As anyone who writes about music will know, spring and certainly autumn are the busiest times of the year with releases coming so thick and fast that inevitably some stuff gets overlooked. And Fold’s 10 Past Midnight – which actually dropped a month ago – was amongst such stuff this year. The band’s distinctive brand of spoken-word-over-breakbeat-powered-music-to-fight-the-man has been featured on MB many times over the years and latest release 10 Past Midnight finds them celebrating a decade since their first LP. Less a reference to Stephen King’s short story collection Four Past Midnight than an acknowledgement to the still horror-filled fact that we could be well past the point of no return on the Doomsday Clock, the title nods to a quote by Fannie Lou Hamer. The music meanwhile provides a meta-celebration of Fold’s debut self-titled album. Back then, the monkey said, “the speeches-over-music thing is probably not something that will work twice in a row and it’ll be interesting to see where they go next,” and truth be told they’ve not stuck to that over the years, having delivered instrumentals, worked with MC and poet Mr Gee and done tracks featuring the singing of bandleader Seth Mowshowitz. For 10 Past Midnight however, it makes perfect sense to revisit their own past as their music revisits our own recent past to find out how humanity managed to make the clusterfuck of 21st century existence even worse in the last decade.
Brief opener The Singing And The Dying finds a newly-restored sample of Bertrand Russell speaking of peace over tinkling ambience while the title track (over breakbeat music originally composed more than a quarter of a century ago) features a narrative constructed from speakers who featured on tracks across the band’s debut album including Bruce Lee, the aforementioned Fannie Hamer and Mr Gee, Macolm X and Kurt Vonnegut. Next up, Narrative Control splices the spoken thoughts of behavioural analyst Thomas Karat about the ways people are manipulated over an unreleased beat written almost immediately after 9/11 which Mowshowitz judged to have the requisite sinister atmosphere to match our current benighted times. The fourth cut is a remix of She featuring Brooklyn’s 6% poet but now underpinned with the funky backing of track Picture Perfect from 2017’s Written In The Sky EP. The remainder of tracks are four previously unreleased instrumentals from the band’s debut LP including The White Man. Only expect to find the EP on Bandcamp and Ampwall however – these guys aren’t fucking with the likes of Spotify any more due to the pathetic returns to musicians of streaming royalties, not to mention (for example) multi-million Euro investment by Spotify CEO Daniel Ek in military AI.
(Out now HERE)