Dean McPhee will release Northern Earth on 11 September via Bass Ritual, his own label. It came out on cassette earlier this year and sold out. This is the vinyl version — 180g brown, limited to 500 — and it is McPhee’s sixth full-length album.
“McPhee’s soundworld is eerie and beautiful,” Thomas Blake wrote in his KLOF review of Astral Gold, Bass Ritual’s first release. Astral Gold made KLOF’s 2024 Albums of the Year list. Since then the sound has got heavier. His Bradford Boar piece for Folklore Tapes ran to fifteen minutes — no overdubs, recorded live. Northern Earth goes further still. Overdriven guitar, a wooden snare drum pedal and an 18-inch subwoofer have joined the stacked valve amps and pedalboard, and McPhee now treats the whole rig as one instrument.
A video for opening track Indica Fields accompanies the announcement. It uses footage from Out of Darkness, Light, licensed courtesy of the BFI National Archive. The film was the final edition of Mining Review, the National Coal Board’s long-running cine-magazine. Mining Review ran for 36 years and over 420 editions from 1947 to 1983, shown in more than 700 cinemas across Britain’s mining regions. Out of Darkness, Light looks back at the nationalisation of the coal industry and forward to the Selby coalfield — McPhee’s music and this archival footage share an obvious attachment to northern landscapes, industrial memory and what lies beneath the ground.
Sharing its title with John Billingsley’s long-running magazine on landscape and psychogeography (McPhee was born in the north of England, still lives in Bradford), the album’s three compositions were honed through live performance and recorded at home with no overdubs. The side-long title track runs to eighteen minutes.
Distributed by Cargo Records, Northern Earth is available to pre-order in record shops now.
Among his upcoming live dates (see below), McPhee is performing at Foyle’s Auditorium, London, on 26 September.
Live Dates
Fri. 11th September – The Triangle, Shipley w/ The Horse Loom – tickets
Fri. 18th September – Fire and Water, Sowerby Bridge opening for Širom – tickets
Sat. 19th September – Snapes Printworks, Preston w/Jon Collin – tickets
Fri. 25th September – NCI Sports & Social Club, Cambridge w/ Powtes – tickets
Sat. 26th September – Foyles Auditorium, London – tickets
