Thanks to Adam at A Model of Control for helping to get the word out, and naming our Special Edition Releases, as among the best of the year.

Collide are a defiantly independent band – they have been releasing their material on their own label, Noiseplus Music, for well over two decades – and that has allowed them to plow their own furrow, having built their audience with a string of striking releases and a long-time internet presence, perhaps being one of the earlier independent bands to realise the importance of the internet, and indeed crowdfunding too. This year – and I suspect this was in train pre-COVID, anyway – they announced lavish reissues of their two greatest albums, Chasing The Ghost and Some Kind of Strange, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the former. Rather than just a quick brush-up of the mix, they went all out.

Included alongside a new “2020 Mix” of each album on CD – basically a very nicely done remastering, they’ve not fucked with the songs otherwise that I can tell – is a Blu-Ray which contains (deep breath) the original mixes, the 2020 mixes, instrumental versions and early demos, as well as a handful of previously unreleased tracks and a video of one track from each. So that’s a lot to get through. But it’s also interesting to listen to the demos, and see how they became the songs that they did – clearly there was a fair amount of reworking and retooling that went on, and it’s not something that we always get to see – a peek behind the curtain, if you will. Really, though, the re-release of these also gives the opportunity for them to reach a new audience, as they deservedly do – Collide stood apart from other bands of the time for resolutely doing something different, taking ethereal goth and harder-edged industrial and even trip-hop that even now still sounds unique. A trip down memory lane that’s well worth doing.