Wrangler—the musical project of Stephen Mallinder (formerly of Cabaret Voltaire), Ben ‘Benge’ Edwards, and Phil Winter are releasing their second studio album White Glue—out September 23rd. This follows the release of their first LP LA Spark in 2014, and the recent Sparked – Modular Remix Project.
White Glue is a funky exploration in analogue synth with nods to Cabaret Voltaire’s ‘brothers in popular electronic music’ Kraftwerk on tracks like Clockwork, and a peter Gabriel sounding falsetto on Stupid (watch the music video for that track here).
You can stream the LP above, and here is an excerpt from a recent interview we did with Mal:
“White Glue was stuff we’ve been playing live for about 18 months. We really just put it all together starting around Christmas time and finished it about 5 months later, so it’s quite concentrated. The earlier stuff was a work in progress—it probably took about 2 years to actually do the album and 3 months to actually nail it.
We’ve done a few remixes where sometimes we’re asked to do a tune and we’re all over the place because Phil’s in London, I’m in Brighton and Benge is in Cornwall. If we’ve got to do a mix, Phil and I work in London while we pull it altogether but we try to be in the same room when we finish.
Wrangler has one rule: when we write we do our own music because it’s performance based. It’s not one of those things that is computer-based in the sense that we send sound files. We all like to work together and be in the room. Strangely, it’s electronic music which is progressive, but in some ways we are traditional in that we work together and it has to come organically—otherwise it’s not really us.”
Read the full interview with Stephen Mallinder on Cabaret Voltaire, Burroughs, and more
Wrangler recently played at the Royal Albert Hall as special guests of John Grant (15th June, 2016) and will be performing with John Grant again on October 22nd at The Barbican, along with Scritti Politti, Alexis Taylor, The Pop Group, and ProtoMartyr for Rough Trade’s 40th Anniversary.
