In Strict Tempo, vol. 69: Sandwell District Interview

I caught up with Karl & Dave from Sandwell District to get the lowdown on their new album End Beginnings in this wide-ranging and in-depth interview. Grab a cup of tea for this one!

Sandwell District, London 2025. (C) Steve Gullick

With the release today of End Beginnings - their first album in over a decade, I spoke to Sandwell District’s Karl O’Connor and David Sumner about the tragic death of musical partner Silent Servant, why they didn’t enjoy making this new album, and why DJs now are like children’s TV presenters.

First, some background. Sandwell District should be immediately familiar to readers of this newsletter, but if not then all you need to know is that it was a collective made up of Karl O’Connor, (better known as Regis), Dave Sumner aka Function and Juan Mendez, the Silent Servant. Firstly as a label, releasing music from Sumner, Mendez, Rrose and others, and then as a musical group who released a handful of 12”s and one era-defining album in Feed Forward. Sandwell District refined the blueprint for what uncommercial, don’t-give-a-fuck electronic music should be and their shows were incendiary, partly due to the often fractious relationship between O’Connor and Sumner. Feed Forward sold out almost instantly, and if you were lucky enough to find one on Discogs you’d have to shell out many hundreds of pounds to secure it. Even the CD of the album (featuring entirely different mixes of the tracks) sold for many multiples of it’s original retail price.

Holding this all together was the art direction of Juan Mendez, not only via the physical releases, but also on the groups only web presence, a Tumblr page titled Where Next? After three short years, lifetime bans from Air Berlin, and a falling out over Sumner’s refusal to play a gig at Fabric, the group disbanded, and Regis & Function would not speak to each other for another decade. In late 2023, tentative moves were made at a reconciliation, aided by Mendez and Mark Lanegan, Feed Forward was finally reissued, a collection of unheard material was compiled for release and three reunion gigs were played, the last of which was in Barcelona. Tragically, any future the group may have had was cut short by the death of Mendez in LA in early 2024 along with his partner Simone and friend Luis of The Soft Moon.

It was a wide-ranging and in-depth conversation, and we touched on many topics over the hour long course of our chat. There’s a lot of mythology around Sandwell District, and Tony Wilson always said “when forced to pick between truth and legend, print the legend” but what you’re reading here is probably the most open and honest interview Sandwell District have ever done.

Hi Dave, Hi Karl, thanks for taking the time out to speak to me. It’s been a while since we’ve had any new Sandwell District material, so let’s start with the new album: It’s a tribute to Juan [Mendez, Silent Servant] and the album title is the title of one of his paintings, correct?

Dave Sumner: It was something he named before he passed. There were a lot of things that happened right before he passed that were kind of lending itself to this. There was also another image that he did that was called “One Last Dance” and then “End Beginnings”, and he passed two days later.

It feels almost crass for me to say so, but he wasn’t involved with the art direction of the album this time, despite being such an important part of the Sandwell District aesthetic previously?

Karl O’Connor: No. This was actually a decision I made straight away. He’s dead, we’ve got to move on from it. I think it would have been actually a lot more crass to use his artwork in some sort of secondary way. And I would have felt very uncomfortable with that. I had to sort of put that to Dave, initially. I felt that everyone was like “of course you've got to use his artwork as some sort of fitting tribute”, but in my heart of hearts I knew that the opposite was true. So what we did do? We used a lot of people who were Juan's friends. So everything was very sympathetic to that. It is a tribute to Juan, but essentially it’s aping a New Order cover. That was the nod to Juan.

It was Jim [Siegel] Vivid Oblivion who did the photography for it?

Karl: Jim did the photography. Yeah.

As soon as I saw it I messaged him on Instagram and said “I’m getting ‘Temptation’ from that, straight away”

Karl: Jim's great, man, he's got a fantastic eye, and I think it was the right thing to do because there was no prejudice with the music there. You weren't expecting something from the past.

So that was kind of important as well this End Beginnings, it was a fresh beginning because it's not a follow-up record to Feed Forward. The follow-up record has happened already. It was Dave’s solo album [Incubation] on Ostgut and Juan’s [Negative Fascination] on Hospital Productions. They’re actually the best Sandwell District albums.

