Adrian Sherwood: The Collapse of Everything

(On-U-Sound)

Out Now 

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From the bush of ghosts to the hole in the ground, the first solo album from Adrian Sherwood in thirteen years, The Collapse Of Everything, sees the On-U-Sound boss and tireless sonic explorer clench his fists as all manner of sonic emanations are alchemically prepared. Interview and review by Ryan-Lewis Walker.

”Over the last few years, I’ve done quite a lot of good records,” says Adrian Sherwood, humbly has ever, both aware of the weight of the records rotating around his name as much as unbothered by it, a poignant seal of guidance, authority and power should any sleeve adorn his label’s logo or the name of the man himself. ‘’Starting with Rainford and Heavy Rain with Lee Perry, I’ve been on a fairly good roll since then. It’s been two years since I did a release on the label. The last release was Creation Rebel’s Hostile Environment. But, I did a collaborative work with Sonic Boom and Panda Bear Reset In Dub, which I’m very proud of.
AA”As a producer, your job is to keep the artists happy and the people who are paying you, or the record company if you’re doing a job for somebody, and yourself. When you make your record for yourself, I’m just trying to keep me happy. It’s much more fun making a record for yourself. I’m gonna just take it where I’ve not been before.”

Who better to soundtrack the sign of the times than Adrian Sherwood? Via the searing incantations of the mixing desk, Sherwood has been projecting himself, vicariously through production duties or otherwise, as a vital, whirling cog in a structured, group dynamic into the sensory mainframes of the modern world for as long as there has been ground fertile enough to shatter.

From the likes of African Head Charge to New Age Steppers, Dub Syndicate to Creation Rebel, Depeche Mode to Einstürzende Neubauten, Blur and Sonic Boom,  these are a mere handful of works that suffused an enduring pursuit of dub, punk, post-punk and bass music together in the spirit of making sure that everything available to be questioned can be, on the smouldering concourse we call a civilisation, rebuilt and destroyed as a bed of flowers would break through a nationwide, radioactive discharge. The collapse of everything equates to the continuation of everything. Sherwood, dub maestro, electronic maverick, understands his duties as a devout, lifelong incubator, savvy iconoclast and formidable exponent of this idiom.

”I wanted to do another [record] because I didn’t want to just keep going round and round doing gigs. It’s been a long time since I have had a name on the front of a cover. It gives me the profile to do something a bit more grandiose than I have been doing. Putting your name on the front and suddenly putting all the effort into making yourself happy, that’s brilliant. I want to prove a point and do something really good. I’ve been on a very good roll in recent years, and I want to do it again. That’s what I want to do. That’s the point I was making. Step it up a gear.”

On the Collapse Of Everything and its surrounding commitments, there are no wings to remain behind – for an occasion as monumental as The Collapse of Everything, the sign of the times, the concentration of the here and now demands all to be dragged forth and dreamed up in the centre of the stage’s raging hurricane.

From the credits on the back of the sleeve, now flipped to the front, an extended part of this evolution is to take the record into a live performance context with musicians. Something of a fresh territory for Sherwood. ”That’s what I’m aiming to do now,” he confirms. The idea of executing a big, live show of spectacle is far removed from the Adrian Sherwood I encountered in 2002 at Manchester’s Band on the Wall, where, as Tackhead Soundsystem, Sherwood, the appointed mixologist, revisited his work with the pioneering ‘80s industrial-funk unit as part of the Subliminal Impulse Electronic Music Festival. If there was more than a third colour to be found on stage, you were lucky. It was Adrian, a couple of decks, and a bottle of water. The master at work, and as raw as they come.

Speaking of Tackhead, the Collapse of Everything features two members of the group. The late Keith LeBlanc and Doug Wimbish, who, along with Skip MacDonald, formed the house band at Sugarhill Records. The impetus for The Collapse of Everything being created was the passing of two of Sherwood’s closest comrades: LeBlanc in 2024 and Mark Stewart a year prior. ”When I started the record, they hadn’t died. They were both alive when I started making this record three years ago. I named it after an obscure lyric of Mark’s that I just thought was so appropriate to our times now. And we lost Keith as well, who’s playing on two or three tracks on it. They’re very much in my heart, those lads. A big part of my life.”

