Groundwork Polytechnic by Groundwork

50 minutes runtime.

All profits donated to Medical Aid For Palestinians (MAP)

Buried deep inside Memory Dance’s array of whirring storage banks sits a vast digitised video archive of rarely glimpsed South Yorkshire art-school hijinks, found footage experiments, and lesser watched eBay analogue tape scores (c.1978-1993). Stripping these video items of the moving image, Memory Dance has curated an exclusive archive of audio-only files and presents the first in a series of collaborations with local artists invited to play around with the collection.

Minting the series is Sheffield DJ/producer collective and promoters, Groundwork, who team up for this heady mixtape excursion into VHS noise and bump. Since 2017, from their base hosting nights in the wobbling attic room of the Shakespeare’s pub, Groundwork have become the go-to Sheffield selectors of choice for those heads into abstract noise, mutant 4/4, rolling techno, and deviant bass weight. Here they make a step into the Memory Dance archives to take that same energy across two sides and fifty minutes of ferric fuzz.

Side A, flickers into shimmering life with a muted bleepscape of pops and whistles before being dragged into a spooked out Deathprod of ambient gloom. Elsewhere the scrapes and clangs of the Little Mesters steelworks play out INA GRM concrète style, while Basic Channel throbs are cut by slashes of the grinding wheel. Finally, to a heavy white noise backdrop, the gentle South Yorks burr of a man teaches us about silver density. A lesson in steel manufacture on tape.

Side B, is a warmer trip into the archive: 27 minutes of blissed out dub-techno, BoC-like vapour chug and dreamy field noise awaits. If Side A was a gaseous wander through the metal workshop under harsh sound and flame, this one takes you out of that space into a calming teabreak where the radio plays ambient pads and lullaby collage. That gentle processing soon descends into an acousmatic-industrial that speaks to the shadowy ghosts of Sheffield post-punk/electronic histories. And so it is done.

The Polytechnic archive series is to be continued…

Sharing never-known work from the non-archival fringes of post-punk, jazz, noise, synthpop, soul, electronics, and everything in between those cracks. Mainly always Northern.