So Sandwell District, the musical act came out of Sandwell District the label. The label existed a few years quite a few years before the act but what was the drive to be like, “actually, you know what? We can make this more than just a record label and put out our own album, our own thing?”

Karl: Sandwell District was never a sub-label of Downwards. We just had a distribution company at the time and it was initially me and Peter Sutton [Female]. It was just, let's start this record and James Ruskin was really early involved and some really great early records but then it kinda just stopped and the interest dissipated until I spoke to Dave. Obviously, we've known Dave since ‘96, so we had a huge history anyway. But then in about 2004, 2005 he played me some tracks.

I'm like, “wow. This is amazing. We should really put this out”. We’ve got the right label, and that was what everybody knows as the birth of Sandwell District, it was Dave's music. And then Juan, was at a loose end as well. And I said, “well, yeah you should put some stuff out”. And it was all of a sudden, there was something bubbling under that was very, very interesting. There was momentum happening where we had all these close friends coming together, and it was good. It was interesting at that particular time because Dave had moved to Berlin and I was living in Berlin as well. So we worked together quite a lot. I spoke to Juan every day.

It was always nine to five. It was about work, work, work. It was like the factory, getting work done and getting things off the table — which was completely at odds with Berlin and that's why it was kind of interesting because Dave brought this real bawdy New York thing to it as well, which was winding people up and confrontation. And, of course people had never seen anything like that before.

Dave: I mean, in a lot of ways, it was born out of desperation.

I was living in New York and hit a brick wall with a lot of things, and I was in sort of a do-or-die situation. And Karl was picking up on that ambition and encouraging me to come to Berlin. And when we were living in the same city, it really kicked off.

Doing these interviews has helped me refresh, because a lot of these things, we're talking about were seventeen years ago. It's kinda hard to remember. But based on these really, really intense conversations about decentralizing the ego, I think the first place it surfaced was the really limited, Sandwell District 12”, and the artist name was NA: Not Applicable.

And that was kind of the idea at the time, decentralizing the ego. It wasn't about Regis, Silent Servant, and Function. It was Not Applicable. That's that's kind of where the Sandwell District collective formed. It wasn't a plan. It was born out of these conversations that organically came together. And then the next thing you knew, it was all synonymous. Sandwell District was a label. It was an artist.

Karl: I love what Gavin Friday always says. “There was no plan, but we knew exactly what we were doing.” And it was that.

And of course, we were informed by stuff outside of club culture. We’re digital migrants. We didn't grow up with this. So we came from a time where things did happen in real time. It was more than music. My thing was that it had to be a lot more than just music. So I think when Juan really found his feet with the visual identity for it, I think that's when it was just it became unstoppable because putting Gene Vincent and teddy boys on a dance record, it was unheard of. Weatherall toyed with it, but it never was as successful as when Juan did it.

Instantly, you brought all these disparate people into your sort of sphere. You get noise people in LA, you get cool rock kid hipsters in New York. And it was driven by me, by Dave in particular, and Juan who was very, very hungry for it. Juan was a nine to fiver in LA, and he was working for Paul Frank of all places, but they were very creative kids in LA. They're always doing stuff, whether it be that or working for skateboard companies, and he's always producing stuff. And then Dave was very fresh and hungry in Berlin.

Dave: It was an exciting time. We were all really ambitious.

Karl: I wasn't. Because I was already fucking great. I was just there. Like, “come on lads you can be as good as me”. Actually, that's not true! So, I think I’d just come out of British Murder Boys and I wasn’t at exactly at a loose end, but I was always like, “wow”. But then also, Blackest Ever Black happened at the same time.

I was going to mention that, and it leads on nicely to me next question. It felt like it was a really fertile period of music based in London, Berlin, New York I guess as well. Blackest Ever Black, Frozen Border, what Downwards was putting out at the time, which wasn’t really techno…

Karl: Tropic of Cancer!

Exactly, they weren’t techno but they fitted in with the whole thing. It feels like something like that can’t really happen again…

Karl: It was a hugely important time that can never really happen again, especially between us and Blackest Ever Black even though the music is completely different. We actually got Kiran [Sande, Blackest Ever Black] and brought him to Dave's apartment to listen to Feed Forward, we gave him a CD and we said “oh, just do this Kiran”, and we fucking dosed him like a bastard. We had this listening party. Dave forced him to listen to this, and he got the fear, and it all went mad. He’s still got that CD-R in his loft somewhere and it’s a completely different version of the album. He's the only person with it. So the one that came out is a completely different version.

