Feed Forward: Vinyl 3LP

Sandwell District have announced details of a brand new release of their era-defining 2010 album Feed-Forward - out on vinyl for the first time since its original pressing, and digitally for the first time on 28 July 2023 via The Point Of Departure Recording Company.

The original print of the album, described by RA a decade later as “the final transmission from a collective whose influence still colours music today”, was effectively a private press that sold out on impact - 3 days before Christmas, with no accompanying promotion – and, despite it changing hands for up to 4 figure sums, it has never been repressed.

Sandwell District - Peter Sutton (Female), David Sumner (Function), Juan Mendez (Silent Servant) and Karl O’Connor (Regis) - was a label, a collective, an impulse, an in-joke, a suicide mission, a gang, a point of view. An amphetamine-fuelled fever dream, a group psychosis, an out-of-hand piss-take which happened to reinvent techno in its own bleakly modernist image.

Growing out of the Downwards label that Sutton and O’Connor established in 1993, throughout the 2000s the collective had a powerful mystique. Its records sell and its reputation swells by word of mouth alone - and for a long time it revels in being faceless, opaque, impenetrable. After a move to Berlin, Sutton and O’Connor intensify their time in the studio, while Function is a resident and Regis and Silent Servant become regular guests at Berghain, giving the collective a key test-laboratory. Mendez meanwhile overhauls the visual identity of the label, giving Sandwell an outlaw style all its own - techno has never seen anything quite like it - and the music itself deepens and darkens as if to meet the challenge.

Tracks:

LP1
1. Immolare (First)
2. Immolare (Main)
3. Immolare (Final)
4. Grey Cut Out
5. Hunting Lodge

LP2
1. Falling The Same Way
2. Svar
3. Double Day
4. Speed + Sound (Endless)

LP3
1. 7" Untitled (1)
2. 7" Untitled (2)
3. Surrender to the Unknown