Sandwell District: Closing the Loop
For a period in the 2000s, Sandwell District defined the sound, the look, the feel of techno. Then, they imploded. Fifteen years after the release of their landmark debut, founders Regis and Function, encouraged by the late Silent Servant, have regrouped for one final album.
“There’s nothing more sickening to me than people my age following what’s current.” Karl O’Connor is speaking over Zoom about End Beginnings, the first Sandwell District album since their 2010 cult classic Feed Forward. “We’re well aware of what’s happening [in music],” he explains, “and the record is completely out of step with this moment in time.” Anyone familiar with the moody techno they conjured on that LP may be surprised by the slow-motion electro of Citrinitas Acid. But this process of upending expectations – of surveying the landscape and avoiding modish styles – is a common practice for O’Connor and David Sumner.
After meeting in 1996, O’Connor and Sumner – better known as Regis and Function, respectively – regularly spoke on the phone about where music was heading. The latter explains that in the early 2000s, for example, minimal techno wasn’t something that either of them was willing to embrace. “It wasn’t until we heard that first Sleeparchive record [Elephant Island] that everything changed.” While Sandwell District, as both a label and collective, were founded in 2002, they trace a lot of the group’s origins to hearing this 12-inch at Hard Wax in 2004. Sumner tells me that 2007 was another crucial year. “I was in Karl’s kitchen, and we had our laptops set up back-to-back, Battleship style, and were just listening to our music on our laptop speakers.” It was here that Function’s Isolation was born, and its acclaim was energising. “I was turning 34 years old, and I had been struggling as an artist in New York – this was my last attempt.”
Throughout our conversation, O’Connor and Sumner emphasise the “decentralisation of the ego” in the Sandwell District collective, which initially included Peter Sutton (a.k.a. Female) and whose other primary member was the late John Juan Mendez (a.k.a. Silent Servant). “I did very little for Sandwell in terms of music,” O’Connor tells me, explaining that much of the music was on Sumner. “I was more of this conduit between things, and then John brought in his visual identity. The real power was all of us coming together.” He goes on to say that Sandwell District were “much more palatable than Downwards”, the record label he co-founded with Sutton in 1993. “We were challenging the fascism of harmony with that label, but Sandwell brought it back. It wasn’t necessarily something I’d make on my own, but I was comfortable being in that area with Dave and John.” If Regis and British Murder Boys – O’Connor’s duo with Surgeon – are synonymous with cold, industrial techno, then Sandwell District offered a lush, inviting alternative.
“It was the worst thing possible. Ego in Sandwell District”
Unsurprisingly, Sandwell District’s sound proved massively popular. Upon release, Feed Forward was immediately embraced by critics and fans alike, and its initial pressing of roughly 3,000 LPs sold out within three hours. But all this success would lead to the group’s demise. When I ask them about pulling the plug on Sandwell District at their peak, O’Connor tells me, bluntly: “One word: Drugs.” Then he pauses before restarting, “Three words: Lots of drugs.” O’Connor and Sumner would have various petty squabbles during this time. They’d fight about the merits of Lou Reed’s music, about Nintendo versus PlayStation. Sumner once went down to a hotel’s reception in only his underwear, exclaiming he was bigger than David Bowie. “It was the worst thing possible,” O’Connor says. “Ego in Sandwell District.”
The group ceased to exist in 2012, and by the following year, O’Connor and Sumner stopped talking to one another. They wouldn’t do so again for nearly a decade, when O’Connor was playing in his group Eros at Tresor. “The show was so close to my house, and my intuition led me to turn up,” Sumner explains. “It was deeply emotional and completely necessary – meeting face to face.” O’Connor tells me that everything that had built up in their years of avoidance quickly fell away. “Other than my close family members, Dave is somebody who knows how to really wind me up, and I’m the same with him. But Dave had the fucking guts to come up to me.”
Before O’Connor and Sumner reconnected, Mendez would mediate between the two. He was always in this supportive role, both within Sandwell District and in his wider Los Angeles community. “He really did live that [stage] name,” Sumner says. O’Connor provides more details: “He wanted to lift everybody up – the second he got a little bit of success, he wanted that for everyone.” The two share that they were surprised by the outpouring of love that came in the wake of his death in January 2024, as it really seemed like everyone was his friend in some way. In reflecting, O’Connor explains that he “didn’t have one single cross word with [Mendez]” during the 25 years that he knew him. But when he tells me this, it transforms from a testament to Mendez’s affability into a reflection on the difficulties men face in discussing serious issues. “Maybe that’s a regret,” he says. “John would say, ‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ but it meant the opposite. And I didn’t say anything. It was hard for him because he gave so much to others.”
Sandwell District’s new LP, End Beginnings, can be considered another offering from Mendez, as it wouldn’t exist without him. After Feed Forward was reissued in 2023, there was no interest from either O’Connor or Sumner to make another record, but Mendez pushed the idea (he suggested the album title as well). O’Connor is quick to emphasise, though, that it’s not a follow-up to Feed Forward. “In fact,” he tells me, “the follow-up records were made shortly after: Silent Servant’s Negative Fascination and Function’s Incubation.” While neither of those two LPs were released on the Sandwell District label, they presented a distillation of the group’s wide-ranging sounds. It only made sense, then, that a new chapter in Sandwell District’s story meant bringing both new and old producers into the fold, including contributions from Mønic, Rivet, Sarah Wreath and Rrose.
The tracks are impressively varied: Dreaming has dubby kicks, Self-Initiate has cosmic pads, and Hidden ends with a minute of soft, glistening textures and the spare, repeated bowing of a string instrument. Most surprising is Least Travelled, which has syncopated percussion and a reverberant guitar that rings out, channelling a sort of gothic Americana. By this past summer, O’Connor and Sumner realised that they had done everything they could, and finally allowed the album to be mixed. “It had to be taken out of our hands,” O’Connor tells me. “It was just too heavy to make a record that was worthy.” Sumner agrees: “It would have destroyed us if we continued working on it.”
End Beginnings was left unfinished when Mendez passed, but both O’Connor and Sumner knew that the only way they could carry on with the tragic news – and to feel close to him in any real way – was to finish what they collectively started. “I’m not saying that he would have wanted us to do this,” O’Connor tells me, “but that’s what Sandwell was about: work, work, work.” While O’Connor and Sumner will keep DJing together under the Sandwell District name, they imagine that recording any material is likely off the table. It’s apt, then, for their final LP to conclude with a direct ode to Mendez. The Silent Servant begins with a soft pulse that sounds like a heartbeat, gradually building into a livelier techno track shrouded in melancholy atmospherics. It feels a bit like mourning, but also like a reminder of Mendez’s indelible presence – in their lives, in Sandwell District and in techno at large. “No one did it as deeply as John,” O’Connor tells me at the end of our conversation. “He was the embodiment of art, music and culture.”
End Beginnings is out 28 March on The Point of Departure
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