Going Out - A Love From Outer Space at The Berkeley Suite

A Love From Outer Space drops into Glasgow tonight (Friday 8th November) for it's Bi-Monthly residency at one of Glasgow's great club spaces The Berkeley Suite with residents Andrew Weatherall and Sean Johnston behind the controls. Beginning in 2010 in a residency within the intimate neo-dinge of Stoke Newington’s The Waiting Room, A Love from Outer Space was originally brought together by the advent of an excitement held for sounds situated within the mid-tempo frame; a lower BPM statute which has accented the astral, the headlong and the brawny, melding disco’s drive and glossy gestures, the cosmic glints of kosmische, thunderous dub-sonority, and intrepid post-punk bombast with proto-house and that of acid-house; the background of perennial residents and night owners, Andrew Weatherall and Sean Johnston. The pair held a mutual regard for Adrian Sherwood records and moved in the same circles for a number of years before ‘the oasis of slowness’, offered by ALFOS was conceived, a refuge from the frenetic ‘velocity’ of modern developments.

Undoubtedly, there’s been little detraction with a night which offers an elusion from the impersonality of the overly veneered and the tedium of the moronically paced; a measured escape from the one-techno-fits-all mind-set. Yet the longevity of their more experimental mandate has not begat dry obscurity as the infectious uptake of ALFOS’s premise has been undeniable, with tours across the UK, jaunts across the continent, numerous festival slots and more recently, the establishment of a Glasgow base at the Berkeley suite: an appropriately meteoric ascendancy.

They’ve welcomed guests like Optimo and Trickski, but kept themselves largely in the foreground, developing a distinct character and spirit to the night. Weatherall, as elder statesman, has provided the uninhibited, bedraggled luridness and the soaring, celestial dimensions that have defined the still-vibrant and pioneering production work he’s mastered over the course of his now fabled career; a career which shows no signs of a lessened momentum. And as one half of revered production outfit, The Hardway Brothers and prominent voice in earlier classic-acid project, The Flash Faction, Sean Johnston has also successfully transmuted studio alchemy into more considered fare for floor spheres. Though this doesn’t seem to be an exercise in rose-tinted retrospection or self-applauding egotism for Weatherall and Johnston, with a clear stretching of selection which journeys further, towards the peripheries, giving new life to old, leftfield eccentricities and airing the young and recent in proximity, with finely judged style.

As regular attendees to these great party's we can testify that these are nights not to be missed, especially in the intimate surroundings of The Berkeley Suite. Things kick off at 11pm, so make sure you have a ticket or get yourself done their early.