With Tropic of Cancer, they were on Downwards, but they were also on Blackest Ever Black. I did a record for Blackest. Juan was in Tropic of Cancer. It wasn't a movement because I hate movements. There was some real momentum happening that I think is impossible now because of the nature of everyone, Everyone is too aware, they’re all too self-aware now.

Dave: The Internet wasn't such a focal point. Sandwell District and everything that’s been mentioned here was all all word-of-mouth. It was all promoted by just talking about things.

Karl: It was really local. That's always true. And this is the whole problem with the world now. Nothing can happen at a local level anymore, because you've been told to look globally. Well, no. It was great. Being local's great.

We're talking about 2010 to 2014 really that kind of time, we're not talking about 1994 or 1996. The Internet was a thing by then. It helped drive this. It wasn't something that could have existed purely offline, but it did in its own way…

Karl: It really did. I felt that with Blackest Ever Black in particular.

I mean, we were just having our own thing in Berlin, It was very localized. We weren't following the old rules of the old type of promotion. It was local. I think that's what's missing, though. People think local scenes can't happen anymore. There'll never be another Seattle scene or a Manchester scene or anything, and whether that's good or bad… Well, yeah of course, it's bad. But I think that that was maybe the last period of time where something like that happened.

I'm not saying it was local, but it felt very local. It felt like a lot of DIY kids doing it. Well, now everyone's completely savvy. You've got fucking podcasts telling you how to start a label and run a label and get a publishing company sorted and an accountant… I kept saying in a lot of interviews after the pandemic, it's as if 98% of DJs have become children's TV presenters overnight. You do techno for a reason: because you look crap. No one wants to hear about it.

So that was the thing that obviously didn't happen then. And it was exciting because it was one of those things that was building and building and building. And, of course, it was to do with Berghain and Dave's involvement with that as well.

Dave: The great thing about it is that it was an international operation, Karl being from Birmingham, me being from New York, Juan being from LA, and then us kind of moving around. As we're talking about this, I'm getting flashes of the way this was transpiring over time. I remember standing in Juan's kitchen in Minneapolis when Juan was a nine to five worker. A really, really hard worker. And he never really gave himself completely to music because he didn't trust it.

So he was in LA, working as a creative director, and he got an offer to do the same thing but he had to relocate to Minneapolis. He was there for a year, and then I was playing a show at First Avenue with Juan in Minneapolis, and then I stayed at his house. I just remember being in his kitchen one morning, and Karl and I had been having these ongoing conversations about adding a visual aesthetic to everything. We were always searching for the right way to do this. Myspace was the platform at the time. And we didn't want to engage Sandwell District in a social media type thing.

I was like, the next thing for us is we need to inject a visual aspect to this. And I remember standing in Juan's kitchen. It was, like, 07:30 in the morning, and he woke up. He was straight to work. We're having our morning coffee, and we talked about it.

The next thing you know, he started the blog [Where Next?]. He decided that Tumblr was the right way to do it, which was also a form of social media and social networking, but different. It gave him - and us - an opportunity to express things without words. It was nonverbal communication through images, and it really resonated with people. It was a zeitgeist moment at that time, and this, I felt, was the thing that put it over the top.

Karl: It was so obvious, and people linked on to it straight away, which is kinda great, really. The thing about Tumblr was you could instantly show people what you're into, whereas, people collect records for years and years and years waiting for that dinner date with somebody they can show it all to…

[Points to a unit full of records in the background…]

Haha, or books then, or whatever. Ultimately, it's all gonna fucking end up in landfill because my daughter definitely doesn't want my records. They’re all in my mum’s loft.

The point being, it was just a great way to really express yourself visually. And Juan really ran with that. He had this really great LA aesthetic, which is very unique to LA.

