BORDERLAND
WOODLEIGH RESEARCH FACILITY ‘Borderland (Andrew Weatherall Remix)’ (Circuitry Electronic)
Photo: John Barrett
Borderland (Andrew Weatherall Mix), by Woodleigh Research Facility
This is just too good to not point it in your direction. Woodleigh Research Facility is the excellent work of partners in musical crime, Nina Walsh and Andrew Weatherall.
An all-round excellent human, Nina worked with Weatherall for 30-odd years, and was doing so right up until his untimely death in 2021. I’m sure she’d tell you that some of those years were very odd. They were incredibly prolific and created an absolute audio mountain of work as WRF between 2016-2019, which Nina has been working her way through and issuing through various channels.
Your first stop should be the Bandcamp page, which is here. That includes the really great ‘Apparently Solo’ and ‘Maximum Vaultage’ series of releases, which all feature extensive sleevenotes from Kris Needs.
So anyway, there’s a new collection, ‘Anamchara’, heading your way via the good folk at the new Circuitry Electronic label. It’s released at the end of May and “spotlights” nine tracks released digitally via the ‘Apparently Solo’ series, but never before heard on vinyl. There’s one track in particular you should hear.
I first heard ‘Borderland’ a couple of years back, 2023, when it appeared on ‘Apparently Solo Volume 4’, where a fluttery almost demo-sounding version, heavy on viola from virtuoso Sarah Sarhandi, appeared along with an rip-roaring Jagz Kooner remix. Jagz does not muck around with remixes. You may recall he picked up last year’s Moonbuilding Weekly Track Of The Year gong for his remix of Lorelle Meets The Obsolete’s ‘Regresar / Recordar’.
As a track, ‘Borderland’ is a bit special because Weatherall saw it as the next ‘Smokebelch’, the original file was even called ‘Viola Belch’. He has a point. It does have an utterly beautiful melody created by Nina on a midi keyboard and transposed and played by her friend Sarah Sarhandi to great effect.
It gets better though. You see there is also another remix of the track. The Andrew Weatherall mix. Yup. It’s brilliant, of course it is. It snuck out last year, in September, as a bonus cut on the digital version of Rebirth Records’ excellent DJ Alfredo collection ‘Paraiso - True Spirit Of Ibiza’ album. They even popped it onto a 12-inch EP earlier this year, which is worth hunting down if you can.
While the Rebirth version is a mere seven minutes long, this is the full-length eight minute and 40 second version. There’s a wonderful breakdown about halfway where Weatherall clears the track and leaves just the viola melody. Gorgeous. Not one second is wasted.
‘Anamchara’ is released by Circuitry Electronic on 29 May