ULTRAMARINE Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Check classic dance music books of the 1990s - and even some later music texts, such as Richard King's The Lark Ascending - and you'll find plenty of praise for Ultramarine's work of the early 1990s, which added pastoral and folk-rock inspired sounds to the sample-heavy pulse of dance music. What you won't find is any reference to their final album of the decade, A User's Guide. Yet it may well be their best album. A conscious exploration of techno and IDM shot through with references to Detroit, Berlin and Sheffield (well, Warp Records at least), it reportedly took the duo almost two years to record. A largely unheralded British techno classic, it has been painstakingly remastered for this first ever vinyl reissue and boasts extensive contextualising liner notes from UK techno historian (and sometime Juno writer) Matt Anniss.

Review: While this may feel like a reassuring relic of a bygone era of house - there's a real mid-to-late-'90s San Francisco deep house-meets-Fila Brazillia vibe going on here - '$10 Rework' is actually brand, spanking new. It's a remake of' $10 Heel', which first appeared on Ultramarine's 2019 set 'Signals Into Space'. This version is warmer, looser and far more groovy, with Anna Domino's stylish vocal, echoing guitars, snaking sax and Dubtribe-esque organ sounds riding a deep, dubby bassline and swinging drum machine beats. Arguably even better are the two flip-side dubs (the first vocal, the second instrumental), both of which see the veteran British duo reach for delay-doused hand percussion, echoing instrumentation and the killer instrumentation. They're the kind of spaced-out dancefloor dubs that make most sense as the sun's coming up at an open-air party.