It was just really amazing how he did and he started doing it. And then we started putting it on the records. Instantly, that's where it just took on something different. I've always said this: Sandwell District, the music's not even secondary. It's not just about the music. It's certainly not about the name. The name was a joke name anyway in the beginning. Sandwell District, the artless home of every British artless son and daughter. It’s viewed with suspicion like black magic. They should give us a fucking statue or a plaque or something in the town center. I think once I saw it in Rolling Stone, I thought, fucking hell. This is so subversive and funny, but then with Juan's artwork, it took on this completely different thing altogether. And then the music remained the same, but it just allowed everybody to operate in this really interesting world where we have this security, this force field of the art.

It's just by default, we do what we do. We're not into club culture, particularly. I like certain parts of it. I think Dave's the same, but that's why it really worked. We were just contrarians, really.

Dave: Yeah. I mean, I think we were like the last hurrah. Everything has become so much more conservative and businesslike and corporate in this scene. And at the time, it was really subversive.

Karl: We were, but I think what happened before us was very, very about commerce, and it was thinly veiled. A lot of that minimal stuff, it was thinly veiled. it was mediocre. I didn't like dance music in the beginning because it was all “it's about football hooligans taking ecstasy” And yeah, but they're still fucking football hooligans, and they're still into shit music. They were into shit music before and they're still into shit music now.

This idea of everyone coming together, It's not… that's why I never liked it. I liked some parts of it. I like [Jeff] Mills because I understood Jeff's influence, it was European and a lot of things that I liked and everything. “Oh, it's this big community” Well, no. It was far from that.

But through that, I've met a lot of people who I really, really like. But, yeah, come on… These people… dance music… Come on. A lot of my friends, my older friends still don't talk to me because I made dance music. I know a lot of people, not my mates, who wouldn't talk to me because I used to wear trainers at the end of the nineties. And it's because everything was tribal. I don't wear trainers anymore.

And that’s what it was. Juan loved it. He was really into it. Dave understood it really well. So that's why I lived it through them, and then they listened to me with other stuff, and that was really good.

It always felt like there's this lightheartedness that kinda runs through Sandwell, runs through your stuff as Regis, runs through British Murder Boys. There's always, like, this sense of humor there. I think you can kinda tell that you had a lot of fun making it, a lot of fun going out and playing it and performing it and and all this. But given the circumstances the album's come out of, was that still the case? Was it enjoyable making this album still, or was it like a sense of duty?

Karl: Well, actually, making the album is a fucking nightmare, and it was well before Juan died as well. It's always been extremely difficult because - I think I can speak for Dave as well - we're actually making music. We make music, but we don't write music. Writing straight lines, that’s about control, like Beefheart said. Doing this record has been very difficult for us. I don't enjoy making music.

Dave: That's true.

Karl: I enjoy being in the same studio like with the project Eros that I do. I really enjoy making that because I think of the studio in a very traditional way. But I don't think me and Dave enjoy making it. I haven't got a studio. I never really had a studio. So it was quite arduous to do it. And it was actually the case that me and Dave didn't wanna make an album, we just wanted to do the reissue because Mark Lanegan was a big fan of mine and Dave's and Juan's, and he really kept…

That blew my mind when when I read that.

Dave: It's pretty mind blowing.

Karl: The last time I saw him was at the Roundhouse, I went into his dressing room before he went on and coming out was John Paul Jones from Zeppelin. I went in and Mark gave me the test copy of his autobiography, and then when I went out, he said “you're gonna get the Sandwell album out back out!”. Him and his friend, Rich Machin [Soulsavers] they just gently persuaded us.

So that was all I really wanted to do. And then we did a compilation of all the stuff [Where Next?] and I thought, yeah, that's great. It was actually really Juan who was pushing to do a new album, me and Dave knew the hassle that had gone on before with the last record. There's there's reports in our circles of the fractious behaviour that went on between us, but that fucking made that record. It was pretty insane.

Dave: This whole process of coming back together is a bit surreal. From the initial call and offer for the Feed Forward reissue to the point where Karl and I spoke again for the first time in the better part ten years took two years for that to happen.

Juan was the one mediating. This is during lockdown and coming out of COVID. Sandwell as an act was always the two of us. But when this Feed Forward reissue came up and then, getting back on the road together again and because of everything that happened, I was like, “Juan, I don't know if I can get on stage with him. I haven't spoken to him. I don't know if we should speak and if we should get on stage. And if we do, I think that it should be the three of us”. And I really pushed for that. The whole time, Juan was like, “well, you know, Dave, it was always the two of you. I don't know if I should be involved.”

