Aerial M – The Peel Sessions

Description

For those of you who’ve mislaid your history goggles, this
archival release recalls an ancient time in the world of recorded
music. Yes, back in the dinosaur days of the 1990s, a creature
known as Aerial M walked the earth, before evolving into Papa
M and Pajo and beyond and back. Even then, the music of M
had a next-wave vibe, walking upright among the knuckledraggers
(and having drinks in the evening with others of its
genetic detachment). It was too much to last very long, of
course – but some things end up lasting forever, don’t they?

Drag City, an organization largely set up to bring you the best of
all available M recordings, are proud to be there for the release
of the only Aerial M session ever recorded for John Peel’s BBC
Radio One show, as it was originally recorded on 4th February
1998 and broadcast on 3rd March of the same year.

The studio versions of these songs, which appear on Aerial M’s
self-titled album and Papa M’s ‘Hole of Burning Alms’
compilation, were played by M himself (now revealed to be
David Pajo), which makes this album a rare alternative view of
the canonical M, played by an actual Aerial M band who, all too
briefly, embodied the sound for a year or so before Papa
brought a brand new bag.

This session found them fortuitously roadburned from several
weeks in the European Theatre. So much the better for our
archival ears, as M’s signature minimalist long-fuse sizzle is
thrillingly intact here; in fact, even more so, as the tunes are
jammed out past the studio versions’ originally delineated
borders, reaching rudely across the table in moments of
liveness that the studio-bound project might have decided
against when conferring only with the walls.

For fans of their epic version of ‘Turn Turn Turn’, this is more
sweetmeats from that raucous old skull – but if you’ve not been
down this road before, be prepared: the taste will set you slowly
aflame. And then, before you know it, the band is dined and
dashed – just like the band that Aerial M was, all too briefly
amok on the earth that was too.