John Darko
Not on my bingo card for 2025: the reformation of the Sabres of Paradise, who played their first live shows for almost 30 years in London and Sydney over the weekend. Original members Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns still have something to say, albeit without the bookending DJ sets from third member Andrew Weatherall. Weatherall died of a pulmonary embolism in 2020.
Debut album Sabresonic, released in 1993 on Warp Records, served as a clearing house for songs already sitting on DATs, many of which started life as offshoots from Weatherall’s much-lauded early 90s remix work. Sabresonic includes the masterful “Smokebelch” that, at the time, fit the Café Del Mar mood of the mid-90s like a glove. However, I would argue that its magic hasn’t endured: I’ve heard the beatless mix of “Smokebelch” played as hotel lobby music on at least two occasions in the intervening years…and it didn’t sound out of place.
Sabresonic was followed by (in this writer’s opinion) the far superior Haunted Dancehall in 1994. Also released on Warp, this is the Sabres album that I always go back to. Where the debut was grounded by techno club DNA, Haunted Dancehall left earth to propel us into its own sonic universe: one of sparse percussion and hard-hitting, low-slung breakbeats that was, if memory serves, intended as an imaginary soundtrack to a night out in London. So stripped back are the first handful of tracks that a proper melody doesn’t appear until “Planet D” (track 5) and the album doesn’t fully bloom until “Wilmot” (track 6). Haunted Dancehall is more film noire than techno.
No doubt to coincide with the new live shows, remasters of Sabresonic and Haunted Dancehall were announced by Warp last week. Stream them at will. Pre-ordering the 2LP vinyl sets from Bleep.com put 24-bit/44.1kHz .wavs in my inbox to have me ask: do Matt Colton’s 2025 remasters improve on the originals, or do they sound worse? Answer: a bit of both.
Colton has lifted the proverbial veil on Haunted Dancehall; its murkier sounds I always attributed to Weatherall’s artistic intent. Colton has given the album a cleaner attack and some extra punch but those upsides come with a dynamic range penalty – a smaller audible difference between the louder sounds and the quieter sounds. MAAT’s DR Offline MKII measures the original master at DR9 and the new one at DR7. Not that it matters much when the music itself is meant to sound crisp n’ crunchy.
Sabresonic fares a little worse. The original master was a terrific example of just how dynamic records sounded before The Loudness War. DR Offline MKII pegs it at DR11. Colton’s fresh coat of paint gives us greater transparency and more short-term immediacy but it comes home with DR8.
You win some, you lose some — but these minor niggles go up in smoke when I let my inner music fan talk over my inner audiophile. “Shut up, John!”
Further information: The Sabres of Paradise / Warp Records Bandcamp
