Last month, Richard Dawson, Newcastle’s finest spinner of tales, backed always with some jaggedly beautiful guitar, released Nothing Important, his fifth album and first for Weird World. Now, in an excellent collision of Quietus favourites, London-based electronic producer Karen Gwyer has done a remix of one of the track’s two 16-minute pieces, ‘The Vile Stuff’, and we’ve been given a first play. Looping one single passage of Dawson’s heavily drone-touched guitar playing, Gwyer laces it with a thick tranche of synth chords, the beginnings of what becomes an excellently psychedelic reworking. Eschewing the vocals, she builds up an alternate landscape to the close-focus place-specifics of the original track, a vista populated by jogging, bumbag-wearing Pepperami fans and those ruminating a move to a Halifax Buddhist monastery, instead one that teases out the Eastern-sounding elements of Dawson’s music, underpinning it with a collision of strings shifting in and out of phase, everything slowly removing until we’re left with a closing boil-down of orchestral discord.
Listen above and read our interviews with both Dawson and Gwyer.