Although literally on the record, the spiritual impression of those two companions bleeds and vibrates throughout the veins of the record – it’s in the metallic ghosts and vaporous echoes, the sweltering rhythms, the cracks and hisses, the tribal moods of the machine. They might have left him, and us – but they remain poignant forces, latching onto and lingering in the air, as much as Lee Perry would, the captain of the Black Ark, banished from more than a handful of camps in the afterlife, the smoke hovering and dissipating and seeping into the skin of the walls the more it rises from the nib of an eternally burning joss stick.
AA”Every day I’m working, if you see the studio up here, I’ve got Mark and Keith looking at me. They’re always they were present because Mark was a big influence on me, as was Keith, and they’re not here anymore. But people live on in you. I’ve lost so many friends. But spiritually, they are with us.”

Forever present and in the eye of the storm, immune to the supposed differences of mindset and methodology between a solo record and a collaborative project, thanks to his prolific attitude to work, was Adrian ready to go to war with the type of mindset that comes with a solo album, a very different kind of storm? ”Keeping doing the same old, same old is kind of boring. I could do the same old, same old by just producing, but the responsibility for producing for other people is a lot more than actually just making something for myself, which is what I really wanted to do at this point.
AA”I thought, I’ve made all these records and I was very proud of the ones I did with Pinch, the ones I did with Sonic Boom and Panda Bea. They’re all great. But with this one, this time now, I’m trying something I’ve never done, which is to go on the stage.”

Neither Dub with electronic undercurrents, nor electronic music with dub undercurrents – simply the sound of an astral plane cracking apart a peat bog – the dark rumble of Battles Without Honour and Humanity is a tempestuous musical creature. A gentle calculator lullaby ascends behind a clatter of hollow synths, barbed-wire and rhythmic onomatopoeia – in gunshots on battlefields. A visor-blinding warble of heat-seeking synths scrapes across the scene. It takes a turn for the dramatic as ripples of electronic intrigue and dub voodoo: the interlocking pull of motor oil bass and leviathan barrels of drums, eventually dissolve into instant print of aching memory.

The Well Is Poisoned (Dub) – sees metallic percussion and smouldering bass radiate and rattle from their infernal crater. It kicks hard. A flickering hologram of shimmering guitar and eerie saw hypnotises and draws us into it’s otherwordly void the more we gaze into it, and feel our heads bend.

Spaghetti Best Western sees a dehydrated platoon cruise their way across a desert of diamond-shaped spores. An electric guitar plucks out a rickety-bridge melody from it’s bare skin before every so often lunging into a chord that could eclipse the sun above. It’s spacey. Luminous frogs croak from afar. The harmonica is feral. The lungs of some kind of ancient organ wheeze and inhale everything into it’s orbit. It’s a death march endured by all these different cogs and mechanical components. No more than skeletons.

The Collapse of Everything, as much a complete summit of all Sherwood’s projects and encountered personalities, is a perfect example of that opportunity: a collaboration with himself. This recent liberation, although nobody shackles Sherwood to one spot for too ong, after so many years as the man behind the desk, rubbing his hands together as a gesture of creating incantations in the studio, or simply the physical sigh of another day’s work finally dusted, is a rarity welcome to see realised.
AA”Definitely. What happens is, if I’m working with whoever and they come to the studio and you’re working together, I always get the result,” Sherwood states. ”What tends to happen often is that someone’s either very successful or can’t be bothered or can’t get to come and do it, and they leave it to you to get on with it, yourself. That happens so often. It used to happen in the old days: ‘let’s get Adrian in to do some weird mixes’ and shit like that. And when the artist came, it was almost great. When they didn’t, it was hit or miss. So I just reached the point where I was like ’sod it, I’m going to just make something great for myself.’ It makes you feel good. It gave me a new sense of freedom. Also, it’s a whole new world out there.”

