Sandwell District
End Beginnings

THE REVIEW

Techno Year 2025: (d)irections for Use.

It's pointless to argue about the impact the collective and its related label had on the scene more than fifteen years ago; it's pointless to debate a hypothetical (not so hypothetical) before and after Sandwell District in the underground techno scene of recent years. What we can discuss is a return—one that calls everything into question again, a return that, without any grand proclamations, seems to inject, in a modus operandi bordering on the subliminal, new lifeblood into the Sandwell sonic body, which over the years has become an underground institution.

Dissolution of mysticism in scales of gray.

The pulsating and abysmal chasms, the melancholy, grey swirling of the austere and airy, gloomy and floating ambient cumuli from previous releases now take a new shape. Their gunmetal gray mysticism, their sense of loss, their sideral-siderurgical short circuit, take shape—or rather, a new shape—soaked in a monopolizing horror vacui. The "new" horror of this End Beginnings for Regis and Function (here joined by the always excellent Simon Shreeve) seems, forcibly, to pass through this new body.

Self-initiations.

A vivid sense of faint psychedelia grips the tracks in a numbing hold; the sonic mass appears overloaded with the aforementioned horror vacui, seems to be overwhelmed by it, but every passage, every monstrous beat, every pulse reveals a naturalness and innate fluidity.

The ultra-geometric polyrhythms of "Will You Be Safe?" and "Self-Initiate" nourish the new sonic body with impervious technoid chiaroscuros overflowing with illusory perceptions, the opening entrusted to the imposing "Dreaming" with its ever-expanding disintegrating beats, the vivid and thriving acid swirls of "Hidden", and finally the relentless flow dispersed into the ether of "The Silent Servant" (dedicated to Juan Mendez, sadly no longer with us) speak of a material, mutable, profound sound.

The new body has become self-aware; the initiated project of self-initiation immediately aims for a deliberate destruction of that very self.