Twenty Five Minutes In Wimborne

In 1994, MLO aka John Tye and Peter Smith released their second album - and second of that year - on Rising High Records, eight tracks of understated beauty called Io.

The opening song, Wimborne, is named after the market town Wimborne Minster in Dorset, in the South West of England. It's a gently transporting, transformative tune, prime material for chillout compilations and mixes. In researching this post, I've found that the Music From Memory label released a MLO compilation in 2021 titled Oumuamua and again featuring the original album version of Wimborne as the opening track. 

 

 

MLO also released the Wimborne Revisited single in 1994 and, as I was a fan of Rising High Records, I bought it at the time without having heard anything by MLO previously. The fact that the line up of remix artists included Wagon Christ aka Luke Vibert probably swung it for me.

The CD contains the album version plus five remixes, clocking in just shy of 80 minutes. The aforementioned Wagon Christ, Spacetime Continuum (Jonah Sharp) and Starfungus (Brian Douglas) all deliver downtempo excursions that don't deviate too far from the original path, whilst MLO themselves offer up a remix that briefly ups the tempo and extends the song to over 16 minutes.

None of that compares to Daniel Pemberton's mix, though. An expansive, meandering mix over twenty five and a half minutes that, on listening, feels considerably less than that. If you're going for a walk, have a stack of tedious chores to do or have a rare opportunity just to relax today, stick this on and it'll take you to a calmer place.

It was lovely to discover via Swiss Adam's excellent series of Sunday half-hour mixes over at Bagging Area that John Tye is still making great music - this time with Pete Fowler - as Seahawks. Although they've been releasing music as Seahawks since 2010, I've only just been catching up to them since last summer.

I haven't been able to find out much about Peter Smith, post-MLO, and Discogs is frequently an unreliable source - there are over one hundred Peter Smiths listed. However, I think that it might be the same Peter Smith that's been a staple member of Band Of Holy Joy since their 2014 album Easy Listening, contributing synths and a multitude of other instruments. 

Daniel Pemberton's career has been much easier to track, building up a sizeable CV as a soundtrack composer for film and television. The jaw-dropping fact that I learned whilst writing this post was that when Daniel released his first album, Bedroom, and delivered his astonishing remix of MLO's Wimborne, he was sixteen years old.