I knew I’d feel more comfortable if it was the three of us. And then there was this one night in late 2023 there was an Eros [Karl’s band with Liam Andrews and Boris Wilsdorf] gig in Berlin and a mutual friend of ours from Italy encouraged me to meet him at the show. And throughout this period of time, I kept having these intuitive nudges. When Juan would bring it up, I just couldn't get back in touch with Karl online. It needed to be in person. It needed to be face to face.

And it took two years, so at this Eros gig at Globus Karl was doing a live performance, and it was incredible. I walked in the venue. I felt it the whole time. It was like a scene out of Wings of Desire. I wanted to respect his space and I almost left without meeting him in person. But right as I was about to leave, I saw him packing up on stage, and I just walked over and said hello. It had to be this way…

Karl: When two people aren't speaking and they have a lot of friends on the periphery, they suffer because then one set of friends meets one person, one set of friends, and you don't know how to position yourself. We had a lot of mutual friends, and I just thought, well - this is in life as well - it's good to have a lot of harmony as you get on. I just thought, it's a good idea. First and foremost, we did it for the good of the project, and we need to get this music out again because a lot of time has passed just to maybe present this to people again.

We did it for the wrong reasons. We did it for the music reasons. We should have done it for the money, but we didn't.

I guess if you were going to do it for the money you could have just repressed it as it was first time out and just sold them all separately on Discogs?

Karl: Having said that, we did sign a pretty big deal. So I think that's why Juan kind of led us to doing the album. But once we did that, we had all these gigs together. And Dave and I would be doing demos. I've done stuff with Simon Shreeve. Dave has been doing stuff with his friend Sarah [Kranz] in Berlin. But it was just tentative stuff for getting together. Very skeletal. Then me, Dave, and Juan had done three shows. We did Berlin Atonal. We did Draaimolen, and then we did our last show together in Barcelona. Now from this if you're looking from the crowd to the stage, everything was amazing. People absolutely adored those shows, but I think it was quite evident behind the scenes that there was something really, really off with Juan.

I've said this before, I don't mind saying, this sense of… foreboding. I just could sense something's happened. Not not that he was gonna die, but he often romanticized death in his music, which I thought was a bit teenage. It's a bit… whatever, but you can invite a real goth element into your music and he did it with a lot of authenticity, and it was that Chicano, American Mexican kind of South American way of viewing death. I think it was very interesting when he bought into stuff. But, yeah, it just got really, really dark.

I think when we said goodbye to Juan in Barcelona I just felt… I don't know, man. It's the last time I'll see you.

He said lots of things as well that were kind of alluded to that. He knew the road he was on. When he passed away, it's just like look, everybody dies. We all have people who pass away and you can mourn that in some very private way. But, unfortunately, his passing very soon became part of this big wider spectacle because of everybody that was involved with him.

I think it became very quick very, very soon. This was kind of a lot. Something that I think me and Dave needed to protect ourselves from because it became a spectacle. And the only way you can get beyond a spectacle, I think, is just to be quiet.

Dave: We needed to be in control of it and we felt this is the right opportunity to fully express ourselves through creativity.

Karl: It was bigger than the internet for us. His death was bigger than the internet. But it was just all these things. I mean, I couldn't locate what people would think would be the appropriate emotions for it. I was left cold with a lot of it, to be honest. I was really cold and very angry about lots of stuff as well. Not confused, but it was just, but I think it's part of apparently, it's normal… I’ve been told since to feel that way, but I feel like I mean, this was right in the middle of everything.

Dave: You have to understand, we were right in the middle of touring, the reunion, and recording an album.

Karl: And then, of course, people are lovely and well-meaning but I didn't want that. I didn’t want the sympathy on me with all of it and it was just kind of… I just felt bad. The whole situation was a really bad situation.

The thing is though, what was it, David? It was a shock, but it wasn't a surprise. My idea was that we had to keep going. We had to keep working. To what end, I don't know? But we had to keep working on this project. It just seemed the right thing to do in some sort of way so that we would be closer to the centre of who we were. It was just navigating a lot of things. That's why we carried on doing it, really

Did you find it difficult being, for want of a better phrase, in the public eye?

