Sherwood & Pinch

Late Night Endless

Image of Sherwood & Pinch - Late Night Endless
Record Label
On-U Sound

About this item

'Late Night Endless' is the first album by (Adrian) Sherwood (On-U Sound label boss) and Pinch (Tectonic head honcho) and the culmination of two years in the studio developing, re-dubbing and deconstructing tracks. It finds the highest common factor between the two's techniques, making it impossible to see where one musical personality ends and the other starts. It touches on the urban swing of UK garage on ‘Music Killer (Dub)' and 'Gimme Some More (Tight Like That)', on interstellar 90s ambient dub on 'Wild Birds Sing', on the mystical minimalism of Pinch's first releases on 'Africa 138' - but none of these stylistic diversions are out of place; they all seem completely of a piece with the heavyweight, ancient-futurist dub pulse that runs under everything.

It's an intergenerational meeting of minds, a fusing of two stories, a collision of the (pun intended) tectonic plates of international soundsystem culture. The currents that link post-punk, jungle, dubstep, almighty reggae, techno, Jamaica, Ramsgate and Bristol all come together in a single small DJ booth in London then explode outwards again through truck-sized speakers, through long weeks of studio experimentation, through days and nights without sleep in Tokyo, and are finally condensed on a record that reverberates with the apocalyptic echoes of all that came before and the rumbling threat of a dark future.

The connection was already there. Adrian Sherwood built up a vast catalogue of music through the 1980s as producer to the vast and sprawling dub-industrial-electro collective that was On-U Sound, taking in Dub Syndicate, Tackhead, New Age Steppers and many many more. As a young boy, Rob ‘Pinch’ Ellis grew up on it. “My older brother had loads of On-U albums,” he says, “and taped them all for me. Listening to all that was definitely my introduction to dub – we didn't have a lot of reggae around where I grew up in Newport [South Wales] – and it meant that when I heard jungle, drum'n'bass, trip hop and stuff later on, it made complete sense to me.”

This is an exciting record because it's full of hints of how much more there is to come from this meeting of minds. It's exciting because of the history that pounds and pulses through it. More than that, though, it's exciting because of what it does to you as a listener right here and now in the present; as the sample of Andy Fairley's vocal from the early days of On-U says in 'Precinct of Sound' says: “your head will become a crazy bulbous punch bag of sound”... and what more could you ask?

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