Woodpigeon

To celebrate the 21st anniversary of their debut release, Blur s eponymous fifth album has now been remastered from the original tapes by Frank Arkwright (The Smiths, Arcade Fire, New Order, Joy Division), with the remastering overseen by legendary original producer, Stephen Street. Continuing the trend, Blur went straight in at No 1 on its release in February 1997, as had Parklife and The Great Escape before it. Representing a musical evolution for the band, the album is home to two of Blur s biggest hits in Beetlebum and Song 2. B-sides taken from all formats of these two singles are included in the accompanying Blur Special Edition bonus disc, along with b-sides from the album s fourth single M.O.R. Also included on the bonus disc is a 7 mix of Death Of A Party by Adrian Sherwood, the Dust Brothers produced Cowboy Song (which featured on the Dead Man On Campus soundtrack), four acoustic live tracks recorded at Viva Niteclub (previously only released on the German-only version of the M.O.R. single) and three live tracks recorded at MC Vredenburg, Utrecht, Netherlands, which were only previously released on the Netherlands-only version of the album.

“I wanted this to be my most open record, uncynical, naive, unguarded, the record teenage me wanted to make,” says electronic explorer James Holden of his generically unconstrained new album of rave music for a parallel universe 'Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities'. “I used to balance my clock-radio on a wardrobe to catch the faint pirate FM signals from the nearest city, dreaming of what raves would be like when I could finally escape and become a New Age traveller. So it’s like a dream of rave, a fantasy about a transformative music culture that would make the world better. I guess it’s also a dialogue with that teenage me.”