Working Men’s Club‘s self-titled debut album was due to drop today, for reasons obvious, it is now due in October. Looking at the blank space left by the postponement, 18 year old wonder-kid 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 ‘MEGAMIX’ that simultaneously acts as a taster and a condensed electronic reworking of parts of the album.
Syd would like to note that:
“It doesn’t 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.“
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The MEGAMIX will be available to stream only via www.megamix.workingmensclub.net from 10am today, Friday 5th June 2020 and will be streaming on a continuous loop until midnight on 12th June.
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“Initially it seemed a bit of a crazy idea,” says Minsky-Sargeant. “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, ‘let’s fucking go for it’. One could of course argue that crazy ideas are what’s 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 band’s perpetual forward momentum.
Minsky-Sargeant teamed up with the band’s producer Ross Orton – under the moniker ‘Minsky Rock’ – and the pair worked remotely to create the unique reimagining. “Ross 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.”
The result is a “reinterpretation rather than a remix” 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 12” extended mix. Albeit one that takes on different forms and explores new terrain altogether. “It takes a number of parts of the album but different versions [and edits] of the songs,” he says. “I’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.”
There’s something of a northern lineage that can be traced here too, in that the 12” 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. “It’s free flowing and electronic, rather than sounding like a band,” Minsky-Sargeant says of the mix. “It gives an insight into what the record is like, as well as the future of the band, but it’s also something totally exclusive. It’s very much its own thing.”
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✦ PRE-ORDER THE ‘WORKING MEN’S CLUB’ ALBUM HERE ✦
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