Bleep

Disciples are really doing right by fans of His Name Is Alive of late. After dropping the archival releases All The Mirrors In The House and the 6TEEN OK cassette, the label now deliver Return To Never, the follow-up to All The Mirrors… and the second of three compilations focussing on tracks made by the one born Warren Defever between 1979 and 1986. What we have here are formative works dating from Defever’s teenage years (sometimes even earlier). In these tracks - and the accompanying interview and inner-sleeve essay by My Bloody Valentine/Galaxie 500 chronicler Mike McGonigal - we see a young Defever honing the techniques that would serve him so well in the project’s successful later years.

Much of the record comprises beautiful greyscale drones and ambiences that often come doused in liberal amounts of tape hiss. This sound is particularly apparent in the first half of the album, and the manner in which one Basinski-esque vignette bleeds into another would have you think that these tracks were conceived together as a whole album rather than being the disparate bedroom experiments of an adolescent. Defever’s wide-ranging musical interests bring more variation into Return To Never as it goes on - the album’s back-third is more torrid, with an increasingly industrial/concrete flavour to the distorted tones and audio manipulations.

Those who dug Disciples’ His Name Is Alive drop All The Mirrors In The House should brace themselves for Return To Never, the latest set of late-70s/early- and mid-80s rarities to emerge from Warren Defever’s vaults.