Karl: Once it got in the Daily Mail, I went, this is fucking this is insane.

Dave: I mean, it was on CBS in The States. Growing up watching CBS, which is one of the main major stations, I've never seen anything involving dance music culture on CBS, and this was on the news.

Karl: Because of the other people involved with it (Juan died alongside his partner Simone Ling and friend Luis Vasquez of The Soft Moon), it was a classic LA rock and roll death story. But for us, it was kind of like, “fucking hell, man”. It wasn’t good on a lot of levels, really. I think it's only recently we've been able to reconcile it a little bit.

We kept going. I think we were a bit more in tune with each other. And also at that particular point, Dave had a really bad accident as well, shattered his ankle, and was confined to his fourth floor apartment in Berlin, which, on top of everything else, psychologically must have been insane for days on end doing it.

Dave: I slipped on ice walking out of my apartment

Karl: I'm into synchronicities and coincidences. It's just like all these kinds of weird things that surround us. Six weeks ago, I was involved in a serious car accident where I nearly died. It wasn't our fault. Somebody came onto the side of our road, had a heart attack, apparently. Head on collision at a hundred miles an hour, they said, 50 each way. The copper said I should be dead. My friend’s now in a wheelchair. So we've had all these, like, really weird things that have happened around all of this that have been coincidental, of course, but just extremely bad luck.

So me and Dave, we kept going, plowing through, and we'd finished the album by April. Then we listened to it about a week later, and even though it was great, I went this is not right. This is not the right record to put out because a lot of the process that made that record had been tainted by or sullied by what had happened, really. It's hard to explain that, but what I did know was we had to give it away for someone to finish and mix and make something that was a completely new record in every way possible.

That's why we did the artwork differently. So I wanted the record to sound different. I wanted it to be a listening record rather than a club record.

Dave: It was all a process of letting go.

Karl: You gotta let go of the tracks. You gotta let go of the past. You gotta let go of the artwork.

I'm assuming you normally mix and master your own records?

Karl: Yeah. Well, we've always mixed most people most people do that. Actually, Dave was one of the first people who actually used… who was it?

Dave: Tobias Freund

Karl: I went, wow. That's a really, really brilliant way, because what you do, you've made the record. It's normal. In every other form of music, it's normal to do that.

With Techno everybody produces and sits at home and does it themselves. And that's what people have always done. A lot of my contemporaries, that's all they do. They never give their music for anyone else to mix. But as a consequence, the ideas become, not formulaic, but you paint yourself into a corner every time. There's only one set of ideas. You might be holding down your idea, but if you open that up to other people, it's amazing and actually being inspired by Dave, doing that first, I did my stuff with Boris (Wilsdorf) who’d recorded Einsturzende Neubauten for my last album, Hidden In This Is The Light That You Miss. Ever since I think I'd always keep doing that. But dance music, yeah, it's totally not done, but we did it this time.

We did it with our friend, Rivet, who's just done a great album on Mego. I really like that record. And I thought, “wow, that could be good”. And he was a friend of Juan as well, so he was sympathetic to the cause, the sadness of the situation.

And the people who did the artwork Claude [Eden, Six Six Seconds], who did all the original Downwards stuff. She was a friend of Juan, a friend of Camilla [Lobo], who’s Juan’s Ex-wife who was Tropic of Cancer. Jim [Siegel, Vivid Oblivion] was our friend as well. A lot of people are very sympathetic to the cause and did it for the right reasons. That's why it felt correct, you see.

Dave: It was beyond the two or three of us and involved a nice team of people. And that was really inspired by Rich [Machin] who runs the label. I feel he did an excellent job at at A&R-ing the record and encouraging us to step out of our comfort zones and and try something a bit different. And I think that's definitely reflected in the in the album

Karl: That's because Rich is a pro, he's worked with Mike Patton one day, with Dave Gahan the next. A lot of the things he tried to apply to us, we listened to it, we're open to it whereas a lot of people, are like, “Oh, no compromise. No compromise.” Well, that's complete nonsense, you have to compromise. Iggy was interviewed once, wasn't he? And in that he was asked what did Bowie teach you the most? He said “how to compromise”. And it's true. Otherwise, you'd be living in a ditch.

