How a decade of innovation, frustration, and reinvention led to Ultramarine’s most defiant statement—now reissued on vinyl by WRWTFWW Records.

Ultramarine’s A User’s Guide is getting a long-overdue return to vinyl, thanks to WRWTFWW Records. For the first time since its original 1998 release, the album will be available as a limited double LP, fully remastered from the original DATs by Jason G at Transition Studios. To boot, dance music historian Matt Anniss provides fresh insights in new sleeve notes featuring reflections from Ultramarine themselves.

By 1998, the UK electronic team Ultramarine had been releasing music for nearly a decade. Rising from the British rave scene of the late 1980s, Paul Hammond and Ian Cooper were among the first wave of British dance music freaks blending electronic, ambient, and house influences—and incorporating elements of jazz, folk, and dub. Their early albums, including their 1990 debut, Folk, and their acclaimed follow-up, Every Man and Woman Is a Star (1991), predicted a melodic, blissful way forward for the relentless, pounding rhythms booming from the DJ booths. Two years later they upended expectations with United Kingdoms, a collaboration with Robert Wyatt.

By the time A User’s Guide hit, Ultramarine had reached a roadblock. Their label hadn’t seen the payoff they’d hoped, and the duo had come to rely on their music to pay the bills. “We’d been working pretty much full-time on Ultramarine for most of the ‘90s and we gradually got ground down by the business aspect of it,” Hammond said in a 2015 interview. “We were signed to Warners for a few years and that gave us some great opportunities but ultimately demoralized us; we didn’t have much commercial sense or a strategy for making it work long term at that level. It’s a shame because I think in retrospect we could have found a way forward, but I don’t think anyone had a clue what to do with us!”

“The live electronic scene had fizzled out a bit by then too,” he added. “We loved working on A User’s Guide and were very focused for that record, spending about a year full-time on developing and recording it. But we saw it as a bit of a ‘fuck you’ record and knew we were going to pack it in once we’d finished it.” A User’s Guide was also Ultramarine’s final album before going on a 12-year hiatus.

As WRWTFWW’s reissue notes explain, A User’s Guide has never been reissued on vinyl “in part because the label it originally came out on, New Electronica, folded shortly afterwards.” The album, which took about a year to make, “was the result of a conscious decision by Ultramarine … to change their working methods and the ‘sound palette’ that underpinned their work.” The notes continue:

Out went the partially improvised hybrid electronic/acoustic sounds and the collaborations with guest musicians they’d become famous for. They were replaced by painstakingly created electronic sounds and textures, metallic motifs, spaced-out chords, rhythms rooted in contemporary techno and drum & bass culture, and nods aplenty to pioneering music of the period, from the post-rock atmospherics of Tortoise, and the hazy dub techno of Basic Channel, to the tech-jazz of Detroit, the minimalism of Berlin, and the musically expansive warmth of Chicago deep house.

Here’s Ultramarine at Glastonbury in 1993: