The first original Sandwell District record in 13 years, End Beginnings, arrives at a low ebb for Serious Dance Music. The big DJs are called Fingerblast and Fart in the Club; the even bigger ones wear dressing gowns and horse masks. You can launch a career by going viral in a fake toilet or a real kitchen. And the future of physical media appears to be rocks (£1,000, please). In a recent interview, Karl O’Connor and Dave Sumner proposed End Beginnings as an attempt to save music from “stupidity.” But the album is less dour than that declaration suggests. Sandwell District built their catalog on vast architectural space and to-the-millimeter precision; now, more than a decade since their last record, End Beginnings is the sound of the collective letting loose.
Much of the appeal of Sandwell District, the “techno boy band” that blew up in acrimony in 2012—there were fistfights, airline bans, and one hotel afterparty that ended only after military intervention—lay in their totalizing sense of hermetic perfection, a modernist’s Platonic ideal of what techno could be. (Their late-2010 album Feed-Forward, reissued two years ago, remains one of the genre’s finest LPs of the 21st century.) Alongside this spellbinding purism, an unholy union of Säkhö and Carl Craig, came an unusually striking visual style: a psychonautic peep show of jaw-headed bikers and rockabilly ghouls that helped insulate the music from the militant dullness typical of dance music’s conservative wing, for whom only mannered reserve will do.
The current Sandwell District lineup is missing one of its pillars: the irreplaceable DJ, producer, and visual artist Juan Mendez, aka Silent Servant, who, alongside his wife, Simone Ling, and friend Luis Vasquez, died last year. (O’Connor recently told Resident Advisor that he also nearly perished earlier this year, narrowly surviving a 100 mph head-on collision.) The rust-on-white artwork for End Beginnings is a deliberate break from Mendez’s leather droogs and inky voids, though the title is taken from one of his unfinished artworks that had been slated for this album. In a similar spirit, some of the music also pivots away from the collective’s established jet-black forms. In an electro track like “Citrinitas Acid,” a doleful android tearjerker, O’Connor, Sumner, and their expanded roster of collaborators—among them Mønic and Rivet, who helped O’Connor and Sumner finish the LP—make fruitful tweaks to the group’s gloomy register.