The album’s being released by Point of Departure Records, which is distributed by PIAS…

Karl: Yeah, Universal man!

How was that for you both? You've always been independent. You've run distribution. You've run labels. How was it to step back and just be the artist?

Karl: It was interesting the element of everything else that you actually had to do. You have to do a lot of work because there were a lot of things expected of you that you didn't have to do before. And just the way they do stuff, I find it really interesting. I mean, it’s not a finely-tuned operation, but it’s not archaic, it's just so different. And it's everything I was against, I guess. I wanted for one time in my glittering career, to try and just do something like that. And it was… yeah. But it's been really good, to be honest. It's really good. There's never been any cross words or, “you can't do this, you can't do that.” They've gone with everything. I suppose, if you’re moving units, it's all good, right?

Dave: I think it was great to have the experience, but I don't know if we'd operate like that.

Karl: I mean, it's not something that I'd operate in. But, of course, the music industry doesn't operate like that anymore. The whole blueprint for labels now is completely different. It's not about breaking artists anymore. There's no artists anymore anyway. It's just all singer-songwriters or whatever. There's nothing really extreme about anything any more. Just this absolute mediocrity is it’s only extremity. But that's what people love.

Dave: But if anything, this whole process is what brought Karl and I back together, and it was worth it all for that. It's like, we lost nine or ten years, and maybe that was necessary, but at this point, we're just grateful. I think we're the closest we've ever been, and we owe a lot of that to to Juan and losing him in the process. I mean, it's all a bit bittersweet, but it is what it is. We can't change it.

He's not with us and what has happened has happened. And then in the middle of all of this, Karl gets in this accident. He was in the accident and what I experienced when hearing about that was just like, “what the fuck?” It was enough that we lost Juan. I couldn't imagine losing him also.

Karl: I couldn't do that to people. I couldn't leave them just with Dave.

We do what we do infinitely better than anybody else. That's what it is, the Groucho Marx thing “I don't wanna belong to a club that would have me as a member,” but that's what it is. It's so easy to do dance music, you know. Just fucking idiots… Don't quote me on that… Actually, someone's already quoted me on that.

In the middle of all that, there's us and to be able to plant our foot in it - with merit- for four decades, I mean, that's great. And I'm pretty proud of that. I think it's just about being delusional. That's what all great artists are, really. I mean, I listen to probably the same 15 records I've always listened to. The name of your newsletter being one of those records.

Fantastic record…

Karl: That's one of my favourite records of all time. It's just about applying your influence and going about using your influences so that's what we try to do. And more and more now, our influences have become more obscure because people haven't heard about stuff.

The other weekend, we played Native Love by Divine in New York. And everyone was like “oh my god. This is new?” And I was like, wow. This is interesting. This is so interesting that people haven't heard Native Love by Divine. And I thought, “wow, there's potential here now to carry on forever!”

Why do you think that is? Do you think there's this almost like a lost generation of people that don't buy records. They maybe they didn't come up necessarily in the Spotify era of everything on tap but they came up maybe a few years earlier like in the pirate era or the iTunes era, it was all there but they still had to look for it?

Karl: I think I think it's a lost well, it's a lost generation. I think it's been maybe thirty years now. So it's a lot.

It's because I think nothing's really nothing really happened of any real significance in real time. No great bands, no really really, really fucking great bands. It's why people are losing their minds over the biggest dickheads and enemies of beauty Oasis. It's just nothing happened. When I went into Rough Trade a few years ago and I saw Haircut 100 in the post-punk section and I saw a Fleetwood Mac album for £50, I went, “you can fuck off.”

You know what? You can have it. I'll go to record shops now. I don't even know what to do with them. I'll just flick through them. Oh, I don't want that, and I get overwhelmed. Interestingly, Juan was… because I’d suggest some things for the blog… And he just had no real direct cultural reference with it because I put this early picture of Adam Ant on there.

He was “I can't put Adam Ant on there” because his understanding of Adam & the Ants was American

Like they knew Prince Charming only?

