Sasha’s last solo studio album, ‘Andrawndagger’, was released in 2002, some 14 years ago. Something of a success in the UK charts (reaching number 18), it did rub some reviewers up the wrong way though, this colourful review from Pitchfork’s Paul Cooper immediately comes to mind: “Shut it, Sashmate. If you really expected people to enjoy this record, you’re loonier than you look. It’s as wet as a Welsh spring morning! I bet this disc’s feistier moments only came about because that Junkie XL bloke you persuaded to join you spiked your Horlicks with a dash of Red Bull.”
Clearly, then, you can forgive Sasha for not wanting to do another album in a hurry.
Well, Paul Cooper me ol’ mucker – you’re not going to be happy: Sashmate is releasing a brand-new album via Late Night Tales, and it’s largely an ambient affair, the perfect soundtrack for one of those wet Welsh spring mornings you speak of.
From what Sasha has said, he didn’t choose to write an album, the album chose him: “Tracks like this kept building up, until finally last summer my frustration boiled over,” explains the producer. “We’d made so many tunes that I couldn’t remember the names of half of them: What was that thing with a bass sound and a string line? It drove me mental. At the same time as we were logging these tracks, I was listening to the Jon Hopkins’ Late Night Tales and I thought a lot of the music we’d been working on was in the same vibe. So I sent the music over to Late Night Tales and they really liked it.
“Initially, I thought we’d just do a Late Night Tales compilation with maybe a few pieces of my own music. But as we went through everything we’d worked on in the last two years, we realised we had about 50 pieces of music. So we started editing and compiling: ‘Scene Delete’ is the end result.”
So there you go, Sasha is releasing an album made up of 21 ambients works, and if you listen really, really closely you can hear Paul Cooper shooting himself.
Buy:
LNT pre-order: po.st/sashaLNT
iTunes pre-order: geni.us/scenedelete
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