As previously reported, Sandwell District will no longer function as a label or as a recording entity, though it will continue as a “live experiment”.

Sandwell – the revered techno collective numbering John ‘Silent Servant’ Mendez, Peter ‘Female’ Sutton, David ‘Function’ Sumner and Karl ‘Regis’ O’Connor reported their decision to cease “audio communications” on their website last week.

Now, they’ve made a further statement clarifying the reasons for their calling time on the project at the height of its popularity and critical acclaim:

“We stopped Sandwell District the same way we started it — through  intuition. It’s what anyone with a passion or half a brain would have done. It will never get old. No one will be able to impose their clean values on it. We will all continue to work together. Nothing has changed but everthing has shifted. It was a glorious death, not a mercy killing, as is so often the case in these situations.”

FACT understands that Function and Silent Servant are already at work on solo albums, though it’s presently not known when exactly these will materialise, or on what labels. Regis’s long-running Downwards label continues to flourish with sporadic releases; having recently issued his own outrageously limited Adolescence: The Complete Recordings 1994-2001 CD anthology, next up is an EP from folk-inspired post-punk survivors Eyeless In Gaza.