Pye Corner Audio Vinyl, CD & Tape 5 Items

Pye Corner Audio releases an EP of remixes by Spacemen 3 legend Sonic Boom on October 28. Let's Remerge! takes three tracks from the recent album Let's Emerge! - which went to Number One in the Official Charts' dance chart following its release in July - and gives them all appropriately weird and wonderful twists. 'Haze Loops' gets turned inside out, the smoke clearing to reveal some new shoots; Andy Bell's guitar is brought to the fore on 'Saturation Point', keeping things together as the rest of the track spins out of control in the background, like a cross between Khruangbin and Ennio Morricone; previous single 'Warmth Of The Sun' is put through an acid blender, blurring all the edges and giving us one much-needed final hit of serotonin as the summer recedes into the distance. "When Nat from Sonic Cathedral said we should ask Sonic Boom for a remix, I thought he was kidding, but as a huge Spacemen 3 fan I felt we should give it a shot," says Pye Corner Audio, aka Martin Jenkins. "Happily, he ended up remixing three tracks and I couldn't have been more pleased with the results. He really took them somewhere special." "Friends kept mentioning Pye Corner Audio. Friends with good taste. And when I listened, I could hear why," says Sonic Boom, aka Pete Kember, who has just released Reset, his acclaimed collaboration with Panda Bear. "When Sonic Cathedral approached me about a remix, with Andy Bell in tow to boot, I asked for the stems of the three tracks that I liked the most_ and sometimes in life things just flow. "Three tracks and three remixes later, here we are, finally sending them off into the world to do their thing and for us to float and oscillate into their textures. These songs were medicine during troubled times for me. I can't think of a better endorsement."

Pye Corner Audio releases a new album, Let's Emerge!, for Sonic Cathedral. It's his first studio outing for the label following the acclaimed live recording Social Dissonance, which came out earlier this year, and it features Ride guitarist Andy Bell playing on five of its ten tracks. From the first glimpse of the artwork to the first note of the music it's a marked deviation from Pye Corner Audio's more traditional shadowy sounds. Whereas his last outing for Ghost Box (2021's Entangled Routes) was inspired by the underground fungal pathways through which plants communicate, this one is very much above ground, bathed in sunlight and acid-bright psychedelia. "This is a departure to sunnier climes, but a departure nonetheless," says Pye Corner Audio, aka Martin Jenkins. "It's something that I'd been thinking about for a while. I try to tailor my work slightly differently for the various labels that I work with, and this seems to fit nicely with Sonic Cathedral's ethos." Designer Marc Jones' bold and ultra vivid artwork consciously references the likes of LFO, Spacemen 3 and the early output of Stereolab. "I think it mixes together many of my earliest influences," explains Martin. "I've been a long-time fan of Spacemen 3 and Stereolab. Their moments of repetition and drone have always seeped into what I've tried to create. "I was living in a small apartment and I'd stripped down my studio set-up when I was recording this album. This enabled me to focus on a few key pieces of equipment and explore them fully." The recordings were fleshed out by Andy Bell, who Martin first met at the Sonic Cathedral 15th birthday party at The Social in London back in 2019 - the same show that became the live album Social Dissonance. "New alliances were formed and friendships made in that basement in Little Portland Street," recalls Martin. "When I met Andy, we agreed that we needed to work together in some way. After I'd remixed a few tracks from his album The View From Halfway Down, he kindly repaid the favour." The end r...

In the heady days prior to the pandemic, on October 23, 2019, Pye Corner Audio headlined Sonic Cathedral’s 15th birthday bash at The Social in London (on a bill that also included bdrmm and Andy Bell). Now, following a limited cassette release in 2020, the incendiary performance – which mixes improvisations with reworked material from across his career – has been remastered by Antony Ryan (isan) and is to be made available on vinyl for the first time. Wryly titled ‘Social Dissonance’, it comes on green and blue swirl vinyl in a striking fluoro green and neon blue sleeve by designer Marc Jones. “This is a recording of a gig in a small space with a big heart,” says Pye Corner Audio, aka Martin Jenkins. “A memory of a night before the world changed completely. However, new alliances were formed and friendships made in that basement in Little Portland Street.” Indeed, Pye Corner Audio went on to collaborate with Andy Bell on an acclaimed series of remixes and the Ride guitarist returned the favour by playing on some new recordings that will be coming out on Sonic Cathedral later this year.

It was the autumn of 2010, and an anonymous figure known only as the Head Technician, an employee of Pye Corner Audio Transcription Services (“Magnetically aligning ferrous particles since 1970”), found himself at an auction in the village of Coldred, pop. 110. He was on the hunt for tobacco pipes when he chanced across a trio of boxes listed in the auction catalog, which described their contents only as “archived magnetic recordings.” The sole bidder, he won the lot, and upon receipt of his purchase took possession of an unspecified number of mouldering cassettes and ¼" reel-to-reel tapes. The collection contained no identifying information save for a single phrase scrawled on each box: “Black Mill Sessions.” And so, armed with razors, eyedroppers, and a bevy of solid-state circuitry, the Head Technician sat down at his machines and got to work. Whether anyone believed it or not, this was the framing device surrounding Pye Corner Audio’s Black Mill Tapes Volume I: Avant Shards, which took the mysterious tactics of artists like Boards of Canada and Burial and raised them exponentially. Much like the narrator of a 19th century novel, the anonymous Head Technician purported merely to be the messenger of secondhand sounds. These were not compositions, we were told; they were tape transfers—“transcriptions” of an unknown author, slathered