Working Men's Club

Megamix

Image of Working Men's Club - Megamix
Record Label
Heavenly Recordings

About this item

THIS IS A RECORD STORE DAY 2020 RELEASE AVAILABLE ONLINE ONLY AS PART OF THE AUGUST 29TH DROP DAY AT 6PM.
LIMITED TO ONE PER PERSON.


Working Menís Club hotly anticipated, self-titled debut album was due to drop this June, now, for reasons obvious to most of us, it is due October. Looking at the blank space left by the postponement, 18 year old wonderkid frontman Syd Minsky-Sargeant decided to utilise his free time, in lockdown, and capitalise on the creative momentum the band has garnered. The result is a 21-minute continuous ëMEGAMIXí that simultaneously acts as a taster and a condensed electronic reworking of parts of the album. ìOur album would have been released today but we had to push the release back due to Covid. It doesnít feel like a particularly apt time to be self promoting anything at all however we wanted to give something to the people who pre-ordered the album on what would of the original release date,î says Minsky-Sargeant. ìInitially it seemed a bit of a crazy idea to go and remix an album we've just made that isn't even out yet. But once we got into it we were like, ëlet's fucking go for ití. One could of course argue that crazy ideas are whatís needed in such crazy times but, in reality, what has been produced is less of a chaotic and scatterbrain idea and more a coherent artistic statement in line with the bandís perpetual forward momentum. Minsky-Sargeant teamed up with the bandís producer Ross Orton - under the moniker ëMinsky Rockí, a recently started project under which they recently completed a Jarvis Cocker remix - and the pair worked remotely to create the unique reimagining. ìRoss has a studio in Sheffield and I have a bit of one at home. So I would play a synth part and then send him the file over and he'd put it into his computer and then bring it up on a shared screen. I could see his interface and we'd mix it like that. It was like being in the same room.î The result is a ìreinterpretation rather than a remixî says Minsky-Sargeant. Over its seamlessly flowing duration, as it unfurls in hypnotic and infectious grooves - teasing snippets of songs as they weave in and out - the mix plays out like a classic 12î extended mix. Albeit one that takes on different forms and explores new terrain altogether. ìIt takes a number of parts of the album but different versions [and edits] of the songs,î he says. ìI've played new parts on more or less everything. Some tracks I've taken out the guitar parts and re-done them with synths or replaced bass lines with synths.î Thereís something of a northern lineage that can be traced here too, in that the 12î band remixes were something of a mainstay of Manchester bands like New Order and A Certain Ratio, and in a similar spirit, WMC are a new young band pushing, and crossing, the boundaries of where guitar and electronic music can interlink and overlap. ìIt's free flowing and electronic, rather than sounding like a band,î Minsky-Sargeant says of the mix. ìIt gives an insight into what the record is like, as well as the future of the band, but itís also something totally exclusive. It's very much its own thing.î

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