Spiritualized to play Pure Phase in full in Dublin in March
Jason Pierce and band will revisit the 1995 album which is one of the finest in Spiritualized discography.
The Foggy Notions presented show will feature the band performing the album in full at the National Stadium on 20th March 2025.
The album is notable for the fact that it features two mixes of the songs running together, with songs ‘The Slide Song’, ‘Medication’ and the title track.
Tickets from €40.80 plus fees on general sale Friday 15th November at 10am.
About Pure Phase:
Briefly renamed Spiritualized Electric Mainline, Pure Phase expanded on the amount of personnel involved in making the record, with Sean Cook joining on bass and the Balanescu Quartest adding string arrangements. The record sounds like no other as there are two mixes running together concurrently.
Jason: “You can’t really compare this record to any other because of how we mixed it; in such an “incorrect” way. When we made it I was crashing on (frequent Spiritualized collaborator) John Coxon’s couch in London; he had his own studio and was always open to new ideas.
We mixed the tracks twice but I couldn’t decide which one I liked better so we said “let’s have them both”. Both of them were on tape so we spent hours cutting them into usable sections. If you run two things together in parallel you get this kind of Hawkwind effect (phase), which gets deeper as they drift away from being ‘locked’, so we had to keep re-locking on a bass drum every eight or ten bars and it took forever. There was no digital recorders back then or if there were they were prohibitively expensive. I’ve actually tried to do this with digital and it doesn’t work the same way because they lock too accurately. Because it was achieved with tape, it gave it this strange kind of movement.
The thing that astounded me most about Pure Phase is that it didn’t make any allowances for the audience. It stuck to its guns. It was like ‘I’m gonna sit on this part for as long as it’s necessary…and it’s probably a little too long.’
If you listen to the isolated parts, everything is incredibly simple, the horns, the slide, all these little motifs and they lock together like some strange kind of machine. Something like Kraftwerk was the nearest thing in my musical vocabulary at the time. Great rock and roll music is like systems, it has its own endless cycle. Pure Phase was Michael Nyman, Steve Reich and John Adams, rock ‘n’ roll and gospel music, and it sounds like driving as fast as you can in torrential rain.
I wish I could do it now, to mix things twice and throw it together and end up with this magic world; it was so immediate. It was a huge accident that it created this world where you’ve got this phase, where you have a sound on one side of the stereo and then the very same sound on the other side but in a different mix, with a different eq, a different tone, a different reverb and when you put them together the two sounds move into some random place near the centre of the stereo field but no place you would ever put it if you tried it in a conventional sense. It was a thing that was out of our control and it just sounded better than we could have imagined so we chased it.
Things that take forever… I love that. I think that’s the best thing. Because it’s like wringing this thing of every enjoyment that I can possibly get from it. But it wasn’t like an endless “what’s the point,” it was impossible to hear the song any other way once we’d pressed the “combine” button. It was impossible to look back.
