Sometime around late ‘93, just after The Fall released The Infotainment Scan there was a fork in the space time continuum, like in Back To The Future 2, in the world we didn’t end up in Mark E Smith called an end to the Fall project and concentrated on colaborating with electronic musicians (musicians who make electronic music, not robot musicians) occasionally parts of this reality break through, like when we got those Dose colaborations in the late 90s, we don’t hear a steady progression as we do in the yearly Fall releases, just random bursts.

The latest dispatch from this paralel realm is the Von Sudenfeld album which has Mr. Smith slurring and jabbering over squelchy grime breats supplied by Deutschland’s Mouse On Mars. The sharpness of the backing suits Mark E Smith’s voice more than any of the recent incarnations of The Fall, lets face it no matter how consistent in quality recent Fall releases have been we’re only getting further from the crisp poetry of Hex Enduction Hour.

St. Werner and Toma (for it is they!) use Smiths voice as an instrument in their arrangements, twisting and filtering it in much in the same way as The Knife do, not to hold the wierdness down as is the case with a lot of electronic music but to make it sound more alien. It’a shame that these tracks won’t see much dance floor action because a lot of them really are quite danceable, in fact the opening track (video above) sounds like it’s deliberately referencing LCD Soundsystem’s Losing my Edge, which itself is practically a tribute to Mark E Smiths inimitable delivery.

Anyway, hopefully we’ll see more of this kind of thing from Mark E Smith, maybe after the period of consolidation with the last band - which was you know, fine - this signals that Mark E. Smith is getting back into making stuff that sounds new.

Also of note is how brill Domino records are getting these days.