Spiritualized are continuing their campaign of reissuing their first four albums with their second album, Pure Phase, in June.
Pure Phase was originally released in March 1995, three years on from their debut, Lazer Guided Melodies. Briefly renamed Spiritualized Electric Mainline, the album saw Sean Cook join proceedings on bass while the Balanescu Quartest added string arrangements. You can watch a video for album track ‘Let It Flow’ above.
"You can’t really compare this record to any other because of how we mixed it; in such an ‘incorrect’ way," Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce says of the album. "We mixed the tracks twice but I couldn’t decide which one I liked better so we said, ‘let’s have them both’. Both of them were on tape so we spent hours cutting them into usable sections. If you run two things together in parallel you get this kind of Hawkwind effect (phase), which gets deeper as they drift away from being ‘locked’, so we had to keep re-locking on a bass drum every eight or ten bars and it took forever.
"If you listen to the isolated parts, everything is incredibly simple, the horns, the slide, all these little motifs and they lock together like some strange kind of machine. Something like Kraftwerk was the nearest thing in my musical vocabulary at the time. Great rock and roll music is like systems, it has its own endless cycle.
"I wish I could do it now, to mix things twice and throw it together and end up with this magic world. It was a thing that was out of our control and it just sounded better than we could have imagined so we chased it."
The reissue of Pure Phase will be pressed across four sides of 180g vinyl, much like the recent re-release of Lazer Guided Melodies, which kickstarted Spiritualized’s current reissue campaign.
Fat Possum will release Pure Phase on June 11, 2021.
