We’re boyishly excited about this one: the eternally underrated Woo are back with unheard material. 

In the mid 1970s, London-born brothers Mark and Clive Ives began experimenting with works that combined pastoral instrumentation – acoustic guitar, clarinet, flutes, etc. – with synthesisers and electronic processing techniques. The next 15 years resulted in ten-odd albums of lilting early folktronica – a sort of dubbed-out cult counterpart to Penguin Cafe Orchestra. Their records juxtapose pretty songcraft with trippy dub interludes and ethnographic shorts, making for a uniquely heady listen; as we put it last year, “the sound of tipsy July afternoons spent lounging in fields.”

Their work has undergone the reissue treatment in the last few years: Drag City revisited 1989’s It’s Cosy Inside in 2012, and Emotional Rescue’s reissue of 1982 debut Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong easily crashed into the top 10 of our best reissues of 2013 list.

Later this year, Drag City will release a brand new disc from the pair, titled When The Past Arrives. The LP assembles various unheard tracks from the brothers’ 1970s/1980s heyday, selected from a pool of hundreds of unheard recordings. Their last release of new material was 1991’s A La Luna, making this their first proper full-length in over two decades.

In a press release, Clive Ives introduces the album as follows:

If we got something good happening it would continue into the early hours. I remember one morning waking up still sitting at my keyboard, the phone as my pillow. The woman below us would thump the ceiling with a broom handle when she got sick of the noise, so that influenced a lot of what we could do and how we would work: drums became triangles, clarinets were played real breathy, guitars were plucked, not strummed. Even hitting the keyboard keys were not to be struck too hard. This new album is mainly a result of these late night recordings. Soft melodic compositions created on either piano or guitar, then multi tracked with improvisations and harmonic patterns.

When The Past Arrives will, ahem, arrive on March 17. Whichever Way You Are Going… track ‘C.H. Revisited’ is below.

Tracklisting:
First Night Nerves
Satya
1001 Decisions
Life So Far
Om Shanti
Amala’s Love
Teddy Bears
H20
Free Will
Distant Consequences
Acting Like a Lover
Glip Glop
The Garden Path
Ruby