About

1994 second album by the trio of Andrew Weatherall, Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns, unavailable on vinyl and CD since original release. A concept album with accompanying text for each track by James Woodbourne, it also includes additional production by Portishead and Mr Scruff. Remastered from the original tapes by Matt Colton, contains “Theme” for the firsttime on the 2LP edition.

By the time this record came out towards the end of ‘94, The Sabres Of Paradise had evolved from a production trio into a fully fledged band, embarking on live tours and augmented for the stage by additional members such as Rich Thair, from Warp labelmates Red Snapper, and Phil Mossman, later to join LCD Soundsystem. Tapped by Noel Gallagher to support Oasis at enormodomes, the group opted instead to play clubs, studentunions, and infamously, a car park in Central London. Their tour adverts contained small print specifying a policy of “no jugglers, no fire eaters, no flutes and no hippies with lawyers”.

The studio sound had shifted radically as well, utilising samples (notably on the 1930s voodoo jazz inflected “Wilmot”), live instrumentation (the heavy twang guitar riff of “Tow Truck”) and a deep love of film scores audible throughout, from theblock party funk of “Theme” to the noir-ish soundscapes of the title track. The sense of the album being a soundtrack itself is underpinned by the accompanying text for each track, rumoured to have been penned by Weatherall himself under a pseudonym, each text fragment joining up to form a suitably grimy, low-lit short story.

The Guardian later summed up Haunted Dancehall as “techno’s first concept album”.  — (via Label)
—

After releasing Sabresonic, the Sabres of Paradise decided to give their sound a facelift. The trio of Andrew Weatherall, Jagz Kooner, and Gary Burns set aside the surprisingly straight-ahead techno sounds of their previous work and shot off into a variety of directions, adding trip-hop, speaker-rattling dub, spy themes, library music, and lopsided funk to the mix on Haunted Dancehall.

It's a gritty, constantly surprising record that displays more of the genre-smashing appeal of Weatherall's remix work and along the way invents noir techno. It started life as something of a concept album with liner notes by Irvine Welsh detailing the outlines of the story. Though the group replaced his work, the idea is still there, and the record feels like a cinematic stumble through the shadow-choked, rain-soaked streets of London late on a desperate night. 

Unlike Sabresonic, which seemed based more for club listening, this is a record for headphones. These are songs masquerading as techno tracks, with all the ebb and flow one would expect from a thoughtful composition. Even the tracks that unspool over long running times - like the fantastic electro dub delight "Duke of Earlsfield" - never feel overly repetitive, with the trio baking enough interest into each excursion to keep things riveting. They also never fail to add nice touches that range from thumping beats, like on "Theme", to very nice live instrumentation ("Tow Truck"), ideal samples ("Wilmot"), and tweaked synth tones ("Jacob Street 7am") in their pursuit of the perfect mix of storytelling and sound. This record is a much more exciting manifestation of Weatherall's take-no-prisoners approach that shows just how far electronic music can stretch, especially when the creators cast aside the rules and follow their hearts. 

It's impossible not to hear this album as anything other than a call to arms to other producers, letting them know that electronic music can be more than bleeps and bloops: it can tell a story, it can challenge expectations, and it can feel just as important and exhilarating as anything any "real" band could concoct. — (via AllMusic)

↓
Label: Warp Records
Format: 2 x Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue, Remastered, Stereo
Reissued: 2025 / Original: 1994
Genre: Electronic
Style: Leftfield, Dub, Downtempo

File under: Electronic // Leftfield
⦿