Spiritualized have added a Belfast date to their upcoming tour, performing their seminal 1995 album Pure Phase live in its entirety. The show will take place at The Telegraph Building on 19th March 2024, marking the band’s first Belfast appearance since 2019. It follows their previously announced date at the National Stadium in Dublin on 20th March 2024.
Originally credited to “Spiritualized Electric Mainline,” Pure Phase remains a singular work within the band’s catalogue. Expanded personnel on the album included bassist Sean Cook and string arrangements by the Balanescu Quartet. At its beating heart is an unconventional mixing approach, described by frontman Jason Pierce (aka J Spaceman):
“You can’t really compare this record to any other because of how we mixed it; in such an ‘incorrect’ way. When we made it I was crashing on (frequent Spiritualized collaborator) John Coxon’s couch in London; he had his own studio and was always open to new ideas.
We mixed the tracks twice but I couldn’t decide which one I liked better so we said ‘let’s have them both.’ Both of them were on tape so we spent hours cutting them into usable sections. If you run two things together in parallel you get this kind of Hawkwind effect (phase), which gets deeper as they drift away from being ‘locked,’ so we had to keep re-locking on a bass drum every eight or ten bars and it took forever.”
This unconventional approach gives Pure Phase its distinct character, with Pierce describing the experience:
“It created this world where you’ve got this phase, where you have a sound on one side of the stereo and then the very same sound on the other side but in a different mix, with a different eq, a different tone, a different reverb and when you put them together the two sounds move into some random place near the centre of the stereo field but no place you would ever put it if you tried it in a conventional sense.
It was a thing that was out of our control and it just sounded better than we could have imagined, so we chased it.”
Pierce also reflected on the album’s uncompromising nature:
“The thing that astounded me most about Pure Phase is that it didn’t make any allowances for the audience. It stuck to its guns. It was like, ‘I’m gonna sit on this part for as long as it’s necessary… and it’s probably a little too long.’”
For fans of Pure Phase and its singular soundscapes – described by Pierce as “driving as fast as you can in torrential rain” – you can file this one under unmissable. Tickets go on sale on Monday, 2nd December at 10AM.