Although in charge of curating careers, hardly in a hierarchical sense but more in the spirit of sharing a collective web of lanes occupied by singular, individual visionaries in their field, echoes and ghosts, giants and flashguns of intoxicating light, there’s an opportunity, sometimes a scarce one, in an artist’s life, where they have to fight for themselves and put themselves first. ”I don’t really want to be just doing records for people, which I haven’t done for a long time. In recent years, I haven’t been doing jobs for other people. The ones I did, I thoroughly enjoyed, like the collaboration with Spoon and Pinch. And also with Horace and Lee Perry. I almost think they’re my records as well. I don’t see them as jobs. I stopped doing jobs a long time ago.
AA”All that remix stuff is very few and far between. I haven’t done many remixes. It’s been one every couple of years, an odd one here and there, but that time’s kind of gone for me. The ones I have done, I really wanted to do them. And the other records I made, I made for me anyway. Trip to Balkatanga, by African Head Charge, is a great album. Midnight Rock and Midnight Scorcher by the Jebeloi Nichols album, all of them, I’m very proud of all of them. And I stand by all of them. But doing something for yourself with your own name? I’ve got nothing dictating if I go left or right or anything. Just what on earth I like.”

The Collapse Of Everything bursts apart the curtains that conceals a window the size of the sky. It’s a window into his world, a television set or cinema screen, twitching and flitting between various channels, cut-up broadcasts of panoramic carnage and dream outtakes, a bombastic tirade of triumphs and fatal mishaps scattered across the globe a thousand times over. Their works are his works, and in some ways, his works are theirs. This soundtrack to a film that doesn’t exist, a stream seamlessly shot through a cathode ray, directly into the mainframes and motherboards of the everyday.
AA”I just thought lots of my stuff was perfect for soundtracks, but they’re not making the film, I’ve got a huge collection of sound effect records. I’m obsessed with sound and noises and stuff. I kept thinking I kept thinking my records would sell ten or a hundred times more than they did throughout my life. I named Starship Africa the second record I ever made from the movie Starship Africa. We haven’t made any movie, but I pretended it was from a movie. All musicians or producers think, “Oh, my stuff would be great in films’’. I’ve had a few things in films, but I definitely think that this is a soundtrack. It doesn’t have to be a film. It’s a good thing in the background. And at the moment, you could play it in the morning, noon or night. I think we should start making cheap movies.’’

With an identifiable, indelible ability that touches the tracks of his additional albums, an ability reigned into a more personally poignant and selfishlessly emancipated focus on this new solo record, is Sherwood still as obsessed with the challenge of being there when new ground is ready to be broken technologically as he was once, or, experiencing new states of grandiosity and a respinsibility with a resonance that starts and ends with him and him alone, is he content just produce and provide what feels right for now with whatever he has to hand?
AA”At the moment, in the last years, all the new plug-ins coming out, all the A. I stuff and all the new outboard gear being made with some absolutely brilliant tools to play with. And, you know, my engineer and I’ve been embracing all that, and on top of that, we‘ve still got all the vintage gear. So I think it’s a matter of how enthusiastic and how driven you are. I’m not stupid enough to just try and get younger people involved and spicing up what you love already, you know. Like with Lee Perry, there’s a sense of mischief and that you can create some magic. I still have that in me. I know I sound like a bit of a wanker saying that, but I genuinely believe that you’ve got to believe you can do something great.”

Starting live, and ending up live again, that unshakable system of belief in the warping and wielding of sound, a palpable feature pulsating and threading itself throughout the peculiar corners and panoramic pans of the album began three or four years ago when Sherwood was being constantly booked for dub shows or DJ sets around the world. ”I was trying to do a sound system opera. I’m thinking of cut tunes to play out that no one else can play to make my set, because I’m not a natural DJ, like a great Andrew Weatherall. You have to carve your own little space.”

An exploration of the possibilities of manipulating sound through the use of pitch, an anarchic and innovative misuse of vinyl as heard on 2012’s much-underrated gem, Survival & Resistance and an exhilarating experiment with studio voodoo in the dub-informed concept of ‘ghosting’, Sherwood also has an impressive collection of 80s sound effects from Japan, Italy and America – sound effects sourced from all over the world.
AA”I was experimenting with taking the groove and changing the pitch of live performances and incorporating some of these things when slowed or pitched down and getting a mad little whirly noises. I started getting some really interesting stuff that followed on the ideas I had with Survival & Resistance, which I think is a great album that isn’t well enough known, to be honest, but I was very proud of that last album.
AAThen, also ghosting tunes of mine from years ago using the RIP-X technology and then pitching the ghosted sound. Do you know what we’re talking about?”

