Sheepscar Light Industrial

Daniel Thomas & Midwich - Twenty-three Taels
Sheepscar Light Industrial
SLI 001. 3” CDR. 50 Copies

Mel O’Dubhslaine - I Can Remember The Faces Of All The Grebs At My School
Sheepscar Light Industrial
SLI 002. 3” CDR. 50 Copies




Still in Leeds we find Daniel Thomas with his shiny new Sheepscar Light Industrial label. A label that sends its wares out in to the world in generic, pill bottle sleeves at the cost of a measly thirty bob. A label that makes all its releases available for download and a website where you can listen to everything for free. That's all the boxes ticked before I even tell you that the SLI website is itself a thing of minimal black and white clarity that even a fool like me can navigate without getting all grumpy.

Concentrating on ‘electronic, experimental, improvised, psychedelic, drone and noise’ SLI has got things off to a marvelous start by delivering a suitably lo-fi groan like industrial drone from Thomas & Midwich and a set of thirteen surreal quirk-ettes from Mel O’Dubhslaine.

‘Grebs’ contains tracks that range in length from seventeen seconds to two minutes and nine seconds and with the tracks flying past you at a not inconsiderable rate of knots the sounds of parping, randomly played synth keys and computers talking to each other become even more surreal than if they were lengthier tracks on a lengthier format. Track titles like ‘But What Is Known About The Man Who Stalked The Street Attacking Lone Women’ further add to the all round ‘what the fuck’ quality. Apparently O’Dubhslaine has been experimenting with an electronic instrument that manipulates breath flow the results of which are the most remarkable I’ve heard from her. Quite unclassifiable and going so far as to subvert the style of the label by containing so many tracks that an insert has to be issued. The three inch format appears to be the soup de jour for labels releasing experimental material and with sounds as adventurous as this it suits it perfectly.

‘Twenty-three Taels’ meanwhile is twenty one minutes worth of a gently chiming hypnotic two note drone underneath which are buried the scouring sounds of steel plates having their rust removed to the accompaniment of a suction pump hitting the last dregs of a bunded sump. Barely shifting from its inception it moves serenely throughout its length with only the suction sounds becoming slightly more urgent. This coming together of label cheese Daniel Thomas and the bearded wonder that is Rob Hayler shows, I assume, the face of the label that the world will see the most of. Time will tell.

A good start then and one that has already seen another four releases in the shape of Mexican guitarist Miguel Pérez, former denizen of Leeds Michael Clough, Hagman and [of course] Midwich.  


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