“We don’t write music, we make it.”

As befits someone who has never been shy of proffering an opinion or three, Karl (Regis) O’Connor has some thoughts about the state of today’s electronic music scene. Particularly when it comes to the overly commercial attitudes associated with what passes for most of modern-day dance music. “If you make something, it’s your dinner date with eternity,” he rails when discussing Sandwell District’s new album, End Beginnings. “That’s what you should be doing, you’re making a record. It’s not about making a track to fulfil something. No, that’s the difference between people who are in it for the music and the art and those who are just in it for the sesh.”

Make no mistake, Sandwell District, the shadowy techno collective, of which O’Connor is the lynchpin alongside Dave (Function) Sumner, have always been about the art. If they hadn’t parted in such bitter circumstances, one would describe End Beginnings as a hotly-anticipated comeback. But, quite simply, no-one ever expected their return. “I was always really averse to it,” he reflects. “It was always a very fractious relationship between me and Dave in particular. It was this rock’n’roll escapade, it wasn’t really dance music. Everyone left on bad terms, everyone walked out. I was left on the decks at Fabric. Dave didn’t turn up and that was that. There was all this hyperdrama nonsense. We didn’t speak for 10 years.”

They are, then, the real deal. In truth, they always were. They were the genuine article back in the early-00s, when Regis and his long-time confidant Peter (Female) Sutton established the artistic co-operative, first as an offshoot label to O’Connor’s influential Downwards imprint to release sonic missives by themselves, and then Function and Juan (Silent Servant) Mendez among others.

Unsurprisingly, Sandwell District remain true originals today. Over a decade since their last acrimonious blow out – Sumner not turning up to DJ alongside O’Connor at Fabric m...