Momentarily lost while led down a rabbit hole of studio jargon and technical education – I admit defeat.

”Well, I’ve got a catalogue of a lot of records that I’ve made. So take one of my old records, ghost it by, you put it into your RIP X, which you start to take it to pieces, and it starts creating unusual noises. If you then pitch it and change the key slightly. I was then taking that and driving the thing through an old TCEQ, driving the input, turning the output down and then putting it through Langevin and Cinema Engineering EQs, which is what King Tubby used, and just mangling them up with a delay, and then sampling those bits. So I’m using kind of the new technology, but try to make it bleed almost through the old analogue effects, and then take a little segment of it and create the sonic from that. I was able to do that because I’m not trying to keep anybody else happy but myself.”

Walking with sound, and stubbornly wrangling with it as though he wants to become one with the interface, the ballistic, technicolour tapestry on The Collapse of Everything feels totally all-consuming, with an uncompromising twine of twists and spells wound tightly together by resurfacing geiser springs and trapdoors of sound, peppered throughout these smog-soaked landscapes, these bullet-bitten battlegrounds, these shoe-scuffed dancefloors. Things unravel, things ripen, rip and ricochet against metallic horizons and iron hives. Expansive and dramatic, things decay and explode, things fragment and find their way back together like rogue frames of film spooling themselves into some sort of chaotic sense.

The filmic nature of the record is also palatable. It imagines characters cruising across barren stretches of desert and glittering vistas still wet with watercolour and thick with matted mosaics of jigsaw pieces. Cowboys, cyborgs and psychonauts bathed below hot embankments of stars and satellites. Psychedelic. Spellbinding. But in the distance, the lingering exoskeletons of heavy industry are seen in gargantuan states of eternal rigor mortis. Wire ghosts draped in urban decay and beautiful ruin. Glimpses of new life are entangled with the fists of death. The new world.
”I worked in Atmos for making some recordings that have not come out. If they did come out, no one’s got the equipment to hear it on. Atmos is where you’ve got twelve things around the room, and you can send perhaps one direction that delays another. The psychedelic potential of that was just mind-blowing. So I was still trying to do that in stereo to create this huge image, almost like a painting, where you’re hearing things above your head, below your feet, in the distance.”

The impossible-to-ignore The Great Rewilding moves slow. Low. A calculated skank of spinning propellers and processions of squelchy synths. Everything breaths and blares out from nowhere. Unsettling shuffles of gadgets glitch away, electronic surprises zap, snap and rasp from realms we dare not imagine to exist, let alone return to. The drums – abstract clutters and leaf-lined heaps of rhythms only logical to the player, create kinetic webs of movement that, along with the jittery shivers of piano, seems to suture everything together.

With sonic footprints similar to that of Battles Without Honour or Humanity, in that – the more it unfolds, what we find ourselves standing on is no ordinary surface. We have been cast down into a territory hot with ammunition, flesh confetti, concrete drama and the sting of blood. It’s whirling synth sabres scourge across the open air. Stretched guitars bend and fizz. A bass held between the hands of a shaman pontificates on the imponderable via these scurrying punctuates of bass groove and unlocks limitless earth-eviscerating power. The space between the space between the space.

Dub as we know it, is not how we know it. It’s a subjective term. Likewise, Adrian Sherwood’s relationship to dub is subjective. We must respect that. And with Sherwood, nothing is as it seems. The closest we come to anything of a straight-up dub tune only does so for an instant, before breaking apart into shrapnel projections of it’s former self. Things move. Things morph. Things never pause for too long. But how he perceives his position in, or around, works of a dub nature he has been involved with has more to do with his experiences, his history, his lineage, than it does with mere sonic form. Just how does Adrian Sherwood classify ”Adrian Sherwood?”

”The word dub is banded around so much. I’m a producer, I find that stuff. I see it through from the beginning to the end. The dub side of it is I’m from a school where the first record I ever made, when I was 19, I called it Dub from Creation. It wasn’t a proper band at the time. I named it Creation Rebel, and on my first label, with all the albums I’ve released with dub albums. So I’ve been a big fan of dub right from the beginning.
”For people who hire me or fans of ours, like me, because I’ve got my own sound. And that’s what I am. I’m a producer first and foremost,” Sherwood confirms. ”All the great dub pioneers such as The Smoky Bears, Style Scott, Augustus Pablo, the records they made, were perfect to sit at home and trip out to. And on the great dub records, you were hearing melodies in your head that weren’t even there. And to this day, you hear things. And each pass, some other image conjures up when you do it well. I’ve worked at that all my life. I’ve dedicated my whole life to working in that field and it’s been a blessing. What a lucky person I am.”

