Music Reissues Weekly: Celebrate Yourself! The Sonic Cathedral Story 2004-2024

Yeti Lane’s second album The Echo Show was released in March 2012. The Paris-based duo’s LP was stunning: holding together overall, as well as on a track-by-track basis. There were obvious influences: Kraftwerk, late-period Spacemen 3, motorik, My Bloody Valentine. But it didn’t sound like anyone else. Charlie Boyer and Ben Pleng had created a wonder.

The Echo Show, released by the Sonic Cathedral label, still sounds great. If it was issued next month or next year, it would still sound great. Eternally fresh. Back in 2012 it seemed to arrive from nowhere. Yeti Lane’s first album had come out in France on a label which specialised in electronica and was also issued in the UK by Sonic Cathedral, an imprint supposedly dedicated to shoegazing – the effects-shrouded indie music which surfaced from around 1987 onwards. Rather than the debut, it was The Echo Show which made a mark. Confoundingly, these things happen.

This wasn’t though, in a reductive sense, shoegazing (the ins and out of shoegazing have been previously gone into by this column: here and here). There was nothing gauzy, misty or indirect about The Echo Show. It was to the point, exhibiting a propensity for forward motion rather than a stately progression similar to wafting along on a cloud. It was stuffed with memorable tunes. The hard edges were drawn from a knowledge of electronic dance music. It was a sit-up-and-take-notice album. Both for Yeti Lane and the label which issued it.

The label is still with us, still vital, ever thriving and has issued Celebrate Yourself! The Sonic Cathedral Story 2004-2024, a collection with a self-explanatory title making fun of the 1990 Melody Maker tag The Scene That Celebrates Itself, a facile jibe at bands such as Lush, Moose, Ride and Slowdive. It is this 4-CD clamshell box set which prompts renewed thoughts of Yeti Lane’s terrific The Echo Show. And, indeed, the French duo figure in the set’s track list.

Sonic Cathedral’s first record arrived in 2006. It was a single by former Ride member Mark Gardener. After this and into 2008, there were ten more singles. The packaging was careful. Each record came in a similarly designed sleeve; an aesthetic a little like the Ghostbox label. Some names on the sleeves were familiar: Dean & Britta, M83. Some were new: Kyte, The Tamborines. Stylistically, everything shared a desire to push beyond genre tropes. All 11 of the label’s first singles were collected in a box set in 2009 (there was a CD counterpart).

It became clear that whatever Sonic Cathedral was about was not really about shoegazing if it were defined as a form of late Eighties/early Nineties indie music. A 2010 compilation on the label was titled The Psychedelic Sounds Of Sonic Cathedral (pictured below right). Its cover image was based on that of the first 13th Floor Elevators album. A line was explicitly drawn between now, then and a more venerable then.

It was a connection which had already been noted. Back in 2001, the author, journalist and historian Jon Savage had written about British psychedelia. He noted that “the shoegazers of the late ‘80s began to tinker with psychotropic drones: the best of this much-maligned bunch were Spacemen 3 and My Bloody Valentine, whose turn-of-the-‘90s albums remain stoner classics. Psychedelia is not dead: it’s just too much fun.” It was, indeed, possible to say the arrival of Ride, Slowdive, Flying Saucer Attack and so on revitalised psychedelia. Without the dress-up-box aspects though. This was about sonic exploration.

Attitudinally, then, this is core to the essence of Sonic Cathedral – snarkily named in tribute to another music press put-down of shoegazers and their “cathedrals of sound.” The Sonic Cathedral tag first emerged in October 2004 when NME contributor Nathaniel Cramp began putting-on club nights under the banner. The label followed after he had a conversation with Mark Gardener: soon the subject of the label’s first release. Gardener’s old band Ride had not yet reformed. That happened in 2014. The same had already happened for Slowdive, who returned earlier the same year.

Of course, what might be called shoegazing had never gone away. In Estonia, Imandra Lake’s wonderful Seesamseesam album was released in 2010. Finland’s Joensuu 1685 white-light intense eponymous debut album arrived in 2008. In Germany, Ulrich Schnauss was consistently in this territory from the mid Nineties, especially so from 2003's A Strangely Isolated Place album. But Cramp’s Sonic Cathedral – and, to a degree, Fuzz Club Records, which began releasing records in 2012 – helped put shape on something which wasn’t so much formless as indistinct.

Now, the pivotal Sonic Cathedral has passed its 20th year in operation. This is marked by the elegant Celebrate Yourself! The Sonic Cathedral Story 2004-2024. The track list underlines the importance of the label’s roster, and that of the ears and energy of its proprietor. Emma Anderson (Lush), Andy Bell (Ride), Neil Halstead (Slowdive), Dean Wareham (Galaxie 500, Luna, Dean & Britta) are here, as are Disappears, Mark Peters (Engineers), Slowdive themselves and Whitelands (who include Slowdive’s Simon Scott). So are significant label discoveries/staples like bdrmm, Cheval Sombre, deary, Lorelle Meets The Obsolete, MOLLY, Spectres, Whitelands and, naturally, Yeti Lane. There are previously unissued tracks, and cuts which have never been on CD before. These sit alongside a disc of frequently paint-peeling live recordings. Add in a tongue-in-cheek disc devoted to Xmas songs (fitting: in 1991 Ride pressed a limited single of “Like a Snowflake,” a seasonal recasting of their song “Like a Daydream”).

Another 20 years then? As music with these inclinations will never go away, why not?

• Next week: Twilights Time - The Complete 60s Recordings. The first-ever complete anthology of The Twilights, one of Australia’s finest pop practitioners of the 1960s
• More reissue reviews on theartsdesk
• Kieron Tyler’s website

@kierontyler.bsky.social