Ana One Naum Gabo

Ana One is a new compilation on Optimo Music which assembles 10 tracks by Glasgow’s Naum Gabo (Jonnie Wilkes & James Savage). Spanning 20 years, it exposes the many slants to Naum Gabo’s sound and is testament to their unwavering commitment to remaining unattached to any scene. We hear early unreleased lo-fi post punk disco experiment “Red Cones” (2001) and one of their releases on Kompakt Extra from the notorious “Speicher” series – “Galore” (2004). There is film music in the form of “Dino”, evidence of their inter-planetary synth prog adventures like “Black Lab”, a cover version of Scottish new wave band Fingerprintz’ “Wet Job” and exclusive new productions like Sleep C’Mon (2021 Bass Mix). The ten tracks are lovingly re-mastered by James (conveniently the mastering engineer for the majority of the label’s output).

Asked about the compilation Jonnie says:

“Although we have released quite a few records since our beginnings around the year 2000, I have always been conscious that ours is a sporadic discography compared to many artists. I remember after the first records came out on Kompakt thinking that we needed to churn out more tracks and quickly… make a name for ourselves! Make bangers! Get a Soundcloud! (it was new then) All that… It wasn’t our way though and we happily got distracted by other things – working with film doing scores and sound design, remixing, trying new writing and recording methods, experimenting with live sound and just doing what we liked really.

We quickly realised that the joy of our collaboration lies in the making process, a collective buzz for making “sound” together rather than wrapping up releases. Literally the only interruption to 20 years of meeting at Hottrax once or twice a week to work on music, eat take-away and drink tea has been the pandemic, at which point Keith (JD Twitch) invited us to compile these tracks – a perfect opportunity for us (and you, we hope) to look at some of the ground covered so far. So here we are, finally on Soundcloud!”