Regis announces retrospective album Manbait on Blackest Ever Black

Regis announces retrospective album Manbait on Blackest Ever Black

Karl O’Connor, the Birmingham-born techno producer best known as Regis, has announced a new retrospective album, Manbait. The anthology will include Regis’s recent remix work (Vatican Shadow, Raime, Dalhous, Ike Yard), alternate takes of old cuts, three unreleased tracks, seldom-heard mixes released under pseudonyms (CUB), rare production work (Tropic of Cancer), and a reworking of an old song by Family Sex, O’Connor’s teenage synth-punk band. Tellingly, Manbait seeks to highlight the way Regis’s minimalist Berlin-by-way-of-Birmingham sound envelops some of Blackest ever Black’s most characteristic acts; there’s a good reason O’Connor became the label’s only remixer. Regis is no stranger to retrospective releases (in 2012, he put out a triptych covering his whole 1990s work), but as the first one set to launch outside of his own label and with his recent focus on remix/production work, cite>Manbait comes as a great twofer: appealing to British techno obsessives, as well as offering a relevant look at the evolution of electronic music in the first half of this decade.

Active since the early 1990s, Karl O’Connor will forever be associated to Downwards Records, the label he created alongside Peter Sutton a.k.a. Female. An essential piece in the often overlooked 1990s English underground electronic scene, the label shaped what would become known as the Birmingham sound, a mixture of European minimal techno, the mechanistic hypnosis of Jeff Mills, very British industrial/post-punk stylings, and unrelenting beats that managed to be at once oppressive and groovy. Although he never achieved the notoriety of Female or fellow label mate Surgeon, O’Connor might be the most influential of the trio, with his darker, more alienating music predating the post-industrial scene that arose in the UK in the second half of the 2000s. An influence that becomes all the more explicit in a compilation like Manbait.

Manbait will be available as a 2LP/CD on September 18 via Blackest Ever Black. Stream “Blood Witness,” a cut from the album, below.

Manbait tracklisting:
01. Ike Yard - Loss (Regis Version)
02. Dalhous - He Was Human And Belonged With Humans (Regis Version)
03. Regis - Blood Witness (Original 12” Mix)
04. Vatican Shadow - Church Of All Images (Regis Version)
05. Family Sex - Manbait (Regis Version)
06. Regis - Blinding Horses (Original 12” Mix)
07. CUB - C U 1
08. Regis - Blood Witness (Downwards Extended Version)
09. Tropic of Cancer - Plant Lilies At My Head (Alternate Version)
10. Regis - Blinding Horses (Turin Version)
11. Raime - This Foundry (Regis Version)
12. Regis - Blinding Horses (Stableboy Version)

• Blackest Ever Black: http://blackesteverblack.com

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