Andrew Weatherall - Slow Electric Vol. 1 (Massive Mellow Mix)

Just before the COVID pandemic truly hit the world, Andrew Weatherall passed away at the age of 56 years. There is little value of rehashing the importance of his contributions to modern electronic music but to me personally he’s an icon of taste. I’m fascinated by Weatherall’s path in life, where he intentionally forfeited fame and glory (as a potential superstar DJ) for what he believed was the right path artistically for him. His view on music and broad taste is something I still use as a guiding star personally when exploring new music and the connections between tracks.

Weatherall produced and released a wide variety of mixes (thankfully collected on the ‘Weatherdrive’) ranging from 90s rave & breakbeat, onto the minimal techno era of the 2000s with Hypercity all the way to the throwback deep disco of the 2010s but one mix stands apart as different from most released work. “Slow Electric Vol.1” is a mix of mostly slower moving electronic music and for me this is one of the best expressions of Weatheralls broad and eclectic taste in music, many of the tracks on this mix are so obscure that they never even saw a digital release, let alone a streaming release. The mix “Slow Electric Vol.1” is also commonly called “Massive Mellow Mix” and was chronicled about by Kirk Degiorgio for ResidentAdvisor.

Kirk gets some facts wrong in the article but the thing he’s absolutely spot on about is the debate about the tracks which adds to the mysticism around this mix. Noone seems to have a good handle on when it was made or what tracks were on it. On top of that, the only available ripped version is a cassette recording that’s been spliced together at various points to mask over recording errors, coupled with aggressive audio compression and generational tape loss.

If you listen to the mix from YouTube you can clearly hear the degraded quality but spectrals also shows the 15KHz cutoff that is common with cassettes with the clear “hiss” being visible in the upper range of the spectrum. Even though tape can have it’s charm, the ambient nature of these tracks really suffer from the lossy nature of tape and takes away from the music.

Who ripped this tape? How did it end up on the internet? Where did the person acquire the tape? What tracks were used in the mix? None of these questions seemed to have answers.

So what do we do about it?

This was one of these projects that I intentionally kept deferring, hoping that eventually my mind would lose interest as a way to pressure test if I really cared about working on this. After over a year of continuous flare ups of thought around this project I eventually accepted the fact that I for some reason did care about solving this and thus set out to solve it. So given the three things that bothered me, how do we go about fixing this? There is no way to access the source mix (he likely taped it directly from the mixer when recording it), the cassettes available for sale are of equally low quality and the recordings I’ve found all suck.

But what if we recreated the mix? As in we found the exact source tracks that Weatherall used, aligned it all to the cassette RIP and matched the transitions. If this mix was made later, this would be much harder as DJ mixers started incorporating looping and on-board effects but Weatherall likely spun this one on vinyl on an old 2 channel Vestax mixer with a 3 band EQ per channel, replicating this would not be hard! It solves the problem of “what tracks were used” as only the right one will fit the source material and it also solves the quality issue as we can source the tracks from the highest quality source possible.

The first step was sourcing all the tracks. It took a long time to find the tracks, as it was confusing what tracks were actually used. I was able to source some of the tracks digitally, as some of the artists have released these as part of compilations or anthologies. Some of the tracks however just never seem to have ever made it online, which was the case for a couple of tracks where the artist just seems to have made one album and never followed it by anything. Since I was set on actually recreating this mix, I had to source the vinyls from Discogs and rip them myself. One of them even came in the original plastic (Keyprocessor), for an artist that likely never sold much in the first place. I realize that the record exploring culture was different in the 90s and Weatherall likely sourcing these tracks from friends / shops but it is also sad that the only real discovery of this artist is through the fact that Weatherall at some point stumbled upon it and had the taste to include it on his mix.

Once I had laid out all tracks it was more obvious where the source taped had been spliced, as the rough alignment started gapping in certain places. Relistening to those specific spots one could easily hear where the person editing the tape had spliced it to fit the tempo of the track, likely cutting a bit more than what was lost to mask it better.

Lastly I had to align the mixes and tempo with what Weatherall mixed, something that wasn’t hard but time consuming. I really wanted to include the “feeling” of the mix, as in to capture the creative decisions and small mistakes that were in the source which meant basically tracking second by second to the source mix and aligning the warp markers. The fun part about this is you can really see where Weatherall was holding his finger on the spindle to slightly slow down the platter as the tempo lightly decreases in a non-linear fashion as the tempo dial on the vinyl decks would do it.

Result

Pressing “Export” in Ableton felt like closing a door to an obsession. After over 3 years of collecting, searching and thinking about this mix, being able to hear this in full quality tracking almost exactly to the source material feels great. Was this worth the effort? Unlikely for anyone else but me. Am I glad I did this? Absolutely.

When was this mix recorded?

Contrary to that the previous uploaded video being dated at 1993, I am almost certain that this mix was recorded in May/June of 1994. The reason for this is that many of the tracks on the mix were actually released in 1994 and not 1993. Since many of the tracks are from early Q2 in 1994, I’m guessing that these are fresh tracks that Weatherall included in the mix. There is also the Reddit user Donkeyshite who mentions being in the band “State of Flux” and their tracks being made and released early 1994, not 1993.

What is the actual tracklist?