From The Great Rewilding to the Grand Designer, the record’s titles lend themselves to an ancient, yet otherworldly domain, a dimension concealed deep in the belly of the beaten earth, whilst also located in the galaxial banquets pinpointed to particular stars and maps. Therefore, as routinely demonstrated throughout the album’s consistently engaging and multiplying circus of personalities, although everything inevitably collapses into a heap of pieces via a catalogue of catastrophic reasons, leading us, as a species, not to the altars of oblivion, but the threshold behind it, out of the rubble, things will shoot through and things will bloom once more.

Is the Collapse of Everything a dark album? Not quiet. There’s too much optimism, too much humour and power in joy/ power in the dark, to staple it to a vibe solely smothered in darkness. The titles of the tunes read like a series of manuscripts or sacred texts, inspired and enlightening, lost forever, yet unlocked deep within the inner deposit boxes of our deepest, unconscious caverns. The Collapse mirrors the state of the surroundings that we find ourselves walking through, sociopaths, somnambulists, stargazers, foot-soldiers, teetering on threshold’s edge, staring into it’s omnipotent iris, of joy, humour and darkness.
AA”You can say it’s dystopian times whatever, and all the horrific things going on around the planet. But when things do collapse, you have to rebuild. You’ve got these titles like The Great Rewilding and The Grand Designer which could be God or it could be the rebuilding. We desperately needed some unity and it’s the one thing I’m missing from when we were younger in the 80s. We had you know the punks, the dreads, the Indians, everybody. People didn’t even ask each other’s religion. Whereas now, it’s all seems so aggy and aggressive and disunified and people just seem to be quite scared. We definitely need some unifying forces now. We need some youngsters to come along and galvanise the goodness.”

Hiroshima Dub Match and Body Roll very much encompass that surreal sense of darkness, an alluring magnetic aura, pulling us towards its trancelike field. They possess that punch. They harness that mischievous energy. The former is, following the phantasmagorical, deconstructed acid experiment that is Spirits (Further Education) sees gathering of machines shatter and dismantled before our very eyes. Some ethereal melody repeats and shimmers from it’s rightful corner as various levels of percussive magic, wild wah-wah guitar tribal chants and gnawing electronics sears into the skull with intense focus.

Darker still, the latter, meanwhile – unloads an unhurried, enveloping and utterly beautiful, Body Roll haunts and hovers with fantastical refrains of earth-encrusted woodwind sweeter than peyote, scuttles of ambient noise, resounding strokes of dreamlike piano chords and unravelling rhythms which, along with some half-imagined melody occasionally peeking out from behind curtains or street corners, simultaneously illuminates a succession of stationary lanterns as rain lightly lets itself be known to strangers on empty streets below. It really is the end credit sequence to an Isao Takahata film.

With a headline show with with African Head Charge & Speakers Corner Quartet scheduled for February, joining Sherwood live, with the minset of mixing desk and a makeshift tour-ready studio ready to roll, is a cast of excellent musicians such as the aforementioned Doug Wimbish, Alex White (Primal Scream and Fat White Family) and Mark Bandola alongside him. ”I’m just trying to go up a gear and it’s culminating in these big shows we’re doing in Japan in November and then a massive show at the headlining at the Barbican. ‘’It’s a no-brainer to me just to have a go and see how much we love it and how much the people attending love it and go from there.’’

An album to see, as much to hear, rather than attempt emulating something from Kingston, Jamaica, circa 1977 or ’78, The Collapse Of Everything commands every facet of our senses in ways impossible to ignore in ways that blaze ahead and burns through a space entirely of the moment. Adrian Sherwood is a champion of evolution, a carrier of certain torches that touches the future as much as being ignited by the past.

It’s sure is a whole new world out there.

~

Adrian Sherwood | Website | Bandcamp | Facebook 

Words | Ryan Walker

Photographs | Nana S.R Tinley ©