Nun Gun’s “Mondo Decay” tape and book officially came out on February 19th. On that same day we also announced a special Stealth Empire Maxi 12” vinyl. This odd format has held a special place in Algiers lore over the years. And while the background and behind the scenes of how this special Dub/Bass focused companion piece will get plenty of posts over the next few weeks (as we continue to collaborate and exchange with Mark Stewart, ONO, Adrian Sherwood, and others), We have to first begin with the story of “Irony. Utility. Pretext.”

IUP, as we list it on set lists, was supposed to be the follow up release after our initial Blood 7”. The idea of doing an expanded 12” Maxi style single that included an extended mix and several other long form variations really appealed to us. We had collected a lot of dance and rap singles over the years that made us fall in love with this type of format, and we also felt like we wanted to do something that pivoted towards our love for those styles of music as well...to you know...show that we weren’t your typical rock and roll band.

IUP as a song had a long road to fruition. It began in 2008 in London in Camden Mews as a vocal sample from the band Osibisa that was run through a distortion pedal and then bass and a simple drum beat were added to it. It was further etched into some sort of prophetic stone when, after we took a break from the music, Ryan and myself went out that same night to the Marathon (an infamous North London felafel shop that had a dance floor in the back room that was open after hours). There we proceeded to randomly meet the 60-something year old drummer for Osibisa in the queue for the toilet (one of the weirdest coincidental moments of my life). The night ended with all of us singing the vocal refrain to that sample at the top of our lungs in the middle of the dance floor with arms around each other’s shoulders. This seemed to be as close to a blessing to use that sample as one could get.

Over the next few years we would all work on the song intermittently and take it in very different directions. Franklin was keen to push a guitar focused organic afrobeat inspired version, while Ryan and myself kept pushing the song ever further towards Africa Bambaataa and Section 25’s “From the Hip” (which was a record that I was completely obsessed with at that time). The dream eventually solidified to pursue all of these directions in one way or the other and tie them all together via the IUP Maxi single. I even mocked up artwork for it. And then a funny thing happened as we inched closer to achieving this dream and pressing this record ourselves...we signed to Matador.

Once that happened, everything kind of changed. We no longer were three friends in different cities that would see each other intermittently, with hopes of self releasing physical music once every couple of years and then keeping boxes of unwanted records in our closet. We now had a label, and one that we grew up admiring, at that. And there was demand for us to collect old and new songs and do a full length debut. So at this point the IUP Maxi 12” fell by the way side, and in some respects, the compiling and release of this Stealth Empire Maxi is the long delayed realization of that dream.

But the story doesn’t completely end there. When we entered the studio to record the self-titled Algiers album with Tom Morris, that long form version of IUP was fresh in our minds, and it was the albatross that hung over most of those sessions as we continued to work through it for the entire time we recorded that album. It was one of the first songs we started tracking, and was the last song we finished tracking, with Franklin even rerecording his vocals after the mix sessions because he thought he had a better take in him.

We were so consumed with this song at that time that halfway through the recording sessions we informed Matador that we were going to Bulgaria to make a low budget video for this track (because we were convinced that we needed to make this epic video for that song), and Matador let us. The song wasn’t even finished (neither was the album), we just shot the video to one of the old versions. Then a few months later I had the fun job of trying to sync video with audio that was completely different, so I had to cut away to other shots when Franklin’s finished vocals didn’t quite line up.

In the studio, we quickly had assembled the 8 ½ minute Maxi version of IUP that never saw the light of day. By the time we mixed the record we cut the song to a more easily palatable 5 minutes, but this extended version is still laying around waiting for this moment to be shared. It was originally supposed to have a locked groove on the white noise that fades up at the end. In the pre-Matador days, the b-side was going to be Claudette and then a couple alternate versions of the song. We ended up just releasing a digital version of Claudette last minute because the whole process was taking so long. We put it up on Soundcloud and sent it to Adhoc to review and that’s essentially what got us signed to Matador, putting the brakes on the IUP Maxi single.

So here it is, in all it’s glory, the "Irony. Utilty. Pretext. (Extended Maxi-single mix)". I’m also including a clip of one of the original demos so can hear how different it was. There are actually some cool ideas buried in there that need to be revisited one day.

–Lee Feb ’21