That Phil Western is not a household name in electronic music today is more of an indictment of the state of electronic music than Phil Western.
From his early esoteric and psychedelic tracks on Harthouse and legendary LA label Exist Dance, collaborations with cEvin Key such as Download and PlatEAU, appearances on records like Skinny Puppy’s The Process and solo productions that occupied his later years, Western’s discography is among the most vast and inviting in electronic music. Western straddled the line that many musicians in the field encounter: between collaborating with others, sometimes touring and then pouring himself into music made largely in isolation that would never and possibly could never be performed. In 2019 he had finished the 11th Download album in collaboration with Key just before he passed away.
People often look to an artist’s “last record” for some insight into their life. Western’s last solo release was New Door Opening, a haunting dirge with song titles like “Goodbye Love (The Last Waltz)” and “The Stages of Grief.” People who loved Ian Curtis say they have difficulty listening to Closer and the song “In A Lonely Place” in particular. I can’t imagine what it’s like, emotionally, to process this.
One of the genre tags used extensively on Phil Western’s bandcamp page is “melancholonica,” a word with only one prior use that I can find in the whole of the English language. Western used it to describe many of his records, the ones released under his own name, as Floatpoint and as Kone.
It wasn’t all “melancholonica,” though. I first discovered Phil Western through Off and Gone, a collaboration between Western and Dan Handrabur from the ’90s. It was that era’s psychedelic techno at its best — wondrously experimental even for an age when people were doped up on the idea that music could be better than drugs. I wrote about Off and Gone’s 1996 release Sigma Receptor and the rest of Western’s career about a year after he passed. Yet to be honest, I still haven’t mastered his entire discography, despite encouraging others to do so. I often skip from album to album before settling on one and playing it about 50 times on repeat. Like with Brian Eno’s records, sometimes you fall into a favorite era of Phil Western and camp out there for awhile before you drag yourself across the terrain to another.
Five years after his death, a group of friends have come together for Afterflash: A Remixed Tribute to Phil Western. The album contains 10 remixes and one original song — 2019’s “Dream Death” — which appears to be the actual “last song” of Phil’s career, as he was apparently working on it “right up to the night before he left us.” Remixers include The Passenger (a blissfully cyberdelic remix of “Dreams Come True”), Love Above Will, Dead Voices On Air, the dizzy ambient of Vuemorph’s remix of “Asleep/Awake,” Rim, FaxLtd, Longwalkshortdock, Shamanavi, Sequence Stranger and Hashmoder. There’s true passion behind this — not just of love for a friend but for the legacy of an artist that left too soon and (whether he felt this way or not) didn’t always get a fair shake. The liner notes are laudatory and often moving.
Afterflash would be a very incomplete introduction to Phil Western’s music, if it were meant to be one. Instead, it’s a profound testament to a person and his art and its impact.
“What Phil created in his time on earth makes our world a better place,” they note. “He was the kind of person everyone needs to know or at least know about.” With this, there will be at least a few more.
⚪️ Afterflash: A Remixed Tribute Tracklisting
Phil Western: Afterflash: A Remixed Tribute (Map Music / Digital)
1. Dreams Come True (The Passenger edit) (04:38)
2. Kone - I Love You (Bardo remix by Love Above Will) (06:56)
3. California (Robert Shea's Pastoral Psychedelicism mix) (06:28)
4. Ghost in Your Bed (Dead Voices on Air remix) (06:08)
5. Asleep/Awake (Vuemorph collage) (06:30)
6. Kone - Koln (Rim's Kolned mix) (07:29)
7. Dementhol (FaxLtd’s Fingerpie mix) (10:06)
8. Boobs (Longwalkshortdock remix) (08:22)
9. California (Shamanavi remix) (06:48)
10. Sequence Stranger - He Watched Me Sleep Last Night (05:36)
11. Dream Death (Hashmoder remix) (07:05)
⚪️ Disclosure Statement
This record was submitted as a promo.
⚪️ Previous Coverage
✳ The Run-Out: The Techno Agnostics: Rediscovering the Ecstasy of Phil Western & Off and Gone (2020)
5 Mag Issue 219
Out Now
VISIONS: Originally published in 5 Mag Issue #219 featuring Hieroglyphic Being, Sunset Sound System founder Galen, Z.I.P.P.O., Flurb and more. Become a member for $2/month and get every issue in your inbox right now…
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