From the Top Drawer XXXI - Mutagen

I've been trying to do my own rip of Mutagen's album 'Inner Sense' for quite a while now, but technical difficulties have prevented me from achieving a tape rip that comes up to standard for upload. The combination of an ageing cassette and my ageing tape deck just hasn't worked and the rips have sounded muffled and indistinct, maybe due to the oxide coming away from the tape. Young people today don't know what we used to have to put up with! Crisp digital copies of easily transferable music with no quality degradation or danger of getting mangled due to dirty pinchwheels and dodgy transport mechanisms are taken for granted in the 21st Century, but this wasn't always the case 20 or more years ago :-)

Anyway the good folks from Mutagen have been in touch to tell me that they have made available two albums on Bandcamp for free - 'Shrine In Your Mind' from 1992 (already posted HERE) and 'Inner Sense' itself from 1993.

You are invited to go to http://mutagen.bandcamp.com/ and download the album files from there.

Also please go to their Facebook page and leave a comment, picture or story if you have any...

Many thanks to the band.

Here's a the first part of a live set which the band performed in Winchester in 1992 -

From the Top Drawer XXIV - Astral Engineering

Before Astral Engineering's album 'Chronoglide' got picked up by Ambient Soho's Worm Interface label and became their first CD release in 1994, Brighton-based producer Simon Rees had distributed that album on cassette. It became a well-regarded ambient dub album that captured the atmosphere of many chill-out rooms of the time and remains something of an enduring classic.

However, previous to this Simon had released another less well-known cassette album called 'Network Space' and it is this that we have here. No track names are given on the artwork and no date of release (probably 1992 or 1993) so details are sketchy, but the music is outstanding and fans of the later CD will certainly not be disappointed.

Ripped @320kbps from an original cassette as two side-long tracks

Download it HERE

--- February 2012 UPDATE ---

Simon Rees has been in touch to let me know that there is now an Astral Engineering Bandcamp page from where you can download a digital remaster of 'Network Space' as well as pages where you can download 'Chronoglide' and 'Music for Insomniacs', the last of which was never released in full.

Please visit -
http://astralengineering.bandcamp.com/

From the Top Drawer IX - Mutagen

Mutagen were formed in Brighton in the early 1990s and played a mixture of what at the time might have been termed 'crusty' techno mixed with dub and electric guitars. The line-up originally included an ex-member of Ring (Ian) and in a later incarnation a synth player (Simon) who would go on to play as a solo electronic act called Astral Engineering and release a CD on the Worm Interface (Ambient Soho) label.

I remember first seeing them play at the Deptford Urban Free Festival that used to take place in Fordham Park in the summer and thinking that they were pretty impressive and fresh sounding. Mutagen featured vocals as well and the live set quite often included dancers and performers of various kinds. I like the combination of guitar and electronics, the organic with the inorganic, it seems to work well as long as the music doesn't stray into cheesy and predictable song structures.

 

Thinking about the Deptford Festival, there used to be an equivalent event in Brighton called the Brighton Urban Free Festival (B.U.F.F.) which took place on the Level over a couple of days at a weekend in the summer. I think there were noise complaints from the locals (who even to this day seem only too pleased to put up with the Fun Fair which arrives for a noisy week to 10 days regularly throughout the year - commercial/money-making, you see...ah, that's all right then) and the BUFF had to move. There was a great day out in 1995 in Wild Park which seemed to be ideal for something the size of this festy, but a year later it moved again to Stanmer Park for a day, after which a minimal number of complaints about noise to the police (from over the other side of the A27!) meant that it was never staged in the town again. So much for democracy - it seems that if there's ever a danger of anyone enjoying themselves in Britain somebody else will disapprove of it, and even if this represents the minority, the law always will take their side and get the thing shut down. The Puritanical streak still persists in this country.

There seems to be little information online about the band apart from this -
http://www.mokshaproductions.com/Mutagen_Brighton.htm

What we have here then, is what I believe to be their first tape release called 'Shrine - In Your Mind' which is dated 1992.

Ripped from the original cassette @320kbps, the track titles can be found on this scan -

Get it HERE