one who can draw?” That’s lifted from the Jimmy Cliff flick, The Harder They Come. I remember Keith from Daddy Kool telling me how him and Adrian ran up and down the cinema aisles, selling weed, at a late night screening years ago. Was that a bit of Blue Rondo A La Turk?

Bumping, jumping, kinda jolly tom toms set the thump. Like everything, this takes its time to build from basics. Adding hats, then snares. Like a pumping Pied Piper, where the only thing approaching a melody is a warning siren. Then the acid drops. Pushing our collective energy past another peak.

We can hear its rattle gunning for us, beneath the track that’s already playing. We all know what’s coming. The whole hall rocking. Waiting. The snares in such a stampede that they’re tripping over themselves, without ever losing their rigid funk. This is Ritchie Hawtin showing off. Manhandling his drum machines with military precision to produce a techno tattoo. When I first heard this tune, I thought he was taking the piss, but once you’re inside it, you’re hooked. On the surface it might seem that it doesn’t change, when, from within, nothing about it sits still. Relentless in its filtered flux.

A clattering and clanking continues for ages before the kick finally comes in. Tabla and timbales increasing the transcendent vibe. No one here’s a hippie, mind. Fellers are chopping up chisel, not aligning their chakras. Proper Herberts more like.

Rain falls. Lightning cracks. A diva sings the blues. A techno torch song set to a throbbing Euro trance beat. A sleazy sonic seduction that, so legend has it, is the most requested track on UK prison radio. The perfect soundtrack for twelve minutes-plus of personal pleasuring. Happy Jax, coincidently, just like Wormwood Scrubs, is packed with mainly geezers. It could be me, and the condition, mess, I’m in, but I don’t remember seeing a single woman… but then I certainly didn’t come here on the pull. High hats hiss constantly, like escaping steam. A rush-inducing wail echoes that old tune by Viola Wills. These things happen. Both of them like a big bang on the amyl.

The club closes at half past two, and outside the pavements will be lined with folks handing out flyers. There was this time that I was so fucking high that I hugged each and everyone of them. At first they were freaked, but then they were laughing, waiting their turn. Everyone leaving was freaked and then laughing too. The Lizard was doubled up.

“Whump, whump, whump, whump… whump, whump, whump, whump…” goes the bass-line, and a voice whispers, conspiratorially, “Ecstasy, ecstasy.” The Lizard reckons it’s Dave Dorrell DJing now.  Everything, I mean, everything, sounds tribal to me. This isn’t a disco, it’s definitely a rite, a ceremony. A machine music mass, a cult, a coven, conjuring magick. Weatherall’s barmy army, all marching, eyes shut.

Unlike, say `88, `89, `90, we’ve made no friends in here. Week in week out, I don’t think we’ve even spoken to anybody. It’s not a place of strangers embracing and sharing bottles of water. To be fair though, that’s not on my agenda either. I come here to get smashed in the darkness by the drugs and the music. It doesn’t solve any of my problems, but for a while it does get their fingers from around my throat. This brief holiday, not on a beach, but in mini oblivion. I’ll probably be out somewhere more sociable tomorrow. I’ll keep taking the pills until they’re gone, and my last drink will be late Sunday night. Just to help me sleep. It’ll be dinner time Wednesday until I’m even close to recovered. Ready to do it all again. With relish. Gusto.

We’re in the middle of one of many long, long intros. Epic fade-ins and fade-outs that maximise the mounting tension. The anticipation building. Emotive strings and drones drawing us in. Transporting us away from this cold cave. When it’s empty in here, I swear you can see your breath. This one’s sirens send out Sci-Fi S.O.S. signals. Fanfares from a galaxy far, far away. A score for X-Wing fighters rolling, rotating through 360 degrees. Dive bombing. Blade Runner’s burning L.A. skyline. Its rhythm, a pummelling futuristic panic.

A charge of crazy colliding metallic echoes. Extra-terrestrial, alien. Of the future. It hammers us with how I imagine a meteor shower to sound. Beating us senseless. Leaving us breathless. Brains blown.

Hendrix, Voodoo Chile-like wah-wah licks some slo-mo skanking. We’re all moving like we’re wearing moonboots. I’m shaking my King Charles curls just like I used to at Balearic dos. Mouthing the words, “Never coming down.” It’s the sort of bass-heavy business that Weatherall would play in the early morning at Dingwalls, at Gosh. Once the Italian Scream-Ups were spent, exhausted. Fuel for the faithful, the fried, as the lights came up.

“Well I stand up next to a mountain, and I chop it down with the edge of my hand…”

I have Withnail & I to thank for that one. Camberwell carrots. Where did I put my tea-shades? Joints we’ve pre-rolled pass between me and The Lizard all night.

Tremolo twang traces mysterious snake-charming figures. A bit like the balalaika lick playing in The Third Man, when Harry Lime steps from the shadows. A sorceress scats, and cymbal crashes skyrocket. A Jah Wobble-like b-line booms beneath a lawless border town brothel organ grind. A haunted horn leads a New Orleans Mardi Gras. Doped on Dr. John’s gris gris. Like Baron Samedi at the head of a calypso carnival of souls. Buffalo hunting with Dave Lynch’s Sailor and Lula. A hip hop Angel Heart. A trip hop score for Johnny Favorite’s last ride in Louis Cyphre’s elevator. Going down.

They’ve switched the lights on, and it feels all of a sudden. I’m blinking like a mole dragged out of its hole. Shocked back to Southwark. Baby, have I got the bends. There’s this god awful distorted ringing, spinning, whipping around the room. Like a tinny, trebly, circular saw taking off the tops of heads. Some are still dancing, but for me it’s too much. The cut’s called Carousel. The label’s Industrial Strength, and they’re not kidding. It’s all gone a bit gabba. It must be almost over. Fuck, I think that’s my lot. I look at The Lizard. “Did I bring a coat?” Saucer-eyed, he shrugs.

Limited Download

*I’m pretty sure that Leftfield signed Dee Patten after hearing Who’s The Badman at Sabresonic.

A big thank you to the admin team at the mighty Flightpath Estate for the archival illustrations.

Track-list
Galaxy 2 Galaxy – Rhythm Of Infinity
Dub Charge – Conflict Of Drums
Bandulu – Invaders
Sven Vath – Ritual Of Life
Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia – Exit 23
Abfahrt – Come Into My Life
Shop – Nitwit
Orbital – The Naked And The Dub
Capricorn – 20Hz
Leftfield – Open Up
Dust Brothers – Song To The Siren
Underworld – Rez
Galaxy 2 Galaxy – Astral Apache
Dee Patten – Who’s The Badman
Sabres Of Paradise – Smokebelch
Ege Bam Yasi – Variation
Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia – The Valley
Sulphuric – Better Come Together
Robert Armani – Circus Bells
Plastikman – Spastik
Sabres Of Paradise – Still Fighting
Secret Knowledge – Sugar Daddy
Joey Beltran – Energy Flash
Vapor Space – Gravitational Arc Of 10
Baruka – Play It Loud
Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia – Challenge
Trance Induction – New Age Heart Core
Basic Channel – Phylyps Trak
Remy & Sven – Piano Power
CJ Bolland – Camargue
Koenig Cylinders – Carousel
Paul Weller – Kosmos Dub
Sabres Of Paradise – Wimot

An honourable mention must go to 4Voice / Eternal Spirit, which I just couldn`t squeeze in. Also absent are all the drum & bass tunes that Weatherall played at the wrong speed, which I never did find the name of.

Please list your Sabresonic hits, things that I`ve missed, in the comments below. We are also looking for members 909, and 808, if the numbers ever went that far : )