mekons - horrorble … - fire
AT RADIO NOW
TRY: Before the Ice Age, Private Defense Contractor & You're Not Singing Anymore
FCC: Mudcrawlers
RIYL: Spiritualized, Pulp, Flaming Lips, Memorials,
Blonde Redhead & Lykke Li
Horrorble is a full-length dub reinterpretation of Mekons’ acclaimed 2025 album Horror, created in collaboration with Tony Maimone (Pere Ubu). Transforming familiar material into immersive, echo-laden soundscapes that emphasise tension and depth. Songs from Horror are pulled apart and reshaped into a drifting dub landscape where basslines stretch and dissolve, rhythms echo into open space and tracks are dismantled and reassembled into versions that drift, jar and unravel. This new release is available now on white vinyl and a double CD featuring both albums.
Early reviews say, "utterly inspiring in their dogged perseverance while aging like a fine vino" (The Vinyl District) meanwhile The Devils Music suggests listening to Horrorble, "rediscover the erudite and esoteric charms of the Mekons."
Whilst the original Horror album confronted climate catastrophe, economic violence and political decay through rock and roll, punk and melody - Horrorble reveals its shadow counterpart. Working with Maimone, this record treats dub as subtraction, space and echo rather than simple revision, revealing hidden textures and new emotional weight within the original recordings.
“We first met Tony Maimone when we opened for Cleveland’s darkest art rockers Pere Ubu on a long, weird tour of the UK tour in 1988. By 1991 he was somehow playing bass for a newly fractured Mekons on a longer weirder tour of Europe bashing out songs from the Curse album which never saw the light of day in the US. In 2015 Tony unleashed the Studio G mobile to record ‘Existentialism’ the Mekons’ instant live album featuring brand new songs. Recorded in one night at a tiny theater in Brooklyn while mixing and editing the batch of tunes that became Horror, we had a feeling they might have some sort of secret double life. So much potential and split decisions that could’ve gone either way. Tony was the man to get his tools out and see what lurked beneath to make it truly Horrorble.”
A Mekonic tactic for songwriting might be to think of a title for a song, in this case “Private Defense Contractor”, agree on it and then sit up very late the night before heading into the recording studio, in this case Elefante Estudios in Valencia, Spain, exploring what such a song might actually consist of. Memories of lies justifying war loom large - the owl of Minerva flies at dusk.
Formed in Leeds in the late 1970s, Mekons have always operated as a collective, working outside trends and expectations. Guided by the belief that the political and personal remain inseparable, they continue to create on their own terms, combining experimentation with a call to organise and resist.
The Mekons are Jon Langford, Sally Timms, Tom Greenhalgh, Dave Trumfio, Susie Honeyman, Rico Bell, Steve Goulding, and Lu Edmonds.