Saagara, Wacław Zimpel & Giridhar Udupa - 3 (The Shackleton Versions) (2025) [Official Digital Download]

British producer Shackleton meets the transnational collective Saagara for a shapeshifting, top to bottom remix of the group's celebrated 2024 album 3.

Saagara’s album 3 made itself right at home in the tak:til universe as soon as it was released to considerable acclaim last October, quickly becoming as much of a touchstone for the label’s Fourth World aesthetic as Jon Hassell, 75 Dollar Bill and Širom. A mind-twisting conference of jazz clarinet and sax, Carnatic percussion from South India and the kind of minutely textured electronic music that doesn’t mind if you sit down (but would definitely prefer you to dance), the band’s first album for seven years was well worth waiting for.

What had Wacław Zimpel been up to in the meantime? Those seven years appear to have been extremely well-spent, having given him the space in which to him to move on from being a decisive if restless presence on the mighty Polish jazz scene to becoming one of Europe’s most intriguing electronic musicians and producers. What’s been picked up on the way? For one, the conviction that the studio is as much of an instrument as the clarinet, the sax and indeed the percussion and violin that Saagara’s elite line-up of Giridhar Udupa, Aggu Baba, K Raja and Mysore N. Karthik have spent their whole lives mastering. (That said, catch them live and more or less acoustic at every opportunity – they are glorious.) And it’s to the studio that 3 has been led once again, a year on from release, in the form of this brilliant set by a British experimental electronicist celebrated for his groundbreaking dubstep productions and, latterly, for his more ambient and minimalist work and a series of high-profile collaborations (Pinch, Six Organs of Admittance, Holy Tongue and, indeed, Wacław Zimpel).

Wacław originally asked Shackleton to come up with a remix of one track of his choice; what he actually delivered was a shadow album of versions rather than remixes that hits very hard from the off. At every point as beautifully coiled and weighted as 3, it matches the original for drama, trades blows with it, squints at it, smiles at it, waves at it and just as often picks its pocket. There’s a little more darkness in these versions, Lancashire rain rather more than the heat and dust of Southern India, perhaps; but it’s recognisably an exchange of love and respect that will get owners of both records scuttling backwards and forwards between the two. The standout tracks of 3 become Shackleton’s too: ‘Northern Wind Brings Redemption’ and ‘Where Is That Blossom’, tremendous on their own, approaching genius when the one follows the other.

Wacław’s lovely description of 3 as ‘interstellar folk’ places that record firmly within one of music’s more fascinating recent currents: the meeting of electronics and global roots, often anchored by drone, a fascination with minimalism and the kind of progressive retrofuturism that always seems to emerge at times of crisis. It’s a current that Shackleton navigates also, with 3 The Shackleton Versions emerging as a deep-dive conversation between two of the brightest talents in contemporary experimental electronic music.

Tracklist:
01 God of Bangalore (The Shackleton Version)
02 Sunbeam Spirits (The Shackleton Version)
03 The Rite of Rain (The Shackleton Version)
04 Northern Wind Brings Redemption (The Shackleton Version)
05 Where Is That Blossom (The Shackleton Version)
06 Earth, Water and the Holy Groove (The Shackleton Version)


Thanks to the Original customer!