Sandwell District announce a brand new release of their era-defining 2010 album, ‘Feed Forward’, out on vinyl for the first time since its original pressing, and digitally for the first time, via The Point Of Departure Recording Company.

The original print of the album, described by RA a decade later as “the final transmission from a collective whose influence still colours music today,” was effectively a private press that sold out on impact – three days before Christmas, with no accompanying promotion – and, despite it changing hands for up to four figure sums, it has never been repressed.

Sandwell District – Peter Sutton (Female), David Sumner (Function), Juan Mendez (Silent Servant) and Karl O’Connor (Regis) – was a label, a collective, an impulse, an in-joke, a suicide mission, a gang, a point of view. An amphetamine-fuelled fever dream, a group psychosis, an out-of-hand piss-take which happened to reinvent techno in its own bleakly modernist image.

Growing out of the Downwards label that Sutton and O’Connor established in 1993, throughout the 2000s the collective had a powerful mystique. Its records sell and its reputation swells by word of mouth alone – and for a long time it revels in being faceless, opaque, impenetrable. After a move to Berlin, Sutton and O’Connor intensify their time in the studio, while Function is a resident and Regis and Silent Servant become regular guests at Berghain, giving the collective a key test-laboratory. Mendez meanwhile overhauls the visual identity of the label, giving Sandwell an outlaw style all its own – techno has never seen anything quite like it – and the music itself deepens and darkens as if to meet the challenge.

No previous Sandwell release can prepare you for ‘Feed Forward’’s technical and emotional achievement. It is supple, sensuous and utterly widescreen. Driving, infinite- horizon techno – vectors of pure energy – slashed with concussive polyrhythms and draped in swooping strings and a haunted, melancholic musicality only glimpsed on the preceding 12”s, if it was there at all. Above all it is a powerful concentration of atmosphere, its morbid romanticism drawing subtly on influences from post-punk, industrial and the early 1980s avant garde and culminating in a breathtaking final third of eerie concrète and beatific synth sequences. ‘Feed Forward’ is one of the great, elegiac evocations of Berlin, minting the future but grieving and ghost-filled; the offspring of Bowie’s ‘Low’ and Basic Channel.

Sandwell District continued for another year after the album’s release, before disbanding. Today that world, that vertiginous sense of emptiness and possibility, feels entirely vanished, irretrievable. An imaginary world that only ‘Feed Forward’ can give us access to. Its influence in the 2010s and beyond has been colossal, if not always duly credited; those reverberations are still being felt.

Three 140g black vinyl LPs in rigid slipcase – 2mm grey board with black lining and anti- scratch matt lamination – with 16-page stapled booklet on 150gsm matt art paper.

“Techno at its most stunning, a glistening, artful collection of tracks with an appeal that went far beyond the dance floors it soundtracked.” – Resident Advisor, Albums Of The Decade

“Few have melded the textures of the past with the mood of now with such brutal, immersive efficiency” – The Quietus, Albums Of The Year

“A defiant techno statement that feels as utterly singular and unconcerned with trends as it is undeniably contemporary and relevant.” – FACT

“Solidifies a Sandwell aesthetic that synthesises and subverts a number of fashions in Techno.” – The Wire