The Peel Sessions Aerial M

For those of you who’ve mislaid your history goggles, this archival release recalls an ancient time in the world of recorded music. Yes, back in the dinosaur days of the 1990s, a creature known as Aerial M walked the earth, before evolving into Papa M and Pajo and beyond and back. Even then, the music of M had a next-wave vibe, walking upright among the knuckledraggers (and having drinks in the evening with others of its genetic detachment). It was too much to last very long, of course - but some things end up lasting forever, don’t they?

Drag City, an organization largely set up to bring you the best of all available M recordings, are proud to be there for the release of the only Aerial M session ever recorded for John Peel’s BBC Radio One show, as it was originally recorded on 4th February 1998 and broadcast on 3rd March of the same year.

The studio versions of these songs, which appear on Aerial M’s self-titled album and Papa M’s ‘Hole of Burning Alms’ compilation, were played by M himself (now revealed to be David Pajo), which makes this album a rare alternative view of the canonical M, played by an actual Aerial M band who, all too briefly, embodied the sound for a year or so before Papa brought a brand new bag.

This session found them fortuitously roadburned from several weeks in the European Theatre. So much the better for our archival ears, as M’s signature minimalist long-fuse sizzle is thrillingly intact here; in fact, even more so, as the tunes are jammed out past the studio versions’ originally delineated borders, reaching rudely across the table in moments of liveness that the studio-bound project might have decided against when conferring only with the walls.