1. 00:00:00 Hole In One - Spiritual Ideas For Virtual Reality
2. 00:09:37 The Primitive Painter - Levitation Klang Elektronik - KLANG 1
3. 00:16:55 Dubtribe Sound System - Sunshine’s Theme (Sunshine’s Remix) Organico - ORG 004
4. 00:23:40 State Of Flux - Mercury Finiflex - FF1009
5. 00:30:03 The Primitive Painter - Cathedral Klang Elektronik - KLANG 1
6. 00:36:34 Ebi - Chuu Space Teddy - ST 007
7. 00:44:48 Some Other People - Astralise (Dark Globe Remix) Infinite Mass - MASS 018 T
8. 00:53:30 The Primitive Painter - Invisible Landscapes Klang Elektronik - KLANG 1
9. 00:59:30 Sqvid - Emprisoning Sound On A Piece Of Wax Apollo - APOLLO 16
10. 01:05:55 The Keyprocessor - Feary Tales Eevo Lute Muzique - EEVO 008
11. 01:09:30 State Of Flux - The News Bold! Stars - BR 2009-1
12. 01:13:29 Ian Pooley And Alec Empire - Untitled (Pulse Code E.P. Side A) Mille Plateaux - MP 3
13. 01:24:02 Ebi - Sou Space Teddy - ST 007

Story was supposed to end here

In the midst of all the world chaos and polarization it’s easy to forget how cool the Internet used to be. Random strangers would help each other for seemingly no gain and people would excited about building something together. 6 months after I upload this mix to my blog and to youtube, the best part about the internet shimmered once again. I woke up at 4AM for some random reason in February. Unable to fall asleep I checked my phone and saw I had gotten an email titled “Slow Electric 1 - Andrew Weatherall” from a person named Stu.

Just thought I’d reach out based on your obsession with this mix. I’ve been obsessed with it for 30 years and in fact I was the one who ripped it from tape and that rip is the one that circulates on the internet. I did the shitty remastering in audacity with a few pirated plugins from an Akai Walkman to a pc via line in in a flat in Istanbul in late 90s, and spliced it to try and remove the parts accidentally recorded over and fix a very badly hammered TDK cassette that was a copy of a copy of a copy… Myself and a few friends also finally managed to pull the tracklist together during the covid lockdown with the help of a few internet forums and musicheads we reached out to.

The person who ripped the casette and uploaded it emailed me out of the blue? Going back to sleep now was not an option, I had to know, so I got out of bed at 4AM to much dismay from my family. The email reminded me about how I first acquired this mix from. Back in the days I used a site called The Mixing Bowl, a website where users posts mixes that they recorded or acquired, often from BBC (the essential mix). Searching for the mix shows the same file I acquired many years ago uploaded by ‘studangerous’ … Is that the same Stu who emailed me? Going further I decided to check the ID3 metadata of the file and what do you know

IT WAS THERE ALL ALONG. I never thought of checking the MP3 metadata to find out more about the mix and here I’ve been scouring thorugh youtube comments and manually identifying songs to figure out what tracks was used and what specific vinyl they were released on. I felt both ecstatic and dumb at the same time. In haste I send a bunch of questions back to Stu about how it came to be that he ended up with a casette of this mix and specifically poking around what date this mix would havd been recorded, as I had some evidence pointing to it being 1994 rather than 1993. Stu responds:

The gig posting for SABRESONIC in May of 1994

At that night Ollie bought two mix tapes, one of which was Slow Electric 1. The other was a much harder mix. Ollie’s now on a quest to dig the old tapes out :)

So a large group of our Friends from that time were from Newcastle, myself and the rest were at Birmingham University. A lot of us came from roots at school: Birkenhead School on the Wirral. We were all involved in the newly emerging UK dance music scene and clubbing, and ran some nights in both locations - Bliss at Birmingham Uni being the one I DJd a lot at.

The glue linking us all together was a mutual friend of all of ours called Mike Ingram, who sadly passed a few years ago, but loved his music and partying and even made a fortune selling a business in the early 2000s. It was his copy of Ollie’s mix tape that I copied.

I moved to Istanbul in 1998 to follow my heart and married a Turkish girl. Around 1999 I made the effort to rip some of my own taped live mixes and a few classics from back in the day from my Akai Walkman via phono line in to my old DX pc. Slow Electric was one of them as it was a mix tape that got hammered by myself and pretty much all of my friends bitd I loved it so much I took to editing it on Audacity with a bunch of pirated plugins from limewire. That took me a couple of weeks to get where I wanted it but I’m no sound technician so it was done on poor equipment with no real idea of remastering, which is why it sounds so bad. I burned a bunch of cds, labelled them up as massive mellow mix as the tape was just labelled as Andrew Weatherall mix and posted them to all of my mates back in the uk.

Many years later I posted the mix to themixingbowl.com torrent site and later hosted on my Mixcloud and soundcloud. The general interest in the mix started to grow from there. I’d been looking for a tracklist for years and when covid hit I suggested to my friends that they get on jqbx and while spinning tunes and chatting with each other the hunt for the slow electric tracklist started. It took a good few months. Another old friend from Birkenhead School, Richie Bell, who also used to DJ with us in Birmingham was instrumental in helping source additional expertise from Facebook groups. He went on to do a live mix remake with the tracks he had and dropped a few others in the gaps left by those he didn’t, which is on his Mixcloud. We slowly built up the track list and eventually cracked it.

And thanks where the story that you know starts I suppose, as the interest grew across the internet from there, accelerating with AWs unfortunate passing and the subsequent launch of the Weatherdrive hosting all his mixes.

Talk about being blown away, this wild sequence of events led to this tape being archived and preserved for us to enjoy years later. Had all of that unfolded and Stu not uploaded it, I would have never gotten obsessed with it and spent this entire effort. We now know so much more, the mix was most definitely made in 1994, the ripped tape was a second generation copy and the best possible version have probably deteriorated over time.

Getting these questions answered satisified my curiosity but what I hadn’t expected was the joy I feel over re-igniting the passion in the people that went out of their way to share this in the first place. It’s the sole validation I wanted for making the effort, that someone, somwhere, would care about this as much as I do.

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