Since leaving high school, THUMP hasn't really reflected much on everything we learned in geography lessons, if we learned anything at all. Given that we still don't really know what an oxbow lake is, we'd have to presume that despite Mr Wicks' best intentions we learned pretty much less than fuck all. One thing though, one tiny, tiny thing, that's stuck in the imagination ever since is the notion of a 'slag heap', which when you're a hormonally driven 14 year old desperate for a flash of flesh and the acceptance of your peers, is a godsend. You get to say the word "slag" out loud. In a classroom! And no one can tell you off! Slag! Slag heap! "Don't your mum and your sisters," you could start, knowing that you had a scholastic justification for the utterance that was about to spill from your lips, "live in a slag heap?!" The room erupted with laughter. This is the stuff memories are made of.We found ourselves thinking about slag heaps late last week when London based DJ and producer Joe Ashworth's new record on new label No Real Value landed in our inboxes. New imprints need new ways of standing out from the crowd and the No Real Value approach is pleasingly conceptual. They've decided to combine the world of the club with field recordings. Yes, I know, field recordings are usually the preserve of Wire reading Cafe Oto types, but they don't have to be flat aural documents of the sound of bus stops in Doncaster or whatever. For the inaugural release, Ashworth and fellow producer Aggborough have been tasked with turning the sound of slag heaps into something ready for dank, dark clubs.The original field recordings were gathered by Richard Green and Morgan O'Donovan, as they documented the Slag Heaps in the slate mines of Snowdonia, as part of an exhibition they presented in 2014. Aggborough and Ashworth got their hands on the raw data and set to work. The latter's turned in a deeply dark, toned, taut and trippy slab of avant-techno that sounds like Pete Swanson jamming with the earth itself. Check it out exclusively here on THUMP:Slag Heap drops on November 19th via No Real ValueFollow Ashworth on Facebook // SoundCloud // Twitter
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