Karl: Right, The Ants were the best fucking punk band that we had. He couldn't know, so I found that interesting. You might have been exposed to all this music now, but tell me how much a bag of chips was in 1982? Be down there on the fucking street. It's the same. I might be able to sort of be exposed to all the Velvet Underground records and everything. I've got no fucking real concept what it would be like street level in fucking New York in 1968 as much as I'd love to.

Dave: How much was a bag of chips in 1982?

Karl: 50p. Cod & chips, 90p. Curry sauce one pound 10. Next!

[Laughs] It's about £40 now. The future's dead because the past won't stop happening. That's pretty much true, I think. They’re all having a good time, I think.

Maybe music's just lost its… maybe it's… something else is happening that's just as important right now that we don't know about in youth culture. But it might not be music.

I’m sure we all had that, once you get into music, you start to speak a different language your parents don't speak. And then when you get to more real music, you get a language that people at school can't speak as well. You got three or four friends who speak the same language. That's amazing. But it goes back to the local thing, doesn’t it? People don't wanna be local anymore. They wanna be global. They can have it. I want to be on my own, with my own records, the four records that I like.

Dave: It’s interesting listening to everything that Karl just said and just thinking about how we came up and were exposed to music. I think that Karl and I really are really nostalgic and and romanticized those periods of the way that that music hit us,.

Karl: The problem is though Dave, we're still fucking involved with it. So it's not linear. We are still the same 13, 14, 15 year old kids. It's like, we're living in this box. It's shaken up and in one day it's ‘79, the next day it's nineteen… it's 2010. And that's why I think that we get slightly confused by stuff sometimes.

I put a record out, I made it in my bedroom at my mum's house and three or four months later I was on this dancefloor in New York City listening to it and it was just that was that… my takeaway from any of this is that its worth it. I love all of that and that's what Sandwell District is about. It is loved and we do understand and we're very, very aware of its mythology. I think we're very, very aware of how to do the right thing now as well.

Will we do anything else? Probably not in this guise, no. Me and Dave will always keep working together. Sandwell District is always a name that we'll be associated with and put on flyers and DJ under, yeah.

In general we did the right thing and that's all we can do. I think anything other wouldn't be the right thing. We just gotta carry on. But never say never…

End Beginnings is out digitally and at all good record stores now.

Thanks to Karl & Dave, Zoe Miller and Josh Baines.

Surrender To The Unknown

On to this weeks new music then, as always a great selection to get through.

Sandwell District - End Beginnings [Point of Departure]

Just when you thought it was safe to start making shit, mediocre techno again, Sandwell District return to show us how it’s all done. Up there with anything the collective have done previously and possibly the most important album released this year.

DJ Persuasion & Liftin Spirits - Control (Movin’ On) [Liftin Spirit]

Arch-junglist DJ Persuasion teams up with DnB OG Liftin’ Spirits for this first single from their upcoming album. If you like that tuff 90’s jungle sound then this one’s for you.

Viz - Danse des Larmes [Heat Crimes]

Gothic-influenced dark ambient business here, sounding somewhat like the soundtrack for a long-forgotten 80’s movie about some lost city somewhere. Good stuff all round.

aya - Hexed [Hyperdub]

I still can’t get over the artwork on this. Ugh. Listening to this is like watching one of the weirder Harmony Korine movies. Enjoyable for the most part, WTF?! in others.

Seefeel - Quique [Too Pure]

Seefeel’s pre-Warp debut album reissued and updated for 2025. More accessible than the Warp albums, the fact they were making stuff like this back in 93 is still mind-blowing.

Inkasso & ML - Fashion Recession [Stroom]

Sitting somewhere between Boards of Canada and Actress, with a slight hint of snd in there, this album is best enjoyed in a smoky living room, late at night.

Daily Toll - Killincs [Tough Love]

A five-minute long slab of post-punk direct from that Aussie underground lineage that’s already bought us so many of our favourite records. One to watch for sure.

Schatteraru - Ubers Jahr [Hands in the Dark]

For fans of that trippy, neu-folky stuff so brilliantly purveyed by the likes of Brannten Schnurre this one takes you on a journey through a German winter, spring, summer and autumn.

That’s it for this week, back next week with more of the same! Please share if you enjoyed, and support your local record dealer.