Dual Action - Babe Beer Bar Car (2018)

Hospital Productions return with Dual Action’s Industrial mutations of Techno, D&B and electronic variants smudged with clammy ambience, compiling the hard-to-find ‘Babe Beer Bar Car’ tapes released between 2014-2016. If you’re into John T. Gast, Christoph De Babalon, The Haters or Frak, this one’s for you.

Compiling some of Matthew Folden, aka Dual Action’s most sought-after material, this set of forays into distorted Ambient, mutant House and Jungle – even weird sorta Grime and Footwork variants – was originally released on his hard-to-find Babe Beer Bar Car tapes, issued between 2014-2016 – and compiled here onto vinyl for the first time.

A core figure on Prurient’s label, affectionately described by Fernow as an “uninvited guest sort of figure who travels around fxcking shit up on the lonely”, Folden has appeared on numerous and seminal Prurient recordings including the demo version of the groundbreaking Bermuda Drain album, the final tape recordings made at the original hospital productions brick and mortar store as Prurient’s ‘Oxidation’ and the new released 7LP of doom electronics Rainbow Mirror which arrived in 2017 to commemorate the 20 years of the project.

Babe Beer Bar Car takes in signature sluggers that sound like The Haters gone house, thru to rolling D&B and footwork rhythms fringing on the grey area, each half-lit by patented atmospheric pollutants.

The set builds a murky picture of a character who spends long nights with his drum machine – it’s hard to shift the feeling that this is the kind of music – numbly expressive, rudimentary and bluntly driven by urges – that someone befitting of the great American lounge-lizard/drifter stereotype might make, or at least listen to, after dark.

Its a quintessentially Hospital Productions sound – deeply satisfying in its mix of black humour laced with flashes of demonic genius.