Bleep

Return Versions

This is an LP which has spawned from His Name Is Alive's Return To Never collection, a compilation put out by Disciples Records consisting of archival ambient/industrial recordings made by His Name Is Alive mastermind Warren Defever between 1979 and 1986. However, while Return To Never was a largely weightless affair full of greyscale ambiences and haunted textures, Return Versions blows up the workshop. With the assistance of Michigan-based artist Walking Trails, Defever conjures a set of ultra-heat-treated loops here which teeter on the border between leftfield hip-hop and industrial looping.

The pensive, often rather shadowy textures of Return To Never are supercharged here, and the newly-monolithic sounds recall Prurient and bvdub. When these textures are then brought together with cavernous drum takes, as they are across much of Return Versions, the result nods to the likes of African Head Charge and This Heat. However, Return Versions also maintains Return To Never’s dreamstate qualities - particularly on ‘To Remember 2 Version’ and ‘Last Thing Thought Of Version’, where the rhythms are less pronounced and atmospherics take centre-stage.

Tracks from His Name Is Alive’s Return To Never compilation are remixed to create evocative versions on the new Disciples Records drop Return Versions.

Versions Returned

Ultra-abstract hip-hop, lo-fi atmospheres and industrial beat-tracking come together on the new Disciples Records drop Versions Returned. As the title implies, Versions Returned is a version album of a version album and features two of Disciples’ definitive acts. In order to create the record, Washington, D.C.’s Model Home wreaked havoc with Return Versions, the His Name Is Alive LP which is itself a set of remixes of previous HNIA drop Return To Never.

What came out of all this duplicating, dubbing and reworking is a moody collection full of tape hiss and murky atmospheres. Patrick Cain, Model Home’s sonic mastermind, leads the listener into a shadow-realm of textural drones and beats so scuffed up they almost dissolve into the mixes around them. Vocalist NAPPYNAPPA skulks amidst everything, his lackadaisical vocals often turned alien with distortion or manipulation. On ‘Late Night’ he delivers a soulful sung koan, whereas elsewhere on the Versions Returned NAPPYNAPPA’s technoid chatter startles you with the way it blurts out of the mix. The resulting sonic soup is eerie and strangely psychedelic, drawing on everyone from the Caretaker, Coil, Shabazz Palaces and Hype Williams yet also remaining definitively its own thing.

Model Home turn out an extraordinary collection of post-industrial hip-hop music on Versions Returned, their reworking of His Name Is Alive’s Return Versions.