Sabres Of Paradise, The ‎– Haunted Dancehall

This is not a dance album, for sure. Way too abstract and out there to ever have any success on a dance floor.

I can't say I'm a fan. I like IDM with jazz or classical undertones, atmospheric, moody, contemplative music, rather than heavily sampled synths that are mixed together to form some eccentric concoction of sounds. When IDM begins to loose its human feeling and starts sounding too machine-like then I begin to lose interest.

Haunted Dancehall is like Star Wars Phantom Menace: Just because you CAN copy and paste the same robot, space ship, alien, or sample a bajillion times, doesn't mean that you SHOULD.

On the second listen I was having a hard time resisting the FWD button. Each track had done everything it was going to do and just started repeating bits well before the half-way point. All the samples are really short and inorganic, giving the whole thing a bland cut/paste feel. I don't find mixing a dozen short loops to be that interesting, imaginative, inspiring, talented...

To this day, Haunted Dancehall remains a jewel in WARP's crown. It has aged wonderfully and sounds as fresh today as it did when it was released. Far more structured than the Sabresonic albums and less dancey, this shows the Sabres at their creative peak.
Can anyone argue against the likes of 'Tow Truck' and 'Wilmot'.

I have to admit to getting scammed by this album back in 1994. Inside the CD booklet are thirteen short extracts (one for every track except Theme 4) credited to the book 'Haunted Dancehall' by James Woodbourne; clearly each track (and in some cases its title) is intended to fit the mood and narrative of the main character McGuire's peculiar tour of the gritty underside of London life. My trainspotter curiosity piqued, I spent some time looking for the book in library catalogues and asking booksellers to search their systems, all to no avail. It wasn't until some years later that I finally found a thread on the alt.music.techno newsgroup confirming that the 'Haunted Dancehall' text had been invented especially for the album!

Similarly the inlay of the Versus remix EP from the following year features another couple of passages attributed to James Woodbourne, this time from the sequel 'Return to the Haunted Dancehall'! In retrospect there were clues that they were having a laugh here - one extract mentions an "Eddie Chemical" (the Chem Bros provided one of the remixes for the EP) while the other has "Vogel The Young Modernist" stating "we equate machines with funkiness" (which was actually the title of Cristian Vogel's first release on his Mosquito label).

Anyways, Haunted Dancehall is a great album and the Woodbourne "quotes" add to the atmosphere evoked by the broken beats and moody grooves of Towtruck and the Portishead remix of Planet D; the fantastically haunting beauty of Theme 4, (the second half of) Ballad of Nicky McGuire and Chapel Street Market 9am; the trumpet-led dub of Wilmot and finally the frankly terrifying title-track Haunted Dancehall. I think the Sabres' previous album Sabresonic is a classic UK techno artist LP but if forced to choose a favourite I'd go for this one.

Are Sabres of Paradise one of the most forgotten Warp artists in the age of IDM?? Who knows, but this for me is one the absolute classic Warp releases, up there with the very best from Aphex Twin. Sabres manage to create soundscapes, textures and feelings which are totally unique and totally involving. This is music for the dancefloor and at the same time music